Earlier this month, the UN Human Rights Committee delivered a damning report highlighting the US government’s failure to meet its human rights obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international treaty that the US ratified in 1992 and is one of only three major human rights treaties that the US has ratified.
The UN committee’s final findings echo many of the concerns and recommendations raised by civil society groups in its US investigation last month, and warned of violations of a range of human rights issues, including indigenous rights, voting rights, freedom of expression and assembly, gender equality and reproductive rights, criminal law reform, and immigrant rights. Below are three key takeaways from the committee’s report.
1. Establishing a national human rights institution is an important first step in promoting human rights progress in the country.
In its concluding observations, the Committee highlighted the lack of progress in establishing National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), which would play a key role in monitoring and ensuring compliance with international human rights standards at the national level.
The Biden Administration has called for continued dialogue on NHRIs in the United States, but concrete action has yet to materialize. The Commission’s urgent recommendations back up long-standing calls by civil society groups for the creation of a presidential commission to explore options for creating an NHRI. The call for action has already been endorsed by several members of Congress and the International Association of Public Human Rights Institutions.
2. The United States should ensure that family separation never happens again.
The Committee called on the United States to “redouble its efforts to reunite all children who have been separated from their families, ensure that such family separations are prohibited in the future, and ensure that victims receive effective remedies and full reparations, including adequate compensation and appropriate support services.” These recommendations are consistent with the ACLU’s shadow report on family separations and coincide with the ACLU’s announcement of a major settlement in Ms. L. v. ICE, which provides that the U.S. government must continue to identify families separated by President Trump’s zero tolerance policy and provide them with a path to seek asylum in the United States. The Committee also expressed concerns about racial discrimination and due process violations in the U.S. child welfare system, including the disproportionate number of Black and Native American children separated from their families.
3. The United States should implement significant criminal justice reforms, including abolishing the death penalty and suspending life imprisonment without parole.
The Commission specifically addressed a wide range of human rights violations in the U.S. criminal justice system, including the extreme sentencing highlighted in the ACLU’s joint report with the Princeton Advocacy Policy Clinic. Most notably, the Commission called on the U.S. to “impose a moratorium on sentences of life without parole.” This came after powerful testimony and advocacy by a variety of groups, including the Abolitionist Law Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which raised the torturous practice of capital punishment in prisons with the Commission.
The committee also called on the United States to establish a federal moratorium on executions, abolish life sentences for children and mandatory life sentences not related to murder, and make parole more accessible to all prisoners, including those sentenced to life. For the first time, the committee called on the United States to expand parole eligibility to all prisoners, regardless of age or crime committed. These recommendations are also reflected in the recent report of the United Nations Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equity in Law Enforcement, which visited the United States last spring.
The time to act is now.
The United States sees itself as a global leader on universal human rights. But the Commission’s report highlights significant gaps between U.S. laws and policies and international human rights standards — even in the area of civil and political rights, where the United States has seen itself as a leader for decades. While the Biden Administration has prioritized human rights in some respects, it has failed to pursue bold actions that demonstrate it is leading by example.
While the responsibility for implementing the commission’s final findings rests with federal, state, and local governments, the Biden Administration should immediately devote the necessary attention and resources to making these recommendations a reality.
We can start by establishing a transparent, permanent executive branch human rights oversight body to review and develop an action plan to implement the Commission’s recommendations. We can also hold a White House Summit on domestic human rights to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which would be an opportune time to appoint a Presidential commission to study the creation of an NHRI in the United States. Additionally, the White House should direct all federal departments and agencies to review and implement the Commission’s findings, and create incentives for state and local governments under its jurisdiction to do so.
The Commission calls on the United States to follow up within three years on progress in three key areas: reproductive rights, voting rights, and freedom of assembly. With the next US periodic review taking place in 2031, the US government must immediately implement these recommendations and ensure that this process is based on meaningful consultation with civil society organizations. With the world watching, there is no time to lose in realizing human rights for all in the United States.