The Importance of Internationalism and International Human Rights in the Movement for Black Lives: A British Perspective

On the 12th of February 2021 I spoke at a symposium organized by Fordham International Law Journal and Fordham Law School’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, focussed on Black Lives Matter Around the Globe. I spoke on a panel entitled “Race and Ethnic Discrimination in Europe,” alongside Dr. Eddie Bruce-Jones and Dr. Vanessa Eileen Thompson, discussing my research on potential links between the global Black Lives Matter movement and International Human Rights Law.

Part of the inspiration for my research comes from the protests we saw last year. We saw that despite the protests originating in the United States, many people were protesting all over the world-from the United States to Australia to South Africa to the United Kingdom. These people were protesting in response to the murder of George Floyd but also to various local inequalities that they faced in their countries as well.

Indeed, despite British health secretary Matt Hancock saying that people in the UK were only protesting, “based in response to events in America rather than here,”[1] many of the people protesting in the UK were holding up banners saying, “The UK Is Not Innocent.”[2]

These protestors were cognisant of the fact that Black people are more disproportionately incarcerated in the United Kingdom than in the United States, and that sadly this disproportionality is even higher with regard to Black youth detention.[3]

These protestors were cognisant of the fact that the police are most likely to use disproportionate force against Black British people, born out in statistics like the fact that Black people are 7.7 times more likely to be tasered by the police than white people.[4] For Black in 2017 police in Bristol, which until recently was the home of the Edward Colston statue, tasered their own Black race relations adviser, Judah Adunbi, a 63-year-old-man.[5]

And these protestors were also sadly aware that over 1700 people have died in UK police custody since 1990[6] and no one has been charged with their deaths.[7] These people include Christopher Alder, a military vet who lay choking on his own blood in a police station, as police laughed and made monkey chants at him as he died in 1998.[8] And these include people like Seni Lewis, aged 23, who was held down and asphyxiated by up to 11 police officers in a hospital in 2010 despite the fact that he was complaining, as they held him down, that he could not breathe.[9] As the director of INQUEST, a charity that provides expertise on state-related deaths, told me in 2020 often British police who encounter Black British men perceive them as having “superhuman-strength.”[10]

Therefore, Black Lives Matter protestors in the United Kingdom in 2020 were very angry about what happened in America but were also very angry about the inequalities that they were seeing in the United Kingdom too. In this way, the refrain of “Black Lives Matter” enabled these protestors to link the international with the national.

This reflects a long line of protest history in Britain, as Black British movements for human rights have often been international. After all, if you are Black in Britain today you are likely the descendant of 20th century African or African-Caribbean migrants from former British colonies.[11] And these people, who migrated to Britain in the 20th century, often had an international politics. They kept one eye on what was happening in Britain, and another eye on what was happening in the States, and in other countries like Jamaica, Guyana, Nigeria and Ghana. Indeed, some of the earliest Black British human rights movements formed groups like the League of Coloured Peoples, in 1931 and the West African Students Union, in 1925, whose members corresponded with great African-American activists like W.E.B. DuBois and attended some of the famed Pan-African conferences of the 20th century, including the 1945 Pan-African conference in Manchester, where future African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah were in attendance.[12]

Fast-forward to the 1960s and again young Black British activists were arguing for more decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean but also for their human rights to be protected here in the UK.[13] In fact, when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the UK in 1964,  Bayard Rustin arranged for multiple Black and Asian activists in the UK to meet with him.[14] After meeting him they were inspired to create an organisation known as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination which, inspired by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, lobbied for a civil rights act of their own in the United Kingdom which came in the form of the Race Relations Act 1965.[15] And in 1965 itself, Malcolm X came to visit Smethwick in the West Midlands, a place where a Conservative politician had recently won his seat whilst running on the slogan “If You want an N-word for a Neighbour vote Labour.”[16] In Smethwick, Malcolm X said that:

“I was in Birmingham, Alabama, the other day. This will give me a chance to see if Birmingham, England, is any different.”[17]

However, aside from the specific internationalism that is inherent in Black British activism, Black activism generally has often been international. From W.E.B Du Bois to Claudia Jones to Paul and Eslanda Robeson to Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, Black human rights struggles have often involved Black peoples from all around the world advocating for their global liberation.

And that is why I think it’s very important for us to consider how International Human Rights Law could help further this liberation.

My research is particularly focussed on the Right To Life under International Human Rights Law. After all, Black Lives Matter is a movement that calls us to remember that the life of Black people is something that should be respected and treated with dignity. Therefore, when thinking about the law, and international human rights raw, with respect to Black Lives Matter, I think it is paramount to not only focus on anti-discrimination law but instead think more about how the state fundamentally relates to the lives of its citizens.[18]

In Europe, the right to life that we most often focus on is the right to life found in the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”).

Article 2, paragraph 1, of the ECHR tells us that:

“Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.”[19]

However, I think this right to life is quite restrictive and case law on this particular right to life shows us that the European Court has been reticent to see racism as something which has a substantive impact on a person’s right to life. For example, in the case of Nachova v. Bulgaria, where a police officer killed two men of Roma descent, there was ample evidence of ethnic segregation within the country and anti-Roma bias in the police force, as well as a credible allegation that the police officer who had shot at the two men had used a racial slur.[20] Yet, despite this, the court found that there was insufficient evidence of racist intent and thus that there was “an insufficient basis for concluding that the…State” was substantively liable “for a racist killing.”[21]

In contrast, the right to life found in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights seems much broader and indeed their most recent General Comment on the right to life confirms this in which they write:

“all individuals [should]…be free from acts and omissions that are intended or may be expected to cause their unnatural or premature death, as well as to enjoy a life with dignity.”[22]

And I believe, and other scholars argue, that working to ensure the ability to enjoy a right to life with dignity will enable Black Lives to matter globally.[23] Regardless, whatever rights we choose to use to further the struggle for Black human rights we have to keep moving forward. As Ajibola Lewis, the mother of Seni Lewis, told me “If we get more people marching maybe things will change… If we sit back and don’t do anything, we get what we get.”[24]

Seun Matiluko is a writer and researcher in race, law and human rights.

This is a guest blog post and in no way represents the views of the Fordham International Law Journal.

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[1] Rob Merrick, Matt Hancock accused of ‘ignorance’ after claiming UK marchers not protesting against racism in this country, The Independent (June 7, 2020 3:02 PM), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-ignorance-black-lives-matter-protests-uk-racism-a9553226.html.;

[2] Seun Matiluko, ‘The UK is not innocent’: the very British racism we have to confront Dazed (June 3, 2020), https://www.dazeddigital.com/politics/article/49446/1/uk-not-innocent-british-racism-america-black-lives-matter-george-floyd-protests.

[3] See David Lammy, The Lammy Review, 3 (2017)

[4] See Mattha Busby, Rights groups quit police body over stun gun use against BAME people, Guardian (Apr. 17, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/17/rights-groups-quit-uk-police-body-stun-gun-use-bame-people.

[5] See Will Worley, Bristol police taser their own black race relations adviser after mistaking him for wanted man, Independent (Jan. 20, 2020 1:16 PM), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/bristol-police-taser-black-race-relations-adviser-mistaken-identity-a7536951.html.

[6] See Deaths in police custody, INQUEST (last updated: Feb. 11, 2021), https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-police-custody.

[7] See We know of no successful convictions of a police officer for the killing of someone in police custody since 1971, Full Fact (July 2, 2020), https://fullfact.org/crime/prosecutions-deaths-police-custody/.

[8] See Christopher Alder custody death: Sister demands justice 20 years on, BBC (March. 31, 2018),  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-43581781?fbclid=IwAR24DlD_0hTsi9p9zwofOZZ17YYo2g76J0A0OkR6WWni9xAbazOo8HobD10; see also Vikram Dodd, Monkey chants as black man died ‘not racist’, Guardian (Jul. 22, 2002 9:18 PM), https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jul/23/race.world.

[9] See Oluwaseun Matiluko, What does black British activism look like in 2020?, gal-dem (June 06, 2020),  https://gal-dem.com/what-does-black-british-activism-look-like-in-2020/.

[10] Interview with Deborah Coles, Director, INQUEST, in London, UK. (Jun. 04, 2020) (notes on file with author).

[11] See 2011 Census analysis: Ethnicity and religion of the non-UK born population in England and Wales: 2011, Office for National Statistics (June 18, 2015), https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/articles/2011censusanalysisethnicityandreligionofthenonukbornpopulationinenglandandwales/2015-06-18.

[12] For an overview of this history, see generally, David Killingray, ‘To do something for the race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples’ in West Indian Intellectual in Britain, (Bill Schwarz ed., 2003); Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain: 1900-1960, Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (1998); Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to West African Students’ Union, (Sept. 14, 1945) (on file with U. Mass. Amherst) available at https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b108-i445; George Padmore, History of the Pan-African Congress (1963).

[13] See generally, Bill Schwarz, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the Emergence of Post-colonial Britain 14 Twentieth Century British Hist. 264 (2003).

[14] See Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race 190 (2016).

[15] See id. at 192.

[16] Stuart Jeffries, Britain’s most racist election: the story of Smethwick, 50 years on, Guardian (Oct. 15, 2014 12:45 PM), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/15/britains-most-racist-election-smethwick-50-years-on.

[17] Rangzeb Hussain, 12th February 1965: The day Malcolm X came to Smethwick IAMBHAM (Feb. 12, 2020 6:24 PM) https://www.iambirmingham.co.uk/2020/02/12/day-malcolm-x-came-smethwick/.

[18] See Charles Bracey, Dignity in Race Jurisprudence 7 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 669, 719-20 (2005).

[19] Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, art 2, Nov. 4, 1950, 213 U.N.T.S. 221.

[20] See 2005-VII 42 Eur. Ct. H.R. 17 ¶ 31 (2005).

[21] Id. at ¶ 53.

[22] UNHRC, General comment No. 36: Article 6 (Right to Life), 124th Sess., adopted 30 Oct. 2018, UN Doc CCPR/C/GC/36, ¶ 3.

[23] See Bracey, supra note 18 at 719-20.

[24] See Matiluko, supra note 9.