October 22, 2025
Update: On November 7, 2025, the U.S. failed to appear for its scheduled peer review on its human rights record in Geneva. The UN Human Rights Council, citing non-cooperation, postponed the review. Advocates in Geneva condemned the U.S. for undermining the Universal Periodic Review and demanded accountability to uphold its human rights commitments.
The United States has said that this year it won’t take part in the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, which looks at the progress of countries in promoting and protecting human rights. Our government’s refusal to participate is unprecedented, and shows a dangerous disregard for the civil and human rights of all people.
The purpose of the UPR is to give nations an opportunity to share their progress, report on challenges, and consider recommendations for how to further improve their policies and practices.
On October 22, Children’s Rights and fellow advocates, legal experts, and international human rights leaders came together at a pair of panel discussions to talk about why the UN review matters and provide evidence of how the U.S. is falling short in respecting and protecting human rights.
Youth Voices for Justice: On the Frontlines of Reform
Our first discussion, in partnership with the National Homelessness Law Center and Southern Poverty Law Center, featured youth experts who know firsthand the harms inflicted on children and families by U.S. systems and policies. They connected their lived experiences to broader systems of racial and economic inequity, calling for an end to discriminatory and punitive practices in favor of supportive, rights-based approaches led by youth themselves.
“What my family needed wasn’t for me to be removed from my home and taken to other places. Really what we needed was things like therapy, things like housing support, consistent mental health care. Instead what we got was caseworkers doing surveillance. We got government intervention.” – Jasiyah Gilbert
“I’m here because I believe it’s even more important now for us to build a record to show how the U.S. is falling short of its human rights obligations, and to uplift the lived experts that are doing the work, that are calling out those harms, and ensuring that those voices are heard.” – Hina Naveed
Accountability Now: Exposing the U.S. Family Policing System
The second panel was held in collaboration with JMACForFamilies. It focused on how the U.S. family policing system (“child welfare”) operates as a machine of surveillance, control, and racialized punishment—particularly against Black and Indigenous families.
“There’s no better data than lived experience. Our stories tell the truth as to what is happening.” – Tatiana Rodriguez
“I often say while you may have your degree in social work, I have a PhD in lived experience. You cannot tell me what I went through, how it impacted me and the things that have happened because of my personal experience better than I can.” – Tawanna Brown
Both events underscored a shared truth: Listening to lived experts is the starting point for reform. For too long, systems have been rebuilt around them, not with them. Real transformation happens when young people who’ve lived these harms lead the conversation, shape the policies, and help hold governments accountable.
The conversations also revealed common pillars of action to end the unnecessary separation of families, all of them centered on ending punitive practices and replacing them with laws, policies and procedures that support families instead of tearing them apart.
Participants called on government agencies to provide families experiencing poverty or mental health challenges with housing, therapy, community-based care and direct income support. Child welfare laws must be amended to eliminate racial bias and discrimination in systems and redefine “neglect” which is often conflated with poverty and used as a tool of separation. Government funding must be redirected to pay for family support resources completely de‑linked from agencies conducting investigations.
The international human rights community has listened and made it clear that the U.S must change. It’s time for decision-makers, elected officials and the American people to hear us too, and turn our findings and recommended solutions into real change for families.