The UN Human Rights Committee in its concluding observations, found that the United States failed to uphold human rights obligations in over 30 distinct thematic issues. Several areas of concern including the human rights and health harms of U.S. immigration policies as well as the excessive use of force by law enforcement against individuals in police custody and peaceful protestors, were mentioned in the concluding observations.
Based on the evidence PHR shared in two formal submissions to the Committee and conversations with Committee members and U.S. government officials in Geneva, it is apparent that the United States still falls short in upholding some basic international human rights standards.
Immigration policies adopted under the Trump and Biden administrations violate the human right to seek asylum, according to the Committee. The Committee’s Concluding Observations align with evidence submitted by PHR that the “Zero Tolerance Policy” led to psychological trauma and constituted torture for asylum seekers.
More than 5,000 children were forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, 860 of whom remain separated from their parents, causing lasting physical and mental trauma for families. The United States also must improve accountability for excessive use of force and poor conditions in detention and provide reparations to families affected by family separation policies.
The Committee also decried the United States’s policing practices that violate the rights to nondiscrimination and freedom of assembly. As noted by the Committee, racial profiling is still used by law enforcement and leads to the overrepresentation of racial minorities in the criminal legal system.
PHR’s research has demonstrated that deaths in police custody, particularly of people of African descent, are undercounted across the country and that the use of excessive force against peaceful protestors is most pronounced against the same group of people.