“It’s Terrible. It’s Disgusting”

Human rights expert Manfred Nowak slams the family separations at the US-Mexican border. Hear the full interview.

By Chris Cummins

A haunting video released this week captures the sobs of a small child calling for its mother from behind a chain-mail fence. The video comes from one of the “tender age” shelters in south Texas, housing children as young as 18-months who have been forcibly separated from their parents after being detained by border guards.

A mother was even separated from her daughter with Down’s syndrome. Human rights observers have described the practice as cruel. Reports suggest children have been led away from their parents on the pretext of being taken for a bath, and that parents have been threatened with never seeing their children.

„Zero Tolerance“

Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration in early May, more than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the US-Mexico border, many of them put into government “care”.

Now whether you call these cages, or - to quote a Fox News euphemism – “warehouses with walls built out of chain-link fences”, it’s not a good look.

“It’s terrible, it’s disgusting, it shouldn’t happen,” says Manfred Nowak, Professor of International Human Rights at the University of Vienna. “It’s a major human rights violation by the USA".

That this should happen in the USA, which was famously built on immigration (although Native Americans have a different interpretation of that history) is darkly ironic. And since the USA is a world trendsetter, it is also deeply worrying, says Nowak. “In this increasingly xenophobic world we have many other states as well who are violating the rights of migrants and refugees including, unfortunately, in the European Union.”

Italy’s new government is vowing to deport thousands of nomadic Roma and Hungary’s parliament has passed a series of laws that criminalise any individual or group that offers to help an illegal immigrant claim asylum. “Democracy, human rights and the rule of law are under attack,” says Nowak.

The US leaves the UN Human Rights Council

Amid these developments, the USA has announced it is pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council which Trump has called “a cesspool of political bias.” Nowak, who has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, admits that meetings in early years of the Council, established in 2005, were overly focused on the human rights abuses perpetrated by Israel, but he says that, through the efforts of the EU, the censorship and the independent investigations it commissions have become much broader.

He says it is regrettable, if not surprising, that the US has left the Council, the international community’s most prestigious human rights body, but that the move is unlikely to weaken the institution in which the European Union has proved in recent years a far more active player.