The SearchVoat Forum

THE rightful president of Belarus, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, appeared via video last month before the United Nations Human Rights Council. Her country's August election, she declared, had been "stolen". Despite objections from a representative of the Belarusian government, who said she had no right to address the body, Ms Tikhanovskaya implored the UN to act.

"Standing up for democratic principles and human rights is not interfering in internal affairs. It is a universal question of human dignity," she insisted.

No one knows how US President Donald Trump's Covid-19 diagnosis will affect his presidential campaign, but before falling ill, he repeatedly suggested that he would not accept the results of the election, should he lose.

In that case, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden should follow Ms Tikhanovskaya's example and appeal to the world for help.

For many Americans - raised to see the United States as the natural leader of the "free world" - it may be hard to imagine requesting foreign intervention against tyranny in our own land.

From 1845 to 1847, Frederick Douglass delivered more than 180 speeches imploring British audiences to intervene against American slavery. After World War I, when then-president Woodrow Wilson unveiled the Fourteen Points that he hoped would structure the post-war world, the National Equal Rights League, led by William Trotter and Ida Wells-Barnett, asked the Paris Peace Conference to adopt a 15th: The "elimination of civil, political and judicial distinctions based on race or colour in all nations".

After World War II, the sociologist WEB Du Bois edited a 94-page pamphlet that the (((((National Association for the Advancement of Colored People))))) [parenthesis added by me] presented to every ambassador to the new UN. It declared, "Peoples of the world, we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy."

In 1951, the entertainer-activist Paul Robeson handed UN officials a 200-page document alleging that America's treatment of its black citizens violated the organisation's convention against genocide.

In 1964, Malcolm X beseeched Africa's newly independent governments to "recommend an immediate investigation" into American racism by the UN Human Rights Council.

This June, relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and Michael Brown endorsed a letter calling on the council "to urgently convene a special session on the situation of human rights in the United States". Joe Biden is not WEB Du Bois, let alone Malcolm X. But the party he leads now faces chronic racist disenfranchisement. The more the Democratic Party becomes a vehicle for black political empowerment, the less its votes count.

Democrats should spend the coming weeks working to ensure that this year's OSCE observer mission - despite being banned from many states, especially in the Deep South - can do exactly that. Then, if Mr Trump and his allies halt the counting of ballots, or disregard them altogether, Democrats should use the OSCE's report as evidence in an appeal to the same body where Ms Tikhanovskaya made hers: the UN Human Rights Council. They should also lodge a complaint with the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional organisation that has pledged "to respond rapidly and collectively in defence of democracy", and which in 2009 used that mandate to suspend Honduras after its government carried out a coup.

They routinely exempt American behaviour from the international standards to which they demand other countries comply. If, for example, China regularly sent drones into other countries to conduct extrajudicial killings not just of suspected terrorists but also of government officials, Democrats would denounce it as a grave violation of the "rules-based international order" they extol.

But when the Trump administration assassinated Qassim Suleimani, one of Iran's most powerful officials, in January, Mr Biden said he "deserved to be brought to justice" and worried merely about the killing's practical effects. The 2020 Democratic platform mentions international law just once.

The writer, a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace.