Human Rights Activists

"I have obtained access to all of Stewart McDonald's emails, after approaching a number of people to find out who might have them. I had no hand in obtaining the emails nor prior knowledge. I am grateful they have been so generously shared."

"A conspiracy to attack the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps. If you think I was accusing them of being part of a conspiracy to kill Skripal, you are daft."

"Russia has developed an astonishing new technology enabling its secret agents to occupy precisely the same space at precisely the same time."

"This morning, lawyers are acting on my request to prepare a counsel's opinion on the legality of publishing those of Stewart MacDonald's emails which are in the public interest to be revealed. This may take a day or two."

"The problem with the world is there are conspiracies [...] The idea that they don't happen is ridiculous. As an ambassador I have seen the establishment from the inside, the workings of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 with millions in their budgets — what kind of things do you think they are doing? The hands of the British state are all over this. The roots of it were a political conspiracy against Alex Salmond, to destroy both his reputation and career, and why, because he was a threat to the British state, one of the biggest threats in 300 years who had taken the country to the brink of independence."

"I said this in my talk to Edinburgh SNP club on March 6 and repeated it on this blog last week. There is something delightfully old-fashioned about MI5. Is spraying Q for quisling not rather an obscure reference to today's generation?"

"While I am struggling to see a Russian motive for damaging its own international reputation so grievously, Israel has a clear motivation for damaging the Russian reputation."

"Blackburn was a very difficult place to campaign – 37% of votes were cast by postal ballot. It's a rotten borough and I don't come from the area and yet I secured 5% of the vote – which was second or third highest for an independent in the election"

"[Those who voted "no" in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum are] either evil, or quite extraordinarily thick."

"The only possible explanations are: 1. One of the two is travelling faster than Usain Bolt can sprint. 2. Scotland Yard has issued doctored CCTV images/timeline. I am going with the Met issuing doctored images."

"Remarkable correlation between Labour MPs who attacked Corbyn in EDM wanting no investigation into Salisbury before firmly attributing blame, and parliamentary Labour friends of Israel, I wonder why?"

"[Extract from a blog entry] I am standing to give the voters a chance to reject all the political parties and put an honest man into parliament. I will not put my snout in the trough. I have proved I am not motivated by money by giving up an extremely lucrative career as ambassador on principle, in opposition to our complicity in torture."

"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."

"So how will we do? Well, surprisingly well. There is real anger at the war. People don't like liars. And Straw is plainly very worried. Unlike previous elections, he has not been out to marginals to support other candidates. Rather Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and even the Iraqi deputy prime minister have been here to bolster him. Neither the Lib Dems nor the Tories see this as winnable; they have not brought in a single big hitter. Of whom is he scared? Me."

"[As the British Ambassador in Uzbekistan.] At the same time that I was receiving word from Uzbek citizens about the gruesome affronts to their humanity, I was also getting CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan, under the U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing agreement. This information — fed to the CIA by Karimov's security services — revealed the same pattern of information as those forced confessions. And it was a pattern that was false, often demonstrably so. One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah's Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty. The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem "in the context of the war on terror." (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity."

"Her body invited sex while her eyes screamed, 'Save me.'"

"One of our slogans has been "British Bulldog, not Bush's Poodle", which has the advantage of confusing people entirely about the political direction we are coming from. This at least gets them to open the leaflet and read more. It was devised by Edward, who used to work for Saatchi and Saatchi. He claims it appeals to both left and right. It could, of course, alienate both instead. I suppose we'll soon know."

"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."

"I'm an Anglo really, born in England, like Sandy Lyle and Rod Stewart [...] but my father came from this huge Edinburgh family. He was in the forces and was posted down to Norfolk, which is where he met my mum. I grew up down in Norfolk, but I went back up to - and always spent a lot of time in - Scotland."

"The Paston was an old-fashioned grammar [school] that was trying its best to be an independent school [...] It felt as if the teachers were still fighting the second world war, and once a week we were all made to dress up in military uniform and become cadets. Either I skipped school or refused to take part, so I was frequently suspended."

"[On his posting to Tashkent in Uzbekistan] Unless you've lived in a totalitarian state, it comes as a hell of a shock to see the sheer weight of the police presence. There are four policemen on every bloody street corner. There's 40,000 armed policemen in Tashkent city. There are about the same number of plain-clothes officers from the security services too. Effectively the leadership that was there when the Soviet Union existed is still in charge. They've replaced communist ideology with nationalist ideology whilst maintaining the same power structures."

"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."

"[On his early diplomatic career.] You have to realise I never set out to be a hero [...] I was never a great campaigner for human rights. In many ways, I'd always been just as compromised as any other diplomat. When I was working on the South African desk of the London office I had had to send out letters saying we believed that the African National Congress was a terrorist organisation. I didn't think that for a second and nor did anyone else I was working with, but we did it because it was the price of an impartial, depoliticised civil service. The closest I had ever got to any form of stand was by refusing to implement a government directive to persuade the Poles to reduce the size of the health warnings on cigarette packets to conform with EU law."

"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."

"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."

"“Many friends have expressed concern that a religious fanatic will try to kill me when I go to Africa. After all, I’ll be speaking out against a crime many fundamentalists consider a holy practice. I’m sure my work will be dangerous, and I admit to being scared…. But my faith tells me to be strong, that God led me down this path for a reason. He has work for me to do. This is my mission. And I believe that long before the day I was born, God chose the day I will die, so I can’t change that. In the meantime, I might as well take a chance, because that’s what I’ve done all my life.”"

"“nothing to be done, except go see them. I also knew they”"

"Every 11 seconds a little girl is being mutilated somewhere in the world, it has nothing to do with religion, culture or tradition but against all rights of humanity its a crime its cruel its unacceptable."

"I knew most married women in my community put up with everything and anything. Any abuse, hopelessness, and I thought, was I here to be used and be abused? I knew there was so much I could do with my life, but on my terms."

"I just knew that I had to tell the world that there was torture, an undercover war against women. But this is not one person's war – all of us have to do something."

"Women’s loyalty has to be earned with trust and affection, rather than barbaric rituals. The time has come to leave the old ways of suffering behind."

"What really made me take a stand was that nobody was doing anything."

"“My mother named me after a miracle of nature: Waris means desert flower. The desert flower blooms in a barren environment where few living things can survive.”"

"“I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?"

"“When I was a child I said I don't want to be a woman."

"Hope means believing in ourselves, in our capacity to lead, in our potential to make a better world, country, and planet for everyone."

"Colombia elects climate champions president Gustavo Petro and vice president Francia Márquez, pledging to put "the defense of life above the interests of economic capital.""

"The biggest obstacle we face is the fear people have about their freedom, the fear of deciding for themselves, the fear of joining a transformative force. We are overcoming that fear."

"We have spoken about building a program of employability with care. We must care for and restore our rivers, soils, rural and urban ecosystems, and care for people, children, and the elderly. Our economy is based on care, but we need to have the infrastructure for it; gardens, schools, colleges, parks, and sports arenas for children and recreational areas for the elderly population."

"A multimodal transportation revolution is required to decarbonize the economy. That means strengthening rail transportation, which Colombia abandoned as it surrendered to the vehicle and oil industries, naval transportation, cable transportation, and urban planning."

"Restructuring an anti-drug policy is a task for our nation and the region of Latin America. The “zero tolerance” policy to combat drug trafficking must end because it has failed. Complete criminalization has not diminished production, consumption, money laundering, or dismantled the political mafias that dominate our state, flooding the economy with illicit activity. We promote a social epidemiological approach to addictions, the regulation of the existing market, and the use of sacred plants for health and industry. We will embrace a new paradigm to face the phenomenon of the production, distribution, commercialization, and consumption of psychoactive substances since the current, stale paradigm lacks coherence, planning, and understanding of the problem."

"We want the peace we make to have opportunities for our economies so they can be strengthened by knowledge and productive applications based on our ecological and cultural diversity. This is so we can advance and transform global energy and decarbonize the planet."

"It is not enough to promote more jobs; there needs to be a guarantee of training, remuneration, and stability."

"In our campaign for the presidency, we have built a feminist mandate that seeks to put an end to patriarchal politics, guaranteeing gender equality for women and people with different sexual orientations and gender identities. Our objective is to implement an intersectional public policy that promises sexual and reproductive rights, eradicates all forms of gender-based violence, promotes equal opportunities, and recognizes and redistributes care work."

"We must dispel the myth that the main cause of violence is the “absence of the state.” On the contrary, in many territories where social leaders have been assassinated, the state, especially the armed forces, has been present defending the multinationals that extract our resources, carrying out forced eradication of crops, and displacing communities that are victims of the armed conflict. The elites have created this myth to avoid taking responsibility for the systematic violations of human rights."

"That is a history that is repeated day after day. Mothers go to work in the homes of other families, and they come home to bury their children. That is the history of our country."

"We’re tired of having to bury our family members and seeing women, mothers, burying their children. That is not just. We deserve a more dignified nation, a nation in peace, a nation with social justice, and an antiracist nation."

"Right now I’m here in the United States. And I know that the Black people here are assassinated, especially Black youth, in the same way as Black, impoverished Black youth, racialized impoverished Black youth, are assassinated in Colombia. Because of the color of our skin, they see us as criminals. But we are human beings. Our dignity must be respected and recognized."

"I have been proposing a program of agroecological productive projects and with the idea of food sovereignty being the top issue. There’s more than 21 million people in Colombia who don’t eat enough, who go to bed hungry every night."

"Humanity’s greatest challenge is to either work together to preserve this planet or destroy it. It’s up to us to assume our own responsibility and defend life. In Colombia, we’re creating campaigns to incentivize reforestation, as well as recycling. We want to raise awareness about the products that can be composted and how we re-use certain items. There is so much we can do."