A/HRC/51/54 been in Ireland since the 1700s. Thousands of children of African descent born in Ireland between 1950 and1970, had grown up in notorious “mother-and-baby homes”, with their parentage erased. Those children, now adults, were still searching for their families. Ms. Mbugua also cited high rates of children of African migrant parents taken into State care, often from single-parent families lacking in community support, access to counsel and information on the law, the rights of parents and the operation of the legal system. Some encountered challenges in accessing visits to their children who had been taken into care. She called for a culturally sensitive approach to varied parenting styles and noted the lack of culturally competent professionals and service providers, saying that those who made lifealtering decisions on behalf of children often reflected their own bias and ethnocentrism in their decision-making. She noted that the power dynamics of the courts and caseworkers could further prevent migrant parents from exercising their rights. 34. During the discussion, Ms. MacDougall referred to removals and the forced assimilation of indigenous children, noting numerous cases handled by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Civil society representatives recounted personal accounts of their encounters with the family-policing system, the lasting trauma for children and parents and the intractability and opacity of the decision-making therein. In addition, research showed that racial discrimination in policing and family regulation in the United States were interlinked. Ms. Roberts emphasized the importance of dismantling the familypolicing system, as an existing racially discriminatory structure that systematically failed to effectively support children, families and communities, in particular children of African descent and indigenous peoples who navigated long-term legacies of trauma and human rights abuses at the hands of that system. It was recommended that the United Nations should undertake greater advocacy on family policing and that the Working Group should address the family-regulation system in a follow-up country visit to the United States. 35. The fourth panel, on the theme “Administration of Justice and children of African descent”, was chaired by Ms. Day. In her introductory remarks, the Chair of the Working Group noted that the global call for decriminalization was among the best of the best interests of children of African descent, including as a means of decriminalization of racial identity. The Working Group called for a moment of silence to recognize the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd and to consider how “protection”, “liberty” and “security” were often invoked to endanger rather than protect people of African descent. Ms. Day discussed how negative racial stereotypes of criminality, culpability and dangerousness had been proved to influence decision-making in relation to children and youth of African descent, including by legal system personnel, such as police officers, prosecutors, lawyers and judges. 10 Globally, children of African descent continued to routinely experience that stereotyping. In 2021, the Working Group had focused on the case of Brian K., in Switzerland, as a particularly relevant example. Numerous examples from the United States also illustrated the concern, including those of Emmett Till (a 14-year-old falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955), Trayvon Martin (a 17-year-old shot and killed in 2012 while walking home, by a vigilante who had decided he looked suspicious), and Tamir Rice (a 12-year-old boy killed by police in 2014 while playing with a toy gun in a public park). Ms. Day recognized the courage of Darnella Frazier who, aged 17, had video recorded the murder of Mr. Floyd and triggered a global movement for racial justice. 36. Kris Henning, Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center and author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, noted how profound racial disparities in the legal system deprived Black children of childhood. In the United States, the earliest appearance of police officers in schools was during racial integration, in 1939, perversely generating a higher child arrest rate, rather than greater security. Similarly, although few children were involved in violent crime, the “superpredator” myth popular in the 1990s had increased the targeting of Black children and neighbourhoods and led to the expansion of laws to remove children from juvenile courts and expose them to adult sentences. Although youth of all races exhibited impulsive behaviours (a predictable feature of adolescent development), Ms. Henning noted that disproportionate numbers of Black children were arrested and treated as adults. Police encounters, including regular stops 10 See A/74/274. 9