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The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, (ICERD, or more commonly, CERD), is an international treaty designed to protect individuals from discrimination based on race, whether that discrimination is intentional, or is the result of seemingly neutral policies. The United States ratified CERD in 1994 and is therefore bound by all provisions of the treaty, which includes a periodic compliance review conducted by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The USHRN CERD Project was created to ensure that the committee’s review, which took place in Geneva in February 2008, included full and accurate information about the current human rights situation in the U.S. beyond the formal report submitted by the U.S. government. The project’s key initial objective was to coordinate the production of a comprehensive shadow report that was presented to the committee during the review process. Many of the findings in the shadow report were directly reflected in the committee’s Concluding Observations.
Throughout 2008, the CERD Project monitored the U.S. response to the concerns listed in the Concluding Observations in preparation for the U.S. government’s one-year follow-up report to the committee, which was submitted in January 2009. The Network coordinated a response the U.S. follow-up report that the CERD committee received in June; other Network members submitted responses directly to the committee, also in June (see “Current CERD Process Reports” section in “Related links” below). Additional follow-up activities coordinated by the Network’s CERD Task Force are planned throughout the year.
Other CERD Project objectives include demonstrating the effectiveness of using an international human rights procedure to advance domestic advocacy agendas; educating the public about the human rights framework, particularly with regard to U.S. obligations to combat racial discrimination; increasing the capacity of domestic human rights and social justice organizations to use CERD and other treaties as well as the human rights framework to inform their advocacy; and strengthening the domestic human rights movement overall to better influence U.S. policy.
