The US Supreme Court’s ruling against abortion rights will have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities, a UN expert committee warned on Tuesday.
The Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) said it was “deeply concerned” by the high court’s decision on June 24, which reversed five decades of constitutional guarantees and made it possible for several conservative-majority states to ban abortion.
The committee, made up of 18 independent experts in charge of periodically evaluating the efforts of each country in the fight against racial discrimination, warned of the “profound and disparate impact” of the Supreme Court’s decision “on sexual and reproductive health and human rights.” of racial and ethnic minorities.
“That decision is very unfortunate,” Faith Dikeledi Pansy Tlakula, a CERD expert originally from South Africa, told reporters.
The expert asked the North American authorities, both federal and from each state of the union, to work to guarantee access to a safe abortion by “racial minorities, indigenous women and those with a low income level.”
Likewise, he considered that the US government must “take measures to reduce the risk of criminal prosecution” against women who want to have an abortion and the doctors who perform such abortions.
The committee’s experts asked Washington to inform them within a year of the initiatives taken to “eliminate racial and ethnic inequalities in the field of sexual rights and reproductive health.”
The experts evaluated the fulfillment by the United States of a convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, ratified by the North American country in 1994.
This year’s was the first regular review since 2014 and included hearings in Geneva with senior US officials, human rights defenders and NGOs in the middle of this month.
In this case, the review looked for the first time at the issue of “reparations” to the African-American population.
In its report Tuesday, the committee said it was “concerned that the stubborn legacy of colonialism and slavery continue to fuel racism and racial discrimination (in the United States), and undermine the full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms.” “.
The experts urged that Congress or President Joe Biden create a “commission to study and develop proposals for reparations for African Americans.”
According to several members of the committee told the press, the US authorities have expressed their willingness to see how to do it, without giving a timetable. YS
