New York, US (PANA) – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged US authorities to do anything possible to respond to demands of greater accountability by its law enforcement officials, following recent killings of African-Americans in the US.
The call came in the wake of a grand jury decision in New York Wednesday not to indict a police officer in the choke-hold death of Mr. Eric Garner, an unarmed African-American, which occurred in July in Staten Island, New York.
In a statement on Friday. Ban said: “We are obviously aware of what is going on here in our backyard, and our thoughts are with the families of Mr. Garner, and the people of New York.”
“I think the case is again focusing on the attention of accountability of law enforcement officials,” he said, welcoming the announcement by the US Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation in the case.
“I think I would just add that we have seen a lot of demonstrations here in New York. I would urge the protestors to demonstrate peacefully, and for the authorities to show respect for the demonstrators to do so peacefully,” he added.
The statement also echoed a call made last week by the Secretary-General, following a grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, to absolve a white police office in the shooting death of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown back in August.
That decision sparked major protests in several US cities.
Also last week, the UN human rights chief expressed deep concern about the “disproportionate number of young African-Americans who die in encounters with police officers, as well as the disproportionate number of African Americans in US prisons and the disproportionate number of African-Americans on Death Row.”
“It is clear that, at least among some sectors of the population, there is a deep and festering lack of confidence in the fairness of the justice and law enforcement systems,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said.
