Michael Brown’s Parents Plead To U.N.

On Tuesday, as Ferguson, Missouri—and the rest of the nation—await the grand jury's decision on Officer Darren Wilson, the parents of Michael Brown addressed a United Nations panel in Geneva. “We need answers and we need action,” Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr. told CNN from Switzerland. “And we have to bring it to the U.N. so they can expose it to the rest of the world, what’s going on in small town Ferguson.” Speaking to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, which fights severe treatment or punishment by government authorities, the couple said what transpired between Brown and Wilson, and later the Ferguson P.D. and protesters, “represent violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” according to brief they gave the panel. The couple requested that the U.N. call for the immediate arrest of Wilson and an end to “racial profiling and racially-biased police harassment across the jurisdictions surrounding Ferguson” and the rest of America.