United Nations and the National Police Forces

The Case for Global Oversight: Why the UN Needs the Power to “Police the Police”

The fundamental duty of any police force is to protect and serve the citizenry. However, across the globe, we increasingly witness a disturbing inversion of this role. From the aggressive tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States to the systemic suppression of dissent by police in Russia, Iran, and China, law enforcement has frequently become an instrument of state-sponsored abuse rather than a guardian of public safety. Because these abuses often stem from the highest levels of national government, domestic accountability mechanisms are frequently compromised or non-existent. To protect universal human rights, the United Nations must be granted expanded authority to monitor national police forces, supported by an independent body with the mandate to “police the police.”

The Crisis of Sovereign Impunity

Currently, the UN’s ability to intervene in domestic policing is severely limited by the principle of national sovereignty. This legal shield allows states to treat law enforcement as an internal matter, even when that “internal matter” involves torture, extrajudicial killings, or the systematic targeting of minorities.

• United States (ICE): Despite being a developed democracy, the U.S. has faced international criticism for the conduct of ICE, including the separation of families and reports of medical neglect in detention centers. Without external oversight, these actions are often justified through domestic policy, bypassing international human rights standards.
• Russia and Iran: In these nations, the police act as the frontline of political preservation. The brutal suppression of protests—often involving mass arrests, beatings, and “disappearances”—demonstrates how police forces can be transformed into paramilitary wings of a regime.
• China: The use of police and surveillance technology in regions like Xinjiang represents a high-tech evolution of police abuse, where law enforcement is used to facilitate mass internment and cultural erasure.

In each of these cases, the “guards” are the ones committing the crimes, and because they answer only to the state, there is no one left to guard the people from the guards.

A Global Mandate for Monitoring

To address this, the UN should move beyond its current role of “advising” and “training” and toward a mandatory monitoring framework. This would involve the creation of a Permanent Commission on Law Enforcement Standards. This body would function similarly to nuclear inspectors, possessing the authority to:

1. Conduct Unannounced Inspections: The ability to visit detention centers and police precincts without prior state approval to ensure compliance with the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials.
2. Establish a Universal Body-Cam Mandate: Pushing for international standards in digital evidence to ensure that encounters between police and civilians are transparent and accessible to international investigators.
3. Create an Independent Referral System: Allowing citizens to bypass their own corrupted legal systems and report police abuses directly to a UN tribunal.

Policing the Police: The Need for UN Enforcement

Monitoring alone is a toothless endeavor if it is not backed by the threat of consequence. The most radical, yet necessary, step is the empowerment of a specialized UN police unit—a “Police for the Police.”

This would not be a force that replaces domestic police, but one that investigates them. If a national police force is found to be engaged in systemic human rights violations—such as the shooting of peaceful protesters in Tehran or the torture of detainees in Moscow—this UN body should have the power to name and shame individual commanders, freeze their international assets, and recommend them for prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Critics argue that this infringes on sovereignty. However, sovereignty should not be a “get out of jail free” card for human rights violations. If a state fails in its primary duty to protect its citizens from its own agents, it forfeits the right to absolute autonomy in that sphere.

Conclusion

The world is currently a patchwork of varying police standards, where the quality of one’s human rights depends entirely on the geography of their birth. By granting the UN the power to monitor and discipline national police forces, the international community can move toward a single, higher standard of justice. We must accept that when the state becomes the aggressor, the only solution is a higher authority. It is time for the United Nations to step into that role and ensure that those who carry the badge are held to the same law they claim to uphold.