The U.N. Committee against Torture on Friday urged the United States government to do more to combat police brutality, part of a comprehensive report they say highlights American shortcomings in detaining suspected criminals.
The U.N. panel also criticized American military interrogations and the way prisoners are held at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, particularly the use of sleep deprivation techniques.
“There are numerous areas in which certain things should be changed for the United States to comply fully with the [anti-torture] convention,” Alessio Bruni of Italy, one of the panel’s chief investigators, said at a news conference Friday in Geneva, according to the Associated Press.
The group also highlighted a handful of botched executions in recent months and the high number of rapes in U.S. prisons.
The panel’s first examination of American policies since 2006 came in the wake of a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The investigators did not specifically respond to the events in Ferguson, which have caused protests in major U.S. cities across the nation.
The U.N. committee also said that police needed to limit their use of Taser weapons and improve how they treat minorities. The United States’ record on torture was reviewed by 10 independent experts, which analyze all 156 U.N. member countries.
According to the report, more than 330 police officers have been prosecuted for brutality since 2009.
The group also condemned the treatment of nearly 150 inmates at Guantanamo Bay, slamming the “draconian system of secrecy surrounding high-value detainees that keeps their torture claims out of the public domain.” Nine inmates have died at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
