Attorney Bert Samuels - file photo
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Bert Samuels
Jamaican attorney Bert Samuels has been asked to sit on an independent International Commission of Inquiry into cases of police violence and extrajudicial killings in the United States.
The Commission was established following the May 25, 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
More than 600 human rights groups along with the families of Mr. Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old African-American woman who was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky apartment, later petitioned the United Nations Human Rights Council to appoint the Commission of Inquiry.
The petition was opposed by the US and the United Nations declined to establish the commission.
However, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) decided to set up such a commission with members from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Mr. Samuels said he was appointed by the IADL, the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild to sit on the commission, which will examine police violence as well as "structural racism and bias in the criminal justice system in the United States."
The hearings are to run from January 18 to February 6.
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