The United Nations is made up regimes that regularly ignore human rights, torture their own citizens, allow cannibalism, practice female genital mutilation, and other such atrocious practices. Communist China even holds an estimated one million of its own people as political prisoners.
Yet, Ben Crump, a lawyer who is representing the family of George Floyd — the man who was killed while being arrested by Minneapolis police — is calling for that same United Nations to investigate this unfortunate case.
Crump sent a letter to the UN on June 3, and released a statement about it Monday. “Among the reforms requested,” Crump said, “were deescalating techniques, independent prosecutions and autopsies for every extrajudicial police killing in an effort to stop further human rights abuses including torture and extrajudicial killings of African Americans to protect their inherent and fundamental human right to life.”
Floyd was detained by police in Minneapolis after being accused by a local store clerk of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Videos taken during the arrest show one of the four arresting officers, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” but Chauvin never appeared to release any of the pressure on the man’s neck, and he died.
The killing of George Floyd rightly caused near-universal condemnation in America.
Chauvin and three other officers have been criminally charged in the case. Yet, not only has the Floyd family lawyer called for UN intervention into the case, last Wednesday Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, denounced what she called “structural racism” in the United States in an allusion to the fact that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black. That is the extent of the evidence that the incident was in any way racially motivated, yet we are to simply accept that the incident happened because of hatred of blacks.
Bachelet said, “The voices calling for an end to the killings of unarmed African Americans need to be heard. The voices calling for an end to police violence need to be heard. And the voices calling for an end to the endemic and structural racism that blights U.S. society need to be heard.” Targeting the United States as guilty of systemic racism is beyond ludicrous. If racism in the United States was truly “endemic,” then it is highly unlikely that a black man — Barack Obama — could have been elected president in 2008, and reelected in 2012. It is also doubtful that millions of people around the world would be desirous of emigrating to a country in which racism was so pronounced.
Perhaps Chauvin is a notorious racist who was on the hunt for a black man to murder, but “perhaps” is not good enough in U.S. law courts, in any state. Unlike many of the authoritarian nations who are members of the UN, the American judicial system requires evidence and proof beyond reasonable doubt before an accused person — even a police officer — is convicted of anything.
Yet, that is what Bachelet and Crump would have us believe — that America is a nation shot full with racism, and that a Minneapolis police officer killed Floyd simply because of his race.
“The United States of America has a long pattern and practice of depriving Black citizens of the fundamental human right to life,” Crump said. “I have sought the prosecution of the Federal government on innumerable cases involving the torture and extrajudicial killing of Black men and women by police,” citing the death of “Michael Brown in Missouri.” Brown was certainly killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, but Crump neglects to add that a grand jury concluded, after interviewing several witnesses at the scene — most of whom were black — that the police officer in that case acted in self-defense, a fact that Crump would know, considering that he represented Brown’s family in that case. In fact, Crump’s legal specialty is representing families in cases in which he alleges a black person has been a victim of racist police brutality. He is the author of the book Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People.
Crump explained why he is requesting the intervention of the United Nations in an American criminal justice case:
The United States government has consistently failed to hold police accountable and did not bring Federal criminal charges even in cases with irrefutable video evidence. When a group of people of any nation have been systematically deprived of their universal human right to life by its government for decades, it must appeal to the international community for its support and to the United Nations for its intervention.
But the officers have been charged with either murder or accessory to murder in the state of Minnesota. Under the American system of government, an accused person has a constitutionally protected right to a fair trial. Convictions in the United States are only obtained after the prosecution has proved its case to an impartial jury beyond a reasonable doubt. As such, frustrations about the ultimate outcome of a particular case are going to happen. For example, it is widely believed that O.J. Simpson murdered his wife, Nicole, and a man — Ron Goldman. Yet Simpson — who is black — was found not guilty by a jury of murdering two white individuals.
Despite deep frustration with the outcome of that bizarre trial, no one even considered calling in the United Nations, arguing that someone had gotten away with murder.
But perhaps there is one positive thing to come out of this whole horrible episode of George Floyd’s death. There are those, both in and outside of the United States, who have no regard whatsoever for America’s national sovereignty, and are prepared to surrender that sovereignty to a body — the United Nations — which includes among its members nations that regularly ignore such principles as the presumption of innocence.
Perhaps this will wake up some Americans to the real threat of our nation losing its independence to the UN, and hopefully will shake Americans into understanding that the United States needs to get out of the United Nations. That organization needs to vacate its building on the East River in New York City, and build its headquarters elsewhere.
Image: Veni/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Steve Byas is a university instructor in history and government and the author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected].
