Delegation to travel to Geneva to tell human rights council that attempt is being made to restrict black and Latino right to vote

The leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, will travel to Geneva next week to tell the UN human rights council that a co-ordinated legislative attempt is being made by states across America to disfranchise millions of black and Latino voters in November's presidential election.

The delegation, headed by the NAACP's president, Benjamin Jealous, will address the council on Wednesday and call on the UN body to launch a formal investigation into the spread of restrictive electoral laws, particularly in southern states. The NAACP intends to invite a UN team to travel across America to see for itself the impact of the new laws, which it argues are consciously designed to suppress minority voting.

The UN has no power to intervene in the workings of individual American states. But Jealous told the Guardian that the UN had a powerful weapon in its armoury: shame.

"Shame alone is effective. The US, and individual states within the US that have introduced these laws, have a vested interest in maintaining the opinion that we are the world's leading democracy. That means something," Jealous said.

In the NAACP's view, the voting rights of black and other minority groups are under more threat from laws restricting their participation at the ballot box than at any time since the segregationist days of Jim Crow.

A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that since last year more than 5 million eligible voters had had their right to vote stripped from them.

There are already 19 new laws on the books in 14 different states, which between them account for 63% of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the US presidential race in November. Some laws involve a requirement to show photo identification in polling stations – disproportionately hitting black and elderly people, who often do not have such ID.

Other laws have cut back on early voting schemes, heavily used by ethnic minority and older people, and still others disfranchise former convicted prisoners, even in some cases years after their sentences were completed.

The NAACP delegation to Geneva comes in the wake of a march that is under way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to mark the 47th anniversary of the famous civil rights march. The marchers, sponsored in part by the Service Employees International Union, have followed Highway 80 – as did the campaigners in 1965 – and arrived in Montgomery on Thursday night and will stage a rally at the state capitol on Friday. The purpose is partly commemorative, to recall the events of 7 March 1965, when about 600 civil rights campaigners were attacked by police on so-called "Bloody Sunday" as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

But this year the commemoration has acquired a distinct contemporary poignancy as a result of the plethora of voter ID laws that have been introduced over the past year, as well as the anti-immigration laws that have spread across several states, including Alabama's own HB56.

The immigration laws require local police forces to arrest anyone they suspect of being unlawful immigrants in an attempt to force undocumented Hispanics to quit the country. Alabama's HB56 is considered the most swingeing.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order today temporarily halting two sections of the bill. But if fully implemented they would make companies that employ undocumented workers liable to punishment, cut off undocumented families from public utilities such as water supplies, and oblige teachers to investigate the status of their pupils.

The encroachment of two such controversial sets of laws across a growing number of states has brought African American and Latino activists together on the Selma-Montgomery march. The union was symbolised in posters carried by the marchers proclaiming: "I have a dream – say no to HB56."

Theodore Branch, 74, one of the original Selma marchers in 1965, was marching again. He said the rise of the new voter ID laws "just carry me back to 1964. They are trying to take the rights away from us again – hell, they don't want blacks or Asians voting."

Kemba Smith will be among the NAACP delegation to Geneva next week. Smith will not be allowed to vote in November's presidential election under a Virginia law that disfranchises anyone convicted of a felony.

Smith was released and granted clemency by President Clinton in 2001 on her 24-year sentence. Clinton was struck by the fact that Smith was convicted for the drug trafficking of her then crack-addicted boyfriend, even though prosecutors acknowledged that she herself had never sold, handled or used any drugs.

The law under which she is still disfranchised today was passed by a Virginia state convention in 1901. One of the attendants told the convention at the time that it would "eliminate the darkie as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county … will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government."