POLITICAL FIGURES/RACISM/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump’s seesawing response to the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., has been rebuked by countless politicians, business executives, community groups and religious leaders.
The leaders of Britain and Germany spoke about the need to condemn such violence.
Now the United Nations has weighed in, too.
Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, a body of United Nations experts on Wednesday denounced ‘the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn’ racist violence, saying it was ‘deeply concerned by the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.’
Mr. Trump’s wavering responses to the violence — he has blamed ‘many sides,’ but also singled out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists for condemnation — has roiled his administration, but also unsettled rights advocates around the world…
In a two-page decision that was dated Aug. 18 but released on Wednesday, a day after Washington was informed, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination invoked ‘early action and urgent warning procedures’ in deploring the violence and urging the United States to investigate.
The urgent-warning procedure allows the committee to draw attention to situations that could ‘spiral into terrible events’ and require immediate action, Ms. Crickley said.
The committee last invoked the procedures last year, when it condemned ‘reports of killings, summary executions, disappearances and torture, many of which appear to have an ethnic character,’ in Burundi.”
-Sewell Chan and Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Panel Condemns Trump’s Response to Charlottesville Violence,” The New York Times online, Aug. 23, 2017