A demonstration against Washington’s insufficient efforts on human rights concerns was held by a number of dozen UN representatives.
On Wednesday, while US Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council Michele Taylor gave a speech defending Washington’s human rights record, dozens of demonstrators staged a protest in front of the impartial Human Rights Committee.
The Associated Press reported that up to 140 protestors came from Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and other locations to oppose Taylor’s address. The activists, who were seated across the Human Rights Council chamber in Geneva, Switzerland, got up and turned their backs on the US ambassador as she began her speech.
Taylor’s statement coincided with the first scheduled assessment of the US’s human rights performance in nine years. The country’s efforts to address human rights issues and uphold its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights were assessed by the Human Rights Committee.
The ambassador said that Washington’s adherence to the agreement was “a moral imperative at the very heart of our democracy” and that the US “leads by example through our transparency, our openness, and our humble approach to our own human rights challenges.”
“You have heard over the past two days about many of the concrete ways we are meeting our obligations under the convention, and you have also heard our pledge to do more,” Taylor added, acknowledging that “the topics raised are often painful for all of us to discuss.”
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The US delegation, according to US representatives who attended the event to share their own accounts of suffering and trauma, “decided to stick to scripted, general, and often meaningless responses” to the Human Rights Committee’s inquiries.
“At times it seemed that AI-generated responses would have been more qualitative,” said Jamil Dakwar, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of human rights programme.
Alliance San Diego Executive Director Andrea Guerrero was quoted by the TAG24 News as saying, “We all feel deceived by a government that has said it is going to do better than the administrations before it but has simply just repeated language out of binders they brought and websites they read and did not meaningfully engage in the topics we had shared with them.”
Without deeds, their words are nothing, she said. “Actions have more impact than words do. We turned away from them today because of that.
All nations that have ratified the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are subject to periodic inspection by the UN Human Rights Committee to ensure that human rights are being upheld. Currently, 173 nations, including Russia, have ratified the agreement.
