US Charge d’Affaires Mark C. Storella and Ambassador Martin Umohoibhi

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The United States Friday 19 June put in its first day of a three-year term as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the day after the US Senate formally apologized to African Americans for decades of slavery. The US House passed a similar motion in 2008.

The US was elected to the council 13 May, after years of keeping its distance. US Charge d’Affaires Mark Storella told the Geneva-based council Friday “For our part, the United States hopes to reinforce the ability of this Council to speak with one voice about situations that are an affront to human dignity.

“We will also be stalwart in our promotion of universality, transparency, and objectivity and we urge other members to dedicate themselves to these goals as well.  We are mindful that adherence to these principles requires that all states be subject to review by this body, including our own.”

Storella pointed out that the US membership date coincides with a landmark date in US history, 19 June 1845: soldiers rode into Galveston Texas to declare the end of the US Civil War and enforce the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in the country.

Wade Henderson, Ambassador Umohoibhi

The US began to play a more active role in the council in May in preparation for its new role, says Michael Parmly, chief communication officer for the Geneva US Mission. A forum at the UN in Geneva 3 June, “In pursuit of the dream: race and tolerance in the US in the 21st century” served as a showcase for US efforts to improve its own human rights record. ” Karen Stevens, counsel to the assistant US attorney general for civil rights presented a series of actions taken in recent years, including investigations into two urban police departments, but she noted that “with a new president and a new attorney general there’s a real sense of possibility now, of hope and joy.” She noted that a new category has been added, hate crimes, to the existing categories of human rights abuses: race, religion, colour and sexual orientation.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, at the forum answered a question from a professor at Geneva’s Graduate Institute about narrowing the gap between the American dream and American reality: 100 years ago, in 1909, the NAACP was created, and “Obama was nominated by the Democrats 45 years to the day since Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. So in just 100 years” the US has reached the point where it has raised up the issue of slavery as a crime against humanity, working with the council.

Henderson spoke 18 June on the new Senate apology. “Slavery and the western slave trade are crimes against humanity and will forever be known as our republic’s original sin. A formal apology by the US Congress for the dehumanization and racism wrought by both the enslavement of African Americans and for Jim Crow segregation will admittedly never right such a grave wrong, but it is an important first step in acknowledging its tortured legacy.”

Related: NPR interview with former US Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.