Human Rights Activists

"As women we may not be a minority, but there is a bond that we all share."

"The ultimate prize in the fight for freedom for my country is death. Many have been murdered. Many have disappeared and we don't know where they are. So the ultimate prize is death."

"It is not a bond of geography. Or religion. Or culture. It is a bond of shared experience — experiences that only women go through, and struggles that only women face."

"Motherhood is important for me because everything I do is about creating a better legacy for my children."

"We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier… while Israel is the only country that calls for defence from its victims."

"In Madrid, Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi and I also sparred it out in endless television appearances that were broadcast around he world. She was a worthy opponent."

"Thirty years later, she resigned from her position in the Palestinian Authority, explaining that "it's not a question of peace,. It's a question of democratization. It's a question of good governance." Complaining that there had been no Palestinian elections for more than fifteen years, she vowed, "I won't be part of it anymore". The Palestinian Authority was a morally bankrupt tyranny, but at the time she spoke passionately of its sincere desire to advance peace, as opposed to Israel, represented by me, which obstructed peace."

"“They will say, ‘We did this because we believed in it, but now we want to encourage girls to go back to school,”"

"Was when I was eight years old, my sister and I ran away at four a.m. and hid in a tree to escape from the cut. The next day I went to him, my grandfather was the first person who I could convince that the cut was not necessary, and was the first person who listened to me. He changed my life, and that’s why today I am the woman of my dreams. Thank you"

"And once they see these videos, that's when they see the pain that these girls undergo, and that's when they say: 'I will not allow my daughter, or I will not allow my sister to undergo the same"

"And the second toast is to my elder sister, Soila, she was with me the first time I ran away, but the next time I escaped, she gave up because of the beatings we received from our family members. She was first one that got the cut at the age of ten, and since that was the only way she will be considered a woman in my own community, and that’s why I do this work today because of the sacrifice she made for me then"

"“This is about the countless girls, women, boys, men, and elders all over Kenya and Africa who dare today are working to bring female genital mutilation and child marriage to an end,”"

"Remember, they don't know how circumcision is done for girls or women, because they are not allowed to be there. ... They don't know where it's cut, or what is being done to them"

"We are simply saying let's retain the good part of our culture, because we have so much that is good in our culture that we don't have to do away with"

"In the whole process of circumcision, what we hate is the cut. All the rituals, blessings from cultural leaders, people dressing in their traditional clothes as dancing and singing our beautiful songs — it's not harmful. It's good"

"Amelina put her commitment to her country and its most vulnerable people ahead of her personal safety, training to gather evidence of [alleged] war crimes that could be used in future prosecutions."

"Her work included unearthing the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow writer who was illegally detained and killed by Russian soldiers in the city of Izium in early 2022. The diary, which was buried in his garden, served as a real-time document of Russian atrocities."

"To investigate [alleged] war crimes, Victoria had joined an organisation called Truth Hounds, acquired a flak jacket, helmet and camera and started travelling to places from which the Russians had been driven out."

"Terrified that the pages of the diary [of Volodymyr Vakulenko] were wet and might not survive, she gave it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum. That experience led her to focus on what she called "cultural war crimes". On her phone she showed me photos of bullet holes in library walls in Kherson. "It's important to see for yourself and write down the stories," she said. "The way you see it from afar is very different to on the ground.""

"She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting [alleged] war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline."

"As for me, I don't hate Russians at all; I'm so exhausted by the war they have waged on us that I cannot feel anything. I am numb. There’s a beautiful song by the Ukrainian band Kozak System, a wartime song with many profanities but no hatred. It starts like this: "Our national idea— fuck the hell off!""

"[The changing borders of Ukraine during the Soviet period] Under any [totalitarian] regime you get used to it, and you more than cooperate. You become part of this regime. In my novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom, I used the story of my grandfather. He was a Soviet military pilot. He became part of the Soviet regime. But he was from the east of Ukraine, where the Holodomor [now recognised in Ukraine as an act of genocide] occurred. His family were victims of the that man-made famine, and he had terrible memories about that. I also remember my grandfather explaining to me the fear he felt if the Soviet army could potentially send him to Czechoslovakia in 1968. But regimes force people to do terrible things. As a Ukrainian I felt there was something wrong with that, and I should be somehow even ashamed. This is not what is happening in Russia today. There is no shame."

"I know a little bit too much as I was brought up to be Russian: I attended a Russian school in Lviv, a Russian Orthodox church, a teens’ summer camp in Russia, etc. When I was 15, I was even chosen to go to Moscow to represent my city at the international Russian language contest. Hopefully, I turned out to be a terrible investment for Russia."

"So maybe it is time to shift the debate from whether the world should 'forgive' Russian imperial art and literature, to how to prevent one of Europe’s cultures from becoming another Executed Renaissance. I was never a fan of Cancel Culture. But maybe the Execute Culture that Russians have repeatedly practiced on free Ukrainians is something the world would like to stop before it’s too late again."

"Often we succeed, but not always. As I write this, on my way to Izyum to document war crimes, the occupiers may well be destroying the evidence of genocide in Mariupol. Despite all our efforts, too many stories will never be known. As a human rights activist, I document war crimes and advocate for justice. Yet, as a writer, I know there are wounds only stories can heal."

"[On being chosen to represent Lviv in a Russian language contest aged 15] At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the "former Soviet republics" as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn't need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to the Red Square. Hopefully I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments of the Russian Federation."

"It's me in this picture, I'm a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets on my bag. I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son. But I document Russia's war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems. Why?"

"The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbors who died instead of you a couple of miles away [..] Still, I want to not forget to learn the names."

"We should talk about reconciliation and forgiveness, of course. But, before talking about it to Ukrainians, it’s crucial to let Russians know that they have to do lots of work on their end. So I’d rather postpone the discussion until one side is not being bombed by the other."

"Має бути саме внутрішня готовність жити текстами, перетворювати себе на тексти, писати навіть тоді, коли ніхто не читатиме. У цьому не може відмовити жоден видавець. Якщо література – ваш спосіб взаємодії зі світом, то ставатимуться дива."

"Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs. For me, it would mean the majority of my friends get killed. For an average westerner, it would only mean never seeing their paintings, never hearing them read their poems, or never reading the novels that they have yet to write."

"As females, we are under constant social and cultural surveillance. We are told that we belong to everybody else except to ourselves. This is the foundation of hetero normativity, and too many women have accepted this fraud."

"When you are born, you arrive on this planet with everything you need. It is inside you, you just have to explore it and bring it to the collective human project of freedom."

"All humans have the capacity to experience pleasure, we have to understand its political significance and meanings. That is a feminist insight which we must return to, because in these contemporary societies that we live in, our bodies, our ideas, ourselves can become so easily commodified through the idea of pleasure as something that is for sale."

"What were called “alternatives to capitalism”, like socialism, communism, and other expressions of egalitarianism were largely crafted, imagined and framed by males. We must bring our feminism to the alternative, with all its different energies and expressions not only of resisting patriarchy, but also of celebrating who we are and who we want to become as women."

"Contemporarity is about situating yourself in the new possibilities and opportunities that our world is offering us, based on the many struggles that women have engaged in since the dawn of patriarchal time. We cannot be told by the UN or by those who occupy the state, who we are and what our feminism is."

"This crisis of black survival is directly linked to the predation of big international pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations, which are mining the Black female body. We have become the latest and last capitalist frontier."

"We need to think about globalization as being much more than structural adjustment policies by the World Bank, or the economic policies of the IMF which have devastated so many societies and lives; or just the financial infrastructure through which life becomes financialized on behalf of speculative capital which currently rules the world; the markets and all that."

"Whites who continue to benefit from racism as institutionalized privilege don’t call themselves white Africans, but call us Black Africans. It’s so astounding the ways in which neoliberalism depoliticizes and erases our histories of resistance. It disowns us from the legacies that we should be protecting and mobilizing with to continue the struggle."

"Feminists always create new languages. The normative language is inadequate to say what we want to say and to do what we want to do."

"Feminism is so powerful: because it is not an event that is just emerging now. It is embedded in the oldest memories of human consciousness about freedom. We are born with this instinct to be free and then begin the struggle to resist the attempts to appropriate our freedom, which we experience through the marking of our bodies and the commodification of our bodies."

"We can breed, we can labor, we are creative, we are the first mathematicians, the first scientists, the first agriculturalists, we are a treasure trove. In the moment of male awareness about how amazing and central women are in the creation of surplus and the re-creation of human productivity, then arises the notion of power, exercised through the ownership of women’s bodies."

"All nationalisms are expressions of ideology that brings large numbers of people together to resist oppressive, dominant, intrusive systems."

"The whole idea of buying and selling Africans was a brutal exercise in dehumanizing us, and the societies that benefitted from this brutality have remained essentially slaving societies. Africans everywhere held onto the ancestral spiritual traditions and practices of humanism within the self and community – and the ties with those who came before – so as to survive the brutality of hatred."

"White people have to give up their race privilege. Otherwise, Black people will have to continue fighting racism, which is really a distraction from the crucial healing and recovery work that we need to do among and inside ourselves."

"When we fight racism, we create spaces which are quickly occupied by white people, because they are still not giving up their privilege."

"As radical women we all come from traditions that minimize the individual because we understand that capitalism focuses on the individual, greed and accumulation."

"It’s about harnessing the power we all have within us and begin to practise moving that power. It’s about seeing the dignity in others and [seeing how] the quality of what we create together becomes substantially different"

"This is where depression regularly ends in suicide and there is no place to run for women, girls, transgendered and gender non-conforming people"

"God is male – male is god’ is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Those taught to be subordinate are female and those taught to expect subordination are male. The world order mirrors apartheid and has deepened inequality and poverty. Economic, military and religious fundamentalism have increased vulnerability to misogyny, and rape and sexual abuse will affect an estimated one billion women and girls over their lifetimes"