Human Rights Activists

"our coastal location and low-lying land also makes the Gulf South ground zero for this nation's climate disasters."

"Here in the Gulf South, we know climate disaster. Hurricane Katrina changed my life. I moved back home, to Slidell, Louisiana, in 2006. I realized my community needed lawyers-someone to read all the papers a disaster creates. They were being asked, in the middle of trauma, to sign away their rights. I'm only the third lawyer to come from my community. So I read the papers, and I decided to stay."

"Our firsthand experiences in the Gulf South-Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida-affirm the call of scientists to rapidly address climate change and make frontline communities more resilient in the process."

"Policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions must also clean up the toxic lands left behind by oil and gas, with the same financial support and urgency. In this cleanup, and in every other aspect of the fair and just transition, the costs and burden must be paid by the industries that have polluted communities and deliberately deceived the public about the threat their operations pose to our climate."

"a constant reality of Gulf South life that may be invisible to many outsiders is the centrality of the military to our economy and culture. We must honor the historic significance of the military in Gulf South communities while transitioning investment away from the military and toward job creation in regenerative local economies."

"We’re going to lose everything, and my last name is Battle. What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to fight. I’m supposed to fight, but I’m supposed to fight with tools that build people up, not tools that take people down and take them out. And that’s love. That’s patience. That’s all of those things that they taught you in Sunday school. They were right."

"This is not about greenhouse gas reduction. This is about do we value people equally? And if we do, we’ve got some recalibrating to do, as a planet."

"It’s hard, living in this country and even the response to disaster or harm is to go purchase something. You know? That’s — we don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re so unconscious — we just do it unconsciously. We’re so wealthy — just go buy it. Just go take it. It’s yours to take. It takes a lot of courage to examine that, right, because we would have to examine our comfort. We would have to examine the things we worked all our lives to get — the standards. We have really harmful standards that are harming the planet — our standards. We are — as a country, as a nation, as a people who love comfort and love what we love and love our freedom — we are at the tip of the blame knife. And we are causing a lot of harm, and we’re not paying attention. We’re thinking about climate impacts as something that’s harming those poor people over there because they’re poor, or because they have a bad leader, or, you know — but that’s not what’s happening. Our consumption is causing this problem."

"We must subsidize healthy crops and farm biodiversity instead of monocultures. Our food system must be rooted in principles of community-based agroecology and food sovereignty."

"Without fundamental economic rebalancing in response to historic harm, the rights and dignity of black southerners will forever be unrealized. That's why the GND must be understood as a program of reparations for black people, including through land reform. Gulf South for a Green New Deal calls for the codification of the standards for reparations provided in the Vision for Black Lives platform, and we understand the need to draw connections between reparations in the US and climate reparations around the globe."

"Climate gentrification often happens in the aftermath of vlimate disaster...Rather than seeing displacement and migration as an opportunity for private sector profiteering, what if we saw it as an opportunity to rebuild a social infrastructure, rooted in justice and fairness? We could actually put money into schools and public hospitals and help these institutions prepare for what is to come through climate migration, including the trauma that comes with loss and relocation. We could combat climate gentrification by affirmatively furthering fair, affordable, and equitable housing linked to reliable public transportation. We could protect homeownership by providing material resources to families-especially in communities of color and among others who are vulnerable-for elevating and flood-proofing homes."

"The ocean commons belong to us all. A Blue New Deal must end attempts to industrialize the ocean through factory fish farms and large-scale aquaculture."

"I can’t believe that it is the U.S. government — it’s our government, it’s our representatives, under every administration in these international talks — that are stopping the conversation that says: finance the work needed for the people who are feeling the impacts of climate; finance that, because you caused it. It’s our country saying no. That, to me, is like, come on now. We’re better than that. This is lives we’re talking about. This is mass migration. This is people’s lives. This is heat deaths. This is fires. This is storms. Put everything into this. We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to vote? We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to their bodies? That is child’s play compared to what this climate crisis is. Where is the righteous indignation on this issue? And why can’t we get past that?"

"it was the most honest answer I’d ever gotten."

"And that was a moment where you sort of have this — it’s surreal. You don’t — who can believe your land won’t be there anymore? Most people still can’t conceptually understand that."

"I don’t have this law degree for nothing. And the laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they’re not meant for my community, and they’re not meant to help people, and they’re not meant to save people, and they’re not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have. How does this affect the taxpayer? is the analysis that is used."

"now the land is perpetually saturated, because the water is rising, the water table is rising, the lake is rising"

"the sea level rise is real, and for those of us who are very close to the sea, we can see it."

"there are bad people in this world, but mostly, there are just people who don’t know."

"if we believe in luck, then there’s some responsibility that goes with that. If we’re lucky enough to live in this country and to have what we have, then we don’t just get to recycle and feel better about ourselves. It’s time to show up at the hard places, right? Everybody else is waiting for us to admit that we are the engine of the harm. And so that takes courage. I mean, you know, who wants to admit that about themselves? It is courage, you know? We don’t like to look in the mirror. That stuff takes courage. I fight with those things all the time; like, what’s the line between the blame that stops you from action and the acknowledgement that catapults you to do the right thing? You’ve got to practice that. You’ve got to practice that one every day, or else — and you can’t be mad at people, because there’s a journey. I used to get very mad at people...I mean, you know, the amount of patience it takes for middle-class white folks to understand the plight of brown people in this country is just, like, how much longer do you need me to sit here and be nice about this? At some point, it feels like you’re not listening to me. And now that’s just disrespectful, which we don’t do in the South, because disrespect is a — that’s a line. So the courage is something to practice, and patience is, too. But we are facing a crisis that we have maybe seven years at most to make some corrections on, so we’ve all got to get to that a little quicker."

"we’re going to need that level of creativity to get out of this thing, and I am hopeful that the next generation, that has a lot of challenges, also has enough creativity to get out of it, to get to the next level."

"I’ve learned that even people who are — who see the world differently from you, they love something. And if we take the time to share what we love with one another, we can see each other’s humanity, and we can feel each other’s value. And if we can connect in a real way, that’s what we need to accompany each other, because some of what is going to be asked is that you just let me be. You know. As relocation and all of this stuff happens, some people are going to choose something other than what you would choose."

"it was a moment for me that I understood, well, I have a purpose here. We’ve got to change these laws. We’ve got to change the society. It is the structures that we are living in that is the problem. I am not talking about you liking me, or me liking you, anymore. We’re now going to talk about, does this work for the least of us, which goes back to that very Catholic upbringing...That’s what I learned. That’s who we’re supposed to care about. That’s who we’re supposed to take the time to make things work for."

"the structures and the laws of our country do not work for the least of us. In fact, they create and marginalize people. They create vulnerability, and then we blame people for that vulnerability by saying something about their own individual acts. What we witnessed in Katrina was not a series of poor choices by individuals. We witnessed the breakdown of a system, or: we witnessed a system working the way it was designed to work."

"people ask me all the time, if you know your land is going to go, why are you still fighting?...I don’t know what they’re expecting, you know? We going down swinging if we going."

"I started reading Red Cross papers and FEMA paperwork, and I’m thinking to myself, I’m a lawyer and I can’t understand this stuff. How can regular folks understand what they’re signing? And they were signing their life away. They were signing their property. They were signing, you know, to receive dollars that then got them into lawsuits with the federal government because they didn’t spend them the right way. You know, no one’s telling them what to do, they’re just telling them to sign the paperwork. And this got to understanding what happens when you don’t invest in your education system, what happens when the rest of the nation allows for the South’s education system to go to those low levels. It means, in disaster, people don’t understand the paperwork that they’re signing or the implications behind them. And oh, by the way, neither did the lawyer. Like, I had to like, break that stuff down and read it, too."

"that land, for people like me, was tied to our freedom. You know, that land, the land and the right to be there was tied to — it was the difference between being enslaved and not. It was — it is a culture that has birthed a lot of people. And to lose that — it felt in that moment that we would lose everything."

"You know, we in this country, we all have this starting point of our own struggle, our own existence. And so equitable disaster recovery means you have to acknowledge the past in your action, for the moment and for the future. This is about repair, it’s not just about response. And we in this country have a real problem with that part, right, because blame, for us, is shameful. Responsibility is shameful. But we’re all responsible. If we’re maintaining this system, we are all responsible for the inequities, and therefore, we are all responsible for solutions that are equitable. And it means we have to start at those places that we have created vulnerabilities in, and then go from there. We have enough resources to help everybody. This is about where you start."

"Love leads to joy...The joy comes from love. To combat this thing, to combat the oil industry’s fear of losing profit, I have got to help to bring joy of the community’s love of everything that they are."

"to really, really admit that you understand what is happening to the planet, it will break your heart. If you don’t cry deep, hard tears for the state of this planet and all of the people on it, you don’t yet understand the problem. And so once you get to that place, the only thing that can bring you out of that kind of darkness is belief in something greater than yourself."

"there are all of these researchers who were looking at South Louisiana before Katrina, many people concerned about sea level rise and all of these things for a very long time, but it wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t information brought to the communities. The universities knew it, but the communities didn’t know."

"Living without freedom is so deeply corrosive not only to society but to the human spirit. In a certain sense, I am multi-cultural, but I am not culturally relative."

"Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; Parliament is not subject to democratic election and checks and balances on the authority of the electorate are lacking. There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection."

"There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection."

"The next morning brings good news. The two shops I specified are both available. They both belong to the local brewer, Thwaites. The one I choose has two pubs to its immediate right and one to its left. Only one of them is a going concern. This is one of Blackburn's most striking features. It has an astonishing number of ex-pubs. Some have been converted to other uses, but many more are derelict. I wonder why there were so many and what factors caused this cull. Something else I have yet to learn. I return to London to find messages waiting from Martin Bell and Brian Eno; both want to help my campaign. Then I receive news from the estate agent. Thwaites has decided it will not let me rent any of its property in Blackburn. Its directors feel it would not be in the company's interests to allow its premises to be used to campaign against Jack Straw."

"The Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content. During the dispute he panned one of his superiors in the FCO's eastern department, for questioning whether the number of political prisoners in Uzbekistan had increased. According to a British official familiar with the correspondence, he wrote: "I understand that you might find this fact politically inconvenient. If you wish me to omit it, then say so. But don't pretend it isn't true." He attacked his superior for his "sadly cautious and above all completely unimaginative" censures, and attacked the "classic public school and Oxbridge influenced FCO house style", as "ponderous, self-important and ineffective". The speech began to take on a life of its own. Kofi Annan raised its contents during a meeting with Uzbekistani president Islam Karimov. It became a serious thorn in Tashkent's - and Washington's - side. Murray's confrontational style pressed it further into the flesh. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he could not contain his fury at the "double standards" being practised by Washington. He wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched [[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] talk of "dismantling the apparatus of terror" and "removing the torture and rape rooms" in Iraq, pointing out that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora ... I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.""

"I can say from my own dealings with Murray that he is an approachable and compassionate man, who has become a hero in Uzbekistan. Two colleagues from PEN, the writers' organisation whose Writers in Prison Committee I chair, have just returned from Tashkent full of praise for him, describing how he has become virtually the only source of assistance for desperate families whose relatives have been tortured or disappeared."

"[First sentence refers to George Galloway] At least the Respect MP refrained from naming Assange's alleged victims. No such restraint for Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, who denounced one of them by name on Newsnight, violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy."

"[Murray seems] to find it difficult to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact."

"[The then Nadira Alieva] The next day she was walking past a nightclub and saw an advert saying "dancers needed". "It was basically a brothel," she said. But she was earning £150 a month. Then, one April night in 2003, Murray walked in. "It was my turn to dance and I could see this man, very English-looking, with a half-smile, looking at me," she said. "He wasn't sporty-looking or handsome and I wasn't interested. I just wanted my tip. But the manager said you mustn't refuse him, he's the richest man in the place." After chatting for a while, Murray suggested that she quit the club and become his mistress. "I told him, 'You're not the first to offer', and I left." The next time Murray returned to the club, it was Alieva's day off so he gave another girl £50 for her phone number. Flattered, she agreed to a date. Although she knew Murray was married, they were soon an item. "I'd gone out with diplomats before but Craig was different," she said. "He'd take me to official dinners and parties and introduce me to people. People were shocked as they knew I was a dancer but he didn't care.""

"The petitioner deliberately set out to publish information likely to lead to the identification of the complainers and did so [from paragraph 80 of the original source]."

"The petitioner [Murray] is an intelligent person whose actions were deliberate and calculated. They clearly showed contempt for the court's order and for the rule of law. They created serious risks for the complainers' mental and physical health [from paragraph 82 of the original source]."

"The revelation of the identities of the complainers would be likely to result in considerable abuse and harassment (particularly on social media) against them. There was a real danger that they would be physically harmed [from paragraph 57 of the original source]."

"In the Salisbury case, as Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan has shown, the government initially relied on a phrase that they thought could be defended as true but which was intended to cultivate a deception. This is that the nerve agent involved in the case is of "a type developed by Russia" ... The deception was spectacularly successful. The entire mainstream media went along with it. Embarrassingly, many mainstream journalists deluged Craig Murray with abuse and ridicule for raising modest questions about the government narrative."

"I didn't really volunteer to fight the British police state, it came after me. But here we are, and here I am, in Switzerland seeking the protection of the United Nations."

"This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism."

"My experience of British airports being discouraging recently, I went by public transport from Edinburgh to Belfast. Arriving very late in Belfast due to the storm, I missed the last train to Dublin. Not wanting to stay in Belfast, I flagged down a taxi in the street and asked the driver to take me to Dublin. He did not wish to, so late at night. Then we realised we had worked in the same bar in Aviemore 45 years ago. I have always believed life is governed by forces we do not know."

"In reply, I said to them, "When you’re speaking at a big demonstration, like a Stop the War demonstration, it's impossible to know who the others are and often these things go on for hours and personally I don't ever tend to stay around much, I just tend to make my speech and leave." But if they're people I know, like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or Stop the War, then I trust them as a sensible organisation in terms of who they invite."

"I came back from Reykjavik on Monday morning [16 October] and I was detained at Glasgow Airport by the police after I came through passport control. They took me into a wee room and they said that I was detained under the Terrorism Act, which was an extraordinary thing."

"The whole thing's extraordinary, I don't think anybody can seriously believe I have any connection to terrorism of any kind."