George Stewart, 57, a New Orleans Katrina survivor, arrived in Baton Rouge Sept. 7, 2005, after walking 85 miles in two days. Survival still takes heroic effort for many of the hundreds of thousands of Black people driven from their homes. Photo: Douglas Toussaint, Southern Digest

New York - A report released Monday by the U.S. Human Rights Network (USHRN), a coalition of over 250 social justice and human rights groups across the country, charged the Bush administration with failing to comply with its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), an international treaty that carries the force of law in the United States. The report, known as a shadow report, was filed with the Geneva-based United Nations committee that monitors compliance with the treaty.

The anti-discrimination convention, adopted by the United States in 1969, requires signatory countries to periodically report on their progress in identifying, correcting and remedying racism and racial discrimination. The U.S. quietly submitted a report to the U.N. committee that monitors compliance with the convention last spring.

Lisa Crooms, a Howard University law professor and an author of the USHRN report, says the State Department report "blatantly overlooks and misrepresents ongoing racial disparities and discrimination in the US." Among the concerns identified in the USHRN analysis are:

• The U.S. government's report does not mention the internationally recognized race and poverty related impacts of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
• The report completely ignores the issue of policy brutality, recognized by many Americans as one of the most blatant and common forms of ongoing differential treatment based on race.
• The report does not discuss the well documented "school to prison pipeline," in which discriminatorily applied "zero tolerance" policies and criminal justice based responses to the overcrowding and under-resourcing of public schools drive children of color out of schools and into the prison system
• Required to provide information about compliance with the convention at the state level, the government chose to provide comprehensive information on only four states: Oregon, South Carolina, Illinois and New Mexico, notably overlooking states with some of the country's largest populations of people of color and immigrants, such as New York, California, Texas and Florida, as well as the Gulf Coast states victimized in the aftermath of Katrina.
• The government's report suggests that stark racial disparities in incarceration rates - African-Americans and Latino/as make up 60 percent of the over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, but less than a quarter of the U.S. population - may be "related to differential involvement in crime" rather than a result of the cumulative impacts of racial disparities in the treatment of minorities at every stage of the criminal justice process. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. report fails to cite evidence that rates of involvement in many criminalized activities, including drug use, are actually very similar across the race spectrum.
• The report highlights training and outreach programs for law enforcement agencies, encouraging sensitivity to Arab and Muslim communities developed in the aftermath of 9/11, while completely failing to acknowledge widespread racially and ethnically targeted law enforcement practices such as the special registration program and aggressive round-ups and interviews of thousands of non-citizen Muslims, Arabs and South Asians.
• Indigenous people continue to suffer profound and ongoing effects of the legacy of colonialism and racial discrimination in the U.S.

The report was simultaneously submitted, on behalf of national, state and local organizations from across the country, to the U.N. committee Monday. The same committee will be questioning the U.S. government on its compliance with its obligations under the convention early next year, as a counterpoint to the U.S. report.

To view a copy of the shadow report submitted by the U.S. Human Rights Network, visit http://lacccenter.org/blog/wpcontent/uploads/2007/12/shadowrptsummary2008.doc. The U.S. Human Rights Network was formed to promote U.S. accountability to universal human rights standards. The Network strives to build a human rights culture that puts those directly affected by human rights violations in a central leadership role. To learn more, visit http://www.ushrnetwork.org.

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