US to face litany of complaints at UN Human Rights Council

Human rights groups are telling the United Nations that the United States is failing to hold corporations, including private government contractors, accountable for human rights abuses ranging from human trafficking to murder. These and a plethora of other charges have been triggered by the U.N.'s formal process known as the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) for reviewing the human rights records of 192 U.N. member states by the U.N. Human Rights Council, scheduled for November, when the U.S. human rights performance will be reviewed for the first time. The UPR was established when the Human Rights Council was created in 2006 by the U.N. General Assembly. Numerous human rights groups have responded to the U.S. State Department's invitation to members of the U.S. public to present their concerns about human rights in the U.S. Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, has attended the predecessor U.N. Commission on Human Rights and now the Council for more than two decades, as a delegate of the U.S. government, Amnesty International, or other NGOs. "The Universal Periodic Review process is a welcome step forward, in that it subjects all states to regular review of their human rights records, in addition to the work done by other mechanisms such as the treaty bodies and special rapporteurs, as well as the Council's own retained ability to make recommendations regarding acute situations of gross and systematic violations," he told IPS.