Bill Text: IL HR0906 | 2019-2020 | 101st General Assembly | Introduced

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Bill Title: Urges the United Nations Human Rights Council to pass a resolution denouncing and charging the United States with the crime of genocide against its Black population and calls upon the U.N. General Assembly under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to assure the safety of the 42 million Black people in the U.S.

Spectrum: Partisan Bill (Democrat 1-0)

Status: (Introduced - Dead) 2020-11-10 - Referred to Rules Committee [HR0906 Detail]

Download: Illinois-2019-HR0906-Introduced.html

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HOUSE RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide was unanimously adopted by the United
Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948; and
WHEREAS, Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide confirms that genocide,
whether committed during peacetime or in war, is a crime under
international law which the Contracting Parties undertake to
prevent and to punish; and
WHEREAS, Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as any of
the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c)
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group"; and
WHEREAS, Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide verifies the following acts

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punishable: (a) genocide, (b) conspiracy to commit genocide,
(c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide, (d)
attempt to commit genocide, and (e) complicit in genocide; and
WHEREAS, The United States and its sub-governmental units
are responsible for policies and practices against the Black
population that conform to Article II's definition of genocide
and Article III's specification punishable crimes of the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide; and
WHEREAS, The World Conference Against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has
declared "slavery and the slave trade are a crime against
humanity"; Africans forcibly imported into the 13 British
colonies that became the United States of America were legally
chattel for 246 years, 170 under the United States, played a
significant role in the slave trade; the last slave ship, the
Coltilda, arrived in Mobile, Alabama in July of 1860, just
seven months before the Civil War; and
WHEREAS, Of the nearly 11 million enslaved Africans,
approximately 300,000 were brought to what would become the
United States of America; laborers were subjected to
brutalization, mutilation, rape, torture, suppression of
cultural practices, and routine humiliation, including the

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breaking up of families, and were denied access to education
and a nutritious diet; their inhumane, unpaid working
conditions produced severe illnesses; additionally, because
slavers scrimped on food and shelter, malnourishment,
diarrhea, dysentery, worms, whooping cough, and respiratory
diseases were rampant; these conditions pushed the infant and
early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that of White
infants and children; half of all African American enslaved
infants died in their first year; African American children
continue to be plagued by these problems; for the period 2013
to 2016, African American children experienced a death rate
from SIDS of 74.4 per thousand compared to White children's 39
per 1000; African American infants die at a rate of 171.1 per
thousand compared to the death rate of 85.0 for White infants;
and
WHEREAS, African American history is replete with horrific
atrocities, terrorist lynchings, racial pogroms and massacres,
and, in the contemporary moment, heinous hate crimes and
murders by police; the Equal Justice Initiative has documented
4000 lynchings; Black people are the only U.S. racial or ethnic
group who are killed by police at a rate greater than their
percentage of the population; between 2016 and 2018, the number
of murders by White supremacists more than doubled, with 2017
being the fifth deadliest year on record for extremist violence
against Blacks since 1970; and

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WHEREAS, African Americans are disproportionately killed
by police; although they comprise only 13.4 percent of the U.S.
population, from 2015 to 2019 they accounted for 26.4 percent
of individuals killed by police; Whites make up 50 percent of
police killings but compose 61 percent of the population;
Latinx people comprise 18% of both police killings and the U.S.
population; Asians constitute 2 percent of police killings and
5 percent of the population; and
WHEREAS, Economic genocide is defined as "deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its destruction in whole or in part"; from emancipation
into the 1960s, African American men working the same job as
White men earned only two-thirds of their wages; the
Black-White wage gap expanded with rising wage inequality from
1979 to 2018; consequently, African American women and men
reside at the bottom of the wage scale and disproportionately
comprise unskilled, non-union, service sector labor; due to
ethnic cleansing forcing them out of towns, destroying or
stealing their property, African American homeowners and
business owners have had to start over two or more times; since
the late 19th Century, most African Americans have been
restricted to apartheid neighborhoods with substandard housing
stock and poor municipal services; according to United for a
Fair Economy, 55 percent of all housing loans to African

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Americans between 1994 and 2006 were subprime, thus when the
housing market crashed in 2007, Black people lost between $71.5
and $92.9 billion dollars in wealth; and
WHEREAS, Since the 2000 Presidential Election, suppressing
the Black vote has been the dominant electoral strategy of the
Republican Party; it includes gerrymandering to limit
predominantly Black-populated areas from influencing elections
and referendums, requiring voter IDs, using Reconstruction-era
laws to purge voter rolls, gutting Section 5 of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act, the pre-clearance clause, and cutting the number of
polling places in African American neighborhoods and the hours
they are open; also, the mass incarceration of African American
males eliminates their right to vote and therefore proves a
direct link between racialized policies and the suppression of
African American voices in the political process of the United
States; and
WHEREAS, Even with its record of anti-Black racial
violence, the lynchings of William "Froggie" James on November
11, 1909 in Cairo, of Jesse Washington on May 16, 1911 in Waco,
Texas, and of Laura and L.D. Nelson on May 25, 1911 near
Okemah, Okfuskee County, Oklahoma stand out; the massacres in
Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, in East Louis, Illinois in
1917, in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma in
1921 are remembered for their barbarity; in modern times, the

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savage 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, the atrocious rape of Mary
Ruth Reed in Monroe North Carolina in 1959, the monstrous
murders of James Byrd Jr. in 1998 in Jasper, Texas, and the
Charleston Massacre (North Carolina) in 2015 continue to
resonate with the public; the current wave of protests was
ignited by the callous police murder of George Floyd; his
execution was preceded by several despicable police murders,
including Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor and the
contemporary lynching of Ahmaud Aubrey; and
WHEREAS, As quoted by the statement by certain Special
Procedures at HRC urgent debate on police violence against
people of African descent and peaceful protesters,
"[African-Americans] in the United States, the domestic legal
system has utterly failed to acknowledge and confront racial
injustice and discrimination. This injustice and
discrimination is so deeply entrenched in law enforcement that
even during this period of uprising, reports continue of
extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police. This
injustice and discrimination also affects other racial and
ethnic minorities. Despite several decades of policing reform,
executive intervention, and judicial oversight, this violence
and racial injustice persists."; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE
HUNDRED FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that

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the situation in the United States requires an international
response that can help ensure that people of African descent in
this country are no longer subject to the routine but egregious
violations; and be it further
RESOLVED, That we urge the United Nations Human Rights
Council to pass a resolution denouncing and charging the United
States with the crime of genocide against its Black population;
and be it further
RESOLVED, That we call upon the U.N. General Assembly under
the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide "to assure the safety of the 42 million Black people
in the U.S."; and be it further
RESOLVED, That suitable copies be delivered to the member
states of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the
President and Vice President of the United States, the Speaker
of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Majority Leader of
the U.S. Senate, and to each Senator and Representative in the
United States Congress.