And the head of the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent has compared police killings of African Americans in the United States to lynchings. The comments come as protests continue in Charlotte, North Carolina, over the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the police killing of Terence Crutcher. This is U.N. representative Ricardo Sunga speaking today in Geneva.

Ricardo Sunga III: “Contemporary police killings, and the trauma that they create, are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency. The working group is convinced that the root of the problem lies in the serious lack of accountability for perpetrators of such killings despite the evidence.”