The UN’s at it again! Envoy sent to probe ‘post-Brexit racism’
A CONTROVERSIAL United Nations envoy declared yesterday that Brexit may have worsened racism in Britain.
Tendayi Achiume, who is on a 12-day tour of the country investigating racism and intolerance, said her mission would look at ‘discrimination and exclusion that may have been exacerbated’ by the vote to leave the EU.
But her visit – which coincides with deep troubles for the Government over the Windrush fiasco – provoked condemnation from senior Tories who called it ‘pointless’ and ‘politically motivated’.
Miss Achiume, who is UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, is a Zambianborn US academic.
She is connected to a Los Angeles pressure group that campaigns to abolish prisons, and four years ago she produced an academic treatise which said, without providing supporting evidence, that ‘brutal attacks against foreign nationals threaten the lives of refugees in contexts as varied as Libya, Greece, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine and even the United States’.
Yesterday she said ‘ xenophobic discrimination and intolerance aimed at refugees, migrants and even British racial, religious and ethnic minorities will be an important focus’ oh her inquiry.
She follows a string of dignitaries sent by various branches of the UN over the past decade who have found cause to criticise Britain’s human rights record.
Among them was UN adviser Professor Yves Cabannes, who joined protesters at Dale Farm in Essex in 2011 to condemn the removal of hundreds of travellers from illegal pitches. Two years later a UN housing rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, demanded an end to the ‘bedroom tax’ that limited housing benefit for people with unused bedrooms in their homes. She said the benefit curb was leaving people hungry.
Miss Rolnik, a Brazilian academic whose background included making an animal sacrifice to Karl Marx during a witchcraft ceremony, stayed during her visit to London at a £300-a-night hotel.
She was followed by South African feminist Rashida Manjoo, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, who in 2014 attacked Britain’s ‘ boys’ club sexist culture’.
Earlier this year another special rapporteur, Canadian Leilani Farha, said Britain had a ‘troubling’ attitude to social housing and suggested that the Grenfell Tower disaster showed that human rights laws were being broken. Miss Achiume said she would examine ‘discrimination in the administration of justice and policing, counter-terrorism, and obstacles to full enjoyment of economic, social and political rights.’
UN inspections are requested by UN officials and such requests are routinely followed by invitations from the Foreign Office, without reference to ministers responsible for the matters to be inspected. Former Tory leader and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘These visits are completely pointless. They are politically motivated, they are inspired by the extreme Left, and the idea is to kick the UK.
‘The Foreign Office always allows these people in, but whatever she produces it will be fit only for the waste bin. I hope her report is brief – it’ll make it easier to dispose of.’