World reacts to guilty verdict in death of George Floyd

 

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World reacts to guilty verdict in death of George Floyd

Siobhán O'Grady, Rachel Pannett  1 hr ago

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Foreign leaders and media outlets began to react Tuesday evening to former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s conviction on three counts in the killing of George Floyd, a case that sparked an international reckoning and has grasped the attention of observers around the world.

© Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post People gather at George Floyd Plaza in Minneapolis on April 20 after hearing that former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts against him. (Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

Chauvin, who is White, was found guilty Tuesday of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Floyd, a Black man he pinned down outside a grocery store last year.

A teenage witness filmed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes in a video that was viewed by millions of people globally, sparking outrage and street protests for racial justice.

Derek Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd

British politicians at the highest levels of government were quick to weigh in.

“I was appalled by the death of George Floyd and welcome this verdict,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted that he was thinking of Floyd’s loved ones. “I welcome the verdict but by itself this won’t heal the pain of their loss, which reverberated around the world,” he wrote. “The guilty verdict must be the beginning of real change — not the end.”

Photos: The reaction after the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial was announced

David Lammy, a Labour Party lawmaker in Britain, tweeted: “No judgment can ever make up for murder, but it means everything that justice has been served tonight for George Floyd. Let this send a clear message both in the USA and across the world: #BlackLivesMatter.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview on Real Talk Ryan Jespersen on Tuesday evening that “it is good news that we saw the verdict come through where people hoped it would.”

“But it still underlines that there’s an awful lot of work to do,” he said.

Anger over George Floyd’s killing ripples far beyond the United States

Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, wrote on Twitter that a single verdict “won’t eradicate the systemic racism embedded within our institutions. But, in the memory of George Floyd, it is one small step in the right direction.”

Foreign news outlets featured prominent coverage of the verdict on their websites, with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. running live coverage and French newspaper Le Monde featuring its news story at the top of its website.

Floyd’s killing proved to be a moment of reckoning not only in the United States but across the world, as protesters took to the streets calling for justice in his case and pointing to what they saw as parallels in their own communities. In Britain last year, they chanted for Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old who was shot by police during his attempted arrest in 2011. In France, they said the name Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old who died in police custody in 2016.

Protesters in Europe push for a new reckoning of their own countries’ racism

In Australia, where Floyd’s death last year spurred a resurgence in activism over Indigenous people’s deaths in custody, the guilty verdict led to fresh calls for authorities to scrutinize more than 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody.

On Twitter, some people pointed to the case of David Dungay Jr., a 26-year-old Aboriginal man who died in similar circumstances in a Sydney correctional facility in 2015 after being restrained by five prison guards in his cell.

Video footage aired at a subsequent inquest showed Dungay telling the guards who were pinning him to his bed “I can’t breathe” at least 12 times. The inquest didn’t recommend disciplinary action against the guards. A petition calling for charges to be laid has garnered more than 113,000 signatures.

Last week marked 30 years since a Royal Commission first probed the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody in Australia and recommended 339 changes to reduce the rate at which Indigenous people are jailed, including decriminalizing drunkenness and using prison as a last resort. A 2018 government study found that only two-thirds of those recommendations had been implemented and that the rate of Indigenous incarceration had doubled.

O’Grady reported from Washington and Pannett from Sydney.

This report has been updated.