Originally published 2015-06-10.
On 11 May 2015, the United States went through its second Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Over a three-and-a-half-hour session, 117 countries took the floor with comments and recommendations, and police killings and racial discrimination were among the most common concerns. The review came only weeks after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and months after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.
Headlines at the time said 117 countries "slammed" the US. That is partly true and partly misleading. Every country that spoke was allowed a short statement, and not all of them focused on policing; many raised the death penalty, Guantánamo Bay, immigration or treaty ratification. Here is what the review is, what was said about US policing, how the US responded, and what happened afterwards.
What the Universal Periodic Review is
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) was created in 2006 as part of the reform that set up the UN Human Rights Council. It is the only process in which every one of the UN's 193 member states has its human rights record examined by its peers on a regular cycle. The first cycle lasted four years; later cycles were lengthened to four and a half and then five years.
Each review lasts three and a half hours. The country under review presents its record, then other states make statements and recommendations in a short interactive dialogue. In 2015 so many countries signed up that each had only around a minute to speak. Afterwards, the reviewed country decides which recommendations it supports. The process carries no legal penalties; its power lies in public scrutiny and peer pressure.
The US had first been reviewed in 2010. That round produced 240 recommendations, of which the US accepted 171. By 2015, Human Rights Watch argued that many had not been acted on, and that the US had not ratified any new human rights treaties in the meantime.
What countries said about US policing
Police violence was a dominant theme. Delegates urged better training, clearer limits on the use of force, independent investigations of police killings and stronger laws against racial profiling. Chad's delegate, Awada Angui, opened with a pointed contrast: "Chad considers the United States of America to be a country of freedom," before saying recent events affecting Black communities had damaged that image. Namibia's representative called for reform of a justice system she described as discriminating against marginalised communities.
Some of the sharpest criticism came from governments with poor human rights records of their own, including Russia, China and Pakistan, a fact US commentators were quick to point out. But concern was not limited to rivals: a majority of the countries that spoke urged a federal moratorium on the death penalty, and Guantánamo Bay came up again too, where 122 men were still being held at the time.
Human rights groups watching from the sidelines highlighted a basic gap: the US had no reliable national count of people killed by police. Alba Morales of Human Rights Watch said that "a nation as advanced as the U.S. should be able to gather that number."
How the US delegation responded
The US delegation did not deny the problem. James Cadogan, a senior counselor to the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, named the deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott as cases that had reopened a national debate about policing. He told the council that the US needed to "rededicate ourselves to ensuring that our civil rights laws live up to their promise."
Cadogan pointed to the department's work investigating police departments for patterns of misconduct, and said that federal prosecutors had brought criminal charges against more than 400 law enforcement officials in the previous six years. Critics responded that charges rarely led to convictions and that the cases he cited were better evidence of impunity than of accountability.
The US rejected some recommendations outright, notably calls for a federal moratorium on the death penalty, while saying it would comply with international minimum standards on capital punishment.
The cases behind the criticism
The review took place during a period of intense attention to policing in the US.
- Freddie Gray, 25, died on 19 April 2015 from spinal cord injuries suffered in a Baltimore police van. On 8 May, three days before the Geneva session, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a federal investigation into whether the Baltimore Police Department had a pattern of unconstitutional practices. Six officers were charged; none was convicted, and in 2017 the Justice Department declined to bring federal charges.
- Rekia Boyd, 22, was shot dead in Chicago in March 2012 by an off-duty police detective, Dante Servin. In April 2015 a judge acquitted him of involuntary manslaughter on a technicality, ruling that an intentional shooting could not be prosecuted as reckless conduct. Her brother, Martinez Sutton, was reported to be following the review from the sidelines. Servin resigned from the force in 2016, shortly before a hearing on whether he should be fired.
- Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York had both died in 2014, and the decisions not to indict the officers involved sparked nationwide protests.
How many people do US police kill?
At the time of the review, nobody could answer this with confidence, because official federal data relied on voluntary reporting by local departments. News organisations stepped in. The Washington Post began its "Fatal Force" database in 2015 and found that police in the US shoot and kill roughly 1,000 people a year, far more than earlier government figures had suggested.
Some viral articles in 2015 quoted much rougher figures from partisan websites. The independent databases built since then are a more reliable guide, and they confirmed that the scale of the problem had been underestimated.
Why the review still matters
A UN review cannot force any country to change its laws. What it does is put a government's record on the public record, in front of its peers, at regular intervals. In 2015 that meant the US had to answer, in an international forum, questions that protesters had been asking at home.
It is also a reminder to read headlines carefully. "117 countries" did not vote to condemn the US; they took part in a routine review that every UN member faces, and they raised a wide range of issues. The criticism of police violence was real and widely shared, but it sat alongside many other topics and alongside critiques from governments with serious abuses of their own. Holding both truths at once gives a more accurate picture than either outrage or dismissal.
Sources: US Mission Geneva: statement by James Cadogan (11 May 2015); Al Jazeera America (republished by Portside); Best Practices Policy Project; Wikipedia: Universal Periodic Review; Wikipedia: Death of Freddie Gray; Wikipedia: Killing of Rekia Boyd; Peabody Awards: The Washington Post's Fatal Force. Original report via True Activist and AntiMedia.
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