Julius Maada Bio

"Maintaining international peace and security is a collective responsibility."

"The people of West Africa and the Sahel do not ask for pity; they ask for partnership."

"The threat of terrorism and violent extremism continues to outpace our collective response."

"When I took over, women were definitely at the edge. They did not have the necessary space. They did not have the necessary support. What I have done, apart from bringing a lot of women into governance, is to make sure that they feel a part of our development process, they feel a part of being Sierra Leonean. Rape was rampant. I declared a national emergency, and we have amended the Sexual Offenses Act. And now, the punitive measures are stricter. We've set up special courts for that. We have a special, one stop sentence to deal with rape and other issues."

"Talking about good governance definitely reminds me about transparency, accountability and making sure that we free up the political space so that all the political parties can freely partake in elections and the elections are credible. We have done quite a lot in that direction in the past three years. Today, we have removed the death penalty. It has been hanging in the law books and it's been used by several governments to take away the opposition, to threaten them, to silence them. For me, I have decided that that is a thing of the past. And I took that to the parliament of Sierra Leone, and it's off the law books today. The seditious libel law — this is a law that has been used to threaten journalists and a lot of them have been locked up. As I speak to you, that is also the thing of the past. If you check in our prisons today, there is no journalist in prison for practicing journalism."