UN should send peacekeepers to US to stop its police brutality against people: Scholar

The United Nations should send peacekeepers to the United States to stop its criminal conduct against its own people, a human rights expert and peace activist says.

Daniel Kovalik, who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in the state of Pennsylvania, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

A new investigation has found that US police officers have violated their own rules when they fired "less lethal" projectiles at protesters who were for the most part peacefully assembled.

Fractured skulls, lost eyes: Police break their own rules when shooting protesters with ‘rubber bullets’

An investigation has found that US police officers have violated their own rules when they fired "less lethal" projectiles at protesters who were for the most part peacefully assembled.

“So what we're seeing in terms of both local police activity as well as these unmarked federal law enforcement agents in places like Portland is a complete disregard of all international human rights and humanitarian law norms,” Kovalik said.

“What we're seeing looks like something out of Argentina during the dirty war, or Chile, during the Pinochet years. You have people's, protesters’ eyes being shot out. You have police attacking medics, who are attending to protesters and destroying medical supplies and water supplies for protesters,” he stated.

“And now you have these bizarre forces who are being sent by Trump to various cities, who have unmarked vehicles, unmarked uniforms, and they're heavily armed, they look more like soldiers than they do police and they're pulling people off the streets and taking them to unidentified locations,” he said.  

“This is something really we've never seen in this country before. I mean this is reaching a new low for the United States,” he noted.  

Megan Matthews, 22, in the hospital after she was hit in the eye with a sponge-tipped projectile fired by police at a May 29 protest in Denver.

“If a country like Venezuela were doing this, the US would call for an armed intervention to stop it. So now the shoe is on the other foot. It’s the US that needs some sort of intervention to stop its criminal conduct against its own people,” he said.

“You have local law enforcement, who are misbehaving and then you have a federal government that not only is it refusing to stop local enforcement from acting that way. They're supplementing local law enforcement with irregular troops, paramilitary type forces that in some ways are even worse than the local officials,” he noted.

“So there actually is a situation in which, again, if this were any other country people would be calling for UN peacekeepers to protect the people.  And, you know, the US would never allow such a thing but this actually may be a situation which would call for that,” the analyst concluded.

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