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    Rights Groups Accuse US of "Persistent and Systematic" Racial Discrimination
    Agence France-Presse

    Wednesday 20 February 2008

    Geneva - The United States is guilty of "persistent and systematic" racial discrimination across all aspects of society from Guantanamo Bay to the justice and school systems, rights groups charged on Wednesday.

    "The persistent and systematic issues of racial discrimination have not been addressed" by the US government despite its adoption in 1994 of the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, said Ajamu Baraka, executive director of the US Human Rights Network.

    "Unfortunately since 1994 we have found that the government has not lived up to its obligations," Baraka told journalists, citing issues such as the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the black population of New Orleans, the treatment of immigrant workers, police brutality and housing.

    "These issues have escaped the scrutiny" by government officials that they deserve, he said.

    The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) will examine Washington's record later this week.

    The US Human Rights Network (USHRN), along with a host of other rights and lobby groups including Human Rights Watch, has prepared its own "shadow report" highlighting what it says are serious cases of racial discrimination.

    Human Rights Watch cited the different legal standards applied to non-US citizens detained at the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp.

    "The US policy of detaining non-citizens without judicial review over their detention constitutes discrimination that violates CERD," said Alison Parker, deputy director of the US program of HRW.

    She noted that US citizens were transferred from Guantanamo into the regular US justice system that afforded them more rights.

    Parker also cited the disproportionate impact on African-Americans and other minorities of both corporal punishment in schools, and the handing down of life sentences without parole for juveniles who commit murder.

    The experts said both Democrat and Republican administrations had failed to implement the convention in full since 1994, but voiced some hope that November's presidential elections could bring progress.

    "We have seen some interest on the Democratic side in at least engaging around issues of human rights," said Lisa Crooms, co-author of the USHRN report and a professor of law at Howard University in Washington DC.

    On the Republican side, Crooms noted that current frontrunner John McCain, "at least knows of international law" and had campaigned prominently against torture while in the US Congress.