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Update: Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) praised World Rights and the U.N. Human Rights Committee urging to get D.C. statehood rights. Here’s what she said in a release:

“The UN Human Rights Committee is only carrying out its duty once again by criticizing our country for denying the residents of its nation’s capital basic representation,” said Norton. “It should come as no surprise that the denial of voting rights in the House and Senate for D.C. residents is a human rights violation against the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) treaty, which the U.S. signed in 1977. No other country so flagrantly limits the rights of citizens because they happen to live in their nation’s capital. D.C. residents have shouldered all the obligations of American citizenship, particularly paying federal taxes and service in all the nation’s wars, but still, they are treated as second-class citizens in our own country. We must act on this latest international criticism and the initiative by Tim Cooper and Worldrights, who have diligently pursued international recognition of the unique denial we face. I intend to add the UN to the efforts statehood advocates and I are planning for the House floor during Emancipation Week.”

Original post:

D.C.’s long, arduous quest to become a state—or at least gain the same rights as every other state—has been, well, long and arduous. But is it a human rights violation? According to the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee and a human rights advocacy group it is.

Today, the Committee reiterated “its concern that residents of the District of Columbia are denied the right to vote for and election of voting representatives to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives,” a release states.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee has said that D.C. should have the same voting rights as any other state in the country. In 2006, it issued a similar recommendation and the Committee has raised concerns even further back, in 1995 at the floor of the United Nations in New York.

World Rights, a global human rights advocacy group, issued a brief to the Committee last year claiming that the U.S. Government was violating international human rights laws by denying voting rights to residents in D.C.

“The fact that the United Nations has once again stood with the voteless people of the District of Columbia in the name of helping us win our long overdue congressional voting rights illustrates once again that when the District of Columbia invokes international human rights law as a strategy, the people of Washington, DC win, each and every time,” Timothy Cooper, Executive Director of World Rights said in a release.

“We therefore challenge President Obama to stand on the right side of history and vigorously move to promote and respect international human rights law right here in the nation’s capital and do everything within his executive power to right this enduring and most undemocratic wrong,” Cooper also said.