A UN panel of experts has issued a vividly horrific account of the plight black people have suffered in the United States, urging American authorities to establish a body that would be responsible for making reparations to the descendants of Africans who were brought to the US and sold into slavery.
Vice News reports:
Speaking at a press conference in Washington, DC, three members of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that Congress should pass the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, a bill that Michigan Representative John Conyers last introduced in 2015.
Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, the working group chair and a French human rights expert, told VICE News that the US hadn?t properly addressed the legacy of enslavement or adequately provided necessary redress for those who are descended from Africans forcibly resettled in bondage.
?It?s been absolutely insufficient,? she remarked. ?They are excluded, they are invisible. There is structural racism and structural discrimination, and they face that because of the pigmentation of their skin.?
Mendes-France, the daughter of the Martinique-born writer and leading black intellectual Franz Fanon, clarified that she is not in favor individual payments, as the idea of reparations is often presented in America. She applauded efforts in the Caribbean to sue the British government for centuries of slavery, and recommended that reparations in the US be funneled through the financing and ?full implementation of special programs based on education, socioeconomic, and environmental rights.?
Mendes-France and fellow working group members Sabelo Gumedze of South Africa and Ricardo A. Sunga III of the Philippines spoke in the US capitol after an 11-day tour of the country, with additional stops in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Jackson, Mississippi. The panel, staffed with different experts, last visited the US in 2010.
Though the group will not release a full report of its findings until a Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in September, each member read from a lengthy preliminary statement that touched on mass incarceration, police brutality, lack of housing, and the US government?s failure to ratify a number of international human rights treaties.
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