Black Lives Matter

The protests against the police killings of George Floyd and many other Black people in the United States catalyzed a transnational movement. Around the world, people mobilized to express solidarity with protesters in the United States while also challenging U.S. imperialism, as well as systemic racism, colonialism, and police brutality in their…

In an eloquent blog post written in June 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions Agnes Callamard acknowledged the structural racism and systemic injustice that breed the ‘state-sponsored racial violence’ which the brutal killing of George Floyd so painfully exemplified. She asked: what can we do — what must…

Until very recently, international law usually dealt with questions of race and racism through two primary mechanisms: denial and containment. On the one hand, the outlawing and criminalisation of the most egregious forms of racial discrimination contributed to the narrative that international law was the polar opposite and even the primary antagonist of racism, which was…

In her excellent recent post, Sejal Parmar takes us through the UN Human Rights Council’s ‘urgent debate’ on racism in US law enforcement that took place in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May. That debate was initiated by a draft resolution from Burkina Faso (on behalf of the Group of African…