US: Victims' Relatives of Police Violence Demands UN Probe

As protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the U.S. have reached a boiling point, relatives of four black people killed by police requested Monday a United Nations (U.N.) investigation into racist and violent repression of social protests.

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George Floyd's brother Philonise Floyd and son Quincy Masond; Breonna Taylor's mother Tamika Palmer; Philando Castile's mother Valerie Castile, and Michael Brown's mother Lezley McSpadden joined with over 600 rights groups and endorsed a letter addressed to U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) members demanding a probe to the U.S. upholding its human rights obligations.

"I want people across the world and the leaders in the United Nations to see the video of my brother George Floyd, to listen to his cry for help, and I want them to answer his cry," Philonise Floyd stated.

The document demands the HRC to direly convoke a meeting to address the human rights emergency driven after Floyd's murder.

The request emerges, as the document stated, due to the "recent history of racist policing in cities across the country that continues with seeming impunity(...) and allegations of excessive use of force against peaceful protesters and journalists in the demonstrations in U.S. cities."

U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN) executive director Salimah Hankins expressed his support to the families, and said that the network "believes it is important to move this issue to the international stage to highlight the hypocrisy of the U.S. government's stance, where it calls out human rights abuses abroad but ignores government-sanctioned violence at home."

A statement endorsed also by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)'s Human Rights Program.