Emily Thornberry Quotes

We need to scrap the Human Rights Act and need a balance between rights and responsibilities.

The Human Rights Act has not just given a voice to victims, but to the families who have to fight for the victim where the victim has died.

The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.

I'm a civil rights attorney. I'm a victim rights attorney.

It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad

The Bill of Rights is one of the greatest documents of freedom ever devised in human experience. It is of particular importance to those who have been the victims of oppression.

Any delay in action protecting constitutional rights is justice denied.

Before I became Attorney General, I won’t say that I stayed up at night worrying about civil rights

Constitutional rights must always come before sensitivities.

In the arguments in favor of a declaration of rights... one which has great weight with me is the legal check which it puts into the hands of the judiciary

There is only one rule of law in our country, which provides rights and security for every citizen.

We have a system of jurisprudence. You are innocent until proven guilty. You have a right to counsel. And you have a right to hospitalization if you are ill. That is our system. And it's what makes this country special and what makes this country great.

All victims deserve justice.

To draft a bill of rights that simply replicates the European convention on human rights gives the game away; namely that the Human Rights Act does, in fact, offer appropriate protection to all of our citizens according to universally accepted standards.

Human rights must be protected by the rule of law, and there can never be occasions where human rights can be neglected or ignored or the rule of law set aside.

Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.

For the common man the justice meted out in the lower courts is much more important than that meted out in the Supreme Court.

…when Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures.

If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.

China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice.

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

The Dutch public has always been accustomed to being treated according to the letter of the law.

The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic ….

Of course, the Supreme Court's work is vital not just to a region of the country, but to the whole, vital to the protection of the people's liberties under law and to the continuity of our Constitution, the greatest charter of human liberty the world has ever known.

There's nothing wrong with crooks having lawyers. Everyone is entitled to a lawyer.