The United Nations has been asked to investigate Chicago school closings for potential human rights violations.

Given the amount of gang violence in the city, if investigators do go, they might want to take a few of their Peacekeepers with them.  The Daily Caller Education Editor Eric Owens has the story:

Noted American terrorist and left-wing radical Bill Ayers is among the signatories of a letter calling on the United Nations to probe the closing of 49 Chicago elementary schools based on claims that it is causing massive human rights violations.

The “letter of allegation” is 24 pages long and contains 17 footnotes.

The Midwest Coalition for Human Rights sent the missive to the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland this week.

The Coalition is a network of over 50 organizations united to fight “serious human rights violations occurring in the United States.”

A number of individuals and organizations sponsored the letter. In addition to Ayers, others signers of the letter include four people associated with Action Now, an Illinois community-organizing group that split off from ACORN just before it dissolved because of financial problems and scandals.

As Eagnews.org notes, still another endorser is Michael Klonsky, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society also a former chairman of a Maoist organization called “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).”

Sital Kalantry, a clinical law professor at University of Chicago Law School who actually filed the letter with the U.N., told Chicago public radio station WBEZ her view that the school closings violate the inalienable fundamental rights of thousands of affected Chicago schoolchildren.

“The United Nations taking this issue up and giving it serious attention will really bring home to Chicago and the United States that there are violations occurring here of human rights, potentially, not just about a budget crisis,” said Kalantry.

The letter argues that the 49 school closings violate human rights because they affect black families disproportionately, because they force students to cross gang lines to get to the new schools they will attend, because class sizes will be slightly larger and because the school closings happened despite the objections of some people.

The dispatch asks the U.N. to “urge the United States to investigate and prevent these human rights violations.”

It’s not clear how or if the U.N.’s human rights office will act. The U.N. has no power to direct or regulate any federal, state or municipal government in the United States. The international body is, of course, free to conduct inquiries and issue findings, however.

The commissioner currently occupying the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights is Navanethem Pillay of South Africa, a country where a ruthless system of racial segregation was institutional and legal until the early 1990s.