A UN body “charged with promoting racial justice and equality in the context of policing” was created in 2021, after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer.
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The lack of data in many countries on “race or ethnic origin” people arrested or killed by the police constitutes a major obstacle to the fight against “systemic racism”, according to a report by UN experts presented on Monday 3 October. There is a “critical need to collect, analyze, use and publish data by race or ethnicity”said Yvonne Mokgoro, a former South African judge, presenting the report to the UN Human Rights Council.
In the United States, for example, there is no centralized system for collecting these statistics. If data collection will not in itself end racism, continued Yvonne Mokgoro, it is “an essential first step in highlighting the extent of systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent, and its manifestations in law enforcement and the judiciary”.
“It is essential that systemic racism, including its structural and institutional dimensions, become visible”, she summarized. Yvonne Mogkoro is the president of the “International Mechanism of Independent Experts to Promote Racial Justice and Equality in Policing”, which has two other members. It was set up in 2021 by the UN Human Rights Council, after the murder in the United States of George Floyd, an unarmed African American, by a white police officer.
In a separate report on Monday, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif detailed seven recent cases of police-related deaths in the United States, France, Brazil, Great Britain and Colombia, specifying that in each of these cases “families always seek truth (and) justice”.