U.N. officials could not be reached for comment.
"Lack of an answer does not make the U.S. look good in the international community," said Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's human rights program.
"The U.S. should at a very minimum respond to a letter like this," he said. "And if they believe that law enforcement agencies operated under legal, constitutional authority and there were no problems, then they should explain that and present that" before the Human Rights Council.
The rapporteurs' letter described how groups of peaceful Occupy protesters were forcibly removed from their encampments in various U.S. cities, including New York, Seattle, Denver and Oakland, Calif., last fall.
- New York police staged a night raid on the original Occupy Wall Street encampment.
- The Oakland Police Department fired tear gas, smoke grenades and beanbag rounds at demonstrators.
- Philadelphia and Los Angeles police stormed the encampments in their cities in the middle of the night, evicting and arresting hundreds of protesters.
- Police officers pepper-sprayed protesters at the University of California, Davis, and on a New York City sidewalk.
"In the conduct of such operations, law enforcement officials in these cities allegedly used violence as a means to forcibly remove unwilling protesters from the public areas in which they were located," the letter said. "In some instances, police allegedly used force unnecessarily and disproportionately," including "pepper spray and tear gas … used deliberately on protesters at a very close distance."
The letter asked the State Department to respond to several questions about what happened and what sort of follow-up there was. It inquired, "What was the legal basis for these actions that limit the exercise of the legitimate rights of the protesters?"
The letter was written shortly after La Rue told HuffPost that he would contact the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials were not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators. La Rue's view was that the federal government's role was to ensure that local governments respected protesters' human and constitutional rights.
In reality, the Department of Homeland Security helped coordinate the crackdowns, sharing information gathered by its nationwide monitoring and surveillance network with local governments.
In the letter, the envoys raised a particular concern that the "crowd control techniques used to manage and disperse these assemblies might have been intended to insert fear and intimidation on protesters throughout the country."
Link to the original article on Huffington Post
