The anti-racism committee invoked its early-action procedures for the first time since an outbreak of killings last year in Burundi.
LONDON — President Trump’s seesawing response to the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., has been rebuked by countless politicians, business executives, community groups and religious leaders.
The leaders of Germany and Britain spoke about the need to condemn such violence, and Pope Francis also seemed to allude to the controversy.
Now the United Nations has weighed in, too.
Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, a body of United Nations experts denounced on Wednesday “the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn” racist violence, saying it was “deeply concerned by the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.”
Mr. Trump’s wavering responses to the violence — he has blamed “many sides, ” but also singled out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists for condemnation — has roiled his administration, but also unsettled rights advocates around the world.
In a two-page decision that was dated Aug. 18 but released on Wednesday, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination invoked “early action and urgent warning procedures” in deploring the violence and urging the United States to investigate.
This was the first time the committee had invoked those procedures since last year, when it condemned “reports of killings, summary executions, disappearances and torture, many of which appear to have an ethnic character, ” in Burundi .
The committee called the violence “horrifying” and said it was “alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by individuals belonging to groups of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred.”
The committee noted in particular the cases of two victims: Heather D. Heyer, 32, who was killed on Aug. 11 when an Ohio man drove a car into a crowd, and Deandre Harris, 20, who was savagely beaten by white supremacists wielding poles.
An Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, has been charged with second-degree murder over Ms. Heyer’s death.
The committee urged that “all human rights violations which took place in Charlottesville, in particular with regards to the death of Ms. Heyer, are thoroughly investigated, alleged perpetrators prosecuted and if convicted, punished with sanctions commensurate with the gravity of the crime.”
The committee also called on the United States to identify and address the root causes of racism and to thoroughly investigate racial discrimination, in particular against people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants.
Although doing so is rare, this was not the first time the committee has invoked the urgent-warning procedures in response to events in the United States.
In 2006, it expressed concerns about the Western Shoshone, a Native American community that had filed a complaint against President George W. Bush’s administration as part of a long-running land dispute.
The United States helped set up the United Nations as World War II came to an end, but has had a fraught history with the multinational body. Before he became president, Mr. Trump dismissed the United Nations as “a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.”
