'Endemic racial discrimination' exposed in US: UN rights chief
The coronavirus pandemic's disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities, and protests triggered by George Floyd's death, have laid bare "endemic inequalities" in the United States, the UN rights chief said Tuesday, urging action.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that the covid-19 crisis has had a worse impact on racial and ethnic minorities in the United States and a range of other countries.
"This virus is exposing endemic inequalities that have too long been ignored," she said in a statement.
Similar inequalities were also fuelling the widespread protests over the police killing in Minneapolis last week of Floyd, an unarmed black man.
"In the United States, protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd are highlighting not only police violence against people of color, but also inequalities in health, education, employment and endemic racial discrimination," Bachelet said.
Floyd was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck, and video images of his killing have sparked demonstrations in hundreds of US cities against police brutality and racism.
It has been the most widespread unrest in the United States since 1968, when cities went up in flames over the slaying of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Bachelet meanwhile stressed that entrenched racial discrimination is taking a heavy health toll during the pandemic, which has killed more than 375,000 people out of nearly 6.3 million infected worldwide.
In the United States, which is the worst-hit country with over 105,000 deaths, she noted that the virus death rate for African Americans is reported to be more than double that of other racial groups.
Her statement also highlighted the situation in Britain, where government data for England and Wales shows a death rate for blacks, ethnic Pakistanis and Bangladeshis that is nearly double that of whites.
And she pointed to Brazil, where people of color in Sao Paulo are 62 percent more likely to die from the virus than whites, and in France's heavily minority-inhabited Seine Saint-Denis suburb of Paris, which has reported higher excess mortality figures than other areas.
(Source: AFP)
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