U.N. panel denounces Trump over Charlottesville response

President Donald Trump’s seesawing response to the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., has been rebuked by countless politicians, business executives, community groups and religious leaders.

The leaders of Britain and Germany spoke about the need to condemn such violence.

Now the United Nations has weighed in, too.

Without mentioning Trump by name, a body of U.N. experts on Wednesday denounced “the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn” racist violence, saying it was “deeply concerned by the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.”

Trump’s wavering responses to the violence — he has blamed “many sides,” but also singled out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists for condemnation — has roiled his administration but also unsettled rights advocates around the world.

“We were shocked and horrified by what happened,” the committee’s chairwoman, Anastasia Crickley, said in an interview, expressing disgust at the televised images of white supremacists’ torchlit parade through Charlottesville. “I was horrified as well by the way leaders of that movement were able to state afterwards that they felt secure in their support.”

In a two-page decision that was dated Aug. 18 but released on Wednesday, a day after Washington was informed, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination invoked “early action and urgent warning procedures” in deploring the violence and urging the U.S. to investigate.

The urgent-warning procedure allows the committee to draw attention to situations that could “spiral into terrible events” and require immediate action, Crickley said.

The committee called the Charlottesville violence, which took place mainly on Aug. 11 and 12, “horrifying.”

The committee cited two victims by name: Heather D. Heyer, 32, who was killed when a driver plowed a car into a crowd, and Deandre Harris, 20, who was savagely beaten by white supremacists.

The committee called on the U.S. to identify and address the root causes of racism and to thoroughly investigate racial discrimination, in particular against “people of African descent, ethnic or ethnoreligious minorities, and migrants.”