Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, recently stated “A good percentage of African-Americans are leery of our Justice Department. When there hasn’t been a real effort to deal with [unsolved civil rights slayings] how can we count on them to provide the support and protection we need today?”

For you users of the Inter-American system, my question is this: might it be a good strategy to file petitions before the Commission based upon individual murders in which there appears never to have been an investigation that meets international standards?