Academic who backs campaign to abolish jails
THE UN envoy behind the report on race relations in Britain is connected to a pressure group that campaigns to abolish prisons.
Tendayi Achiume is UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
Four years ago she claimed that attacks on foreign nationals threatened the lives of refugees in countries including the UK, even comparing it to Libya.
Her piece, which did not include supporting evidence,
‘Witchcraft and animal sacrifice’
stated 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’.
The 36-year-old has close links to a Los Angeles prisoners’ pressure group Dignity and Power Now, which describes itself as ‘an abolitionist movement’.
It recruits staff by asking the question: ‘ Is it your dream career to abolish the jail system.’
Zambia-born Miss Achiume, who is a professor of law at UCLA in California, is the latest in a string of dignitaries sent by various branches of the UN who have criticised Britain on human rights.
UN adviser Yves Cabannes joined protesters at Dale Farm in Essex in 2011 to condemn the removal 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 council homes.
The Brazilian academic, who offered an animal sacrifice to Karl Marx during a witchcraft ceremony, said the benefit curb was leaving people hungry. She stayed in a £300-a-night hotel during her visit to London.
Another envoy, South African feminist Rashida Manjoo, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, attacked Britain’s ‘boys’ club sexist culture’ in 201 .
Earlier this year another special rapporteur, Leilani Farha of Canada, said Britain had a ‘troubling’ attitude to social housing and suggested that the Grenfell Tower disaster showed that human rights laws were being broken.