Fatou Bensouda Quotes

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.

If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Governments are mandated by international law to protect people from genocide.

The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don't know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.

Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations.

Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

There is no military government on earth that does not have human rights abuses.

The Syrian people deserve much more than complicit silence, or timid criticism from those who have failed to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court despite acknowledgement if its crimes.

Saddam Hussein is a serial offender -- major crimes against humanity - it's calculated that he's killed about a million people in the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait; gassed tens of thousands of his own Kurdish Iraqi citizens because they happen to disagree with him. Everyone knows that the case against Saddam Hussein is utterly proven. He should be on trial in the international court for crimes against humanity.

In reviewing United State compliance with the Convention Against Torture, a United Nations monitoring panel recently cited, among other American lapses, failure of the Obama Administration to investigate and hold parties accountable for past instances of torture. Such a lack of accountability is more than a treaty breach. It signals a dangerous permissiveness toward torture and cruelty practices in the future.

Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a friendship between nations.

The Human Rights Convention was written by Conservatives in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was designed to combat the risk of another Holocaust, and to try to stop people being sent to prison camps without trial.

I was employed as an investigator and my particular team, we were investigating the role of the business community in the genocide and we identified a bunch of leaders of the business community and I investigated two people.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable.

Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.

Saddam Hussein has openly admitted to the rest of the world that he had weapons of mass destruction. He used those weapons to kill his own people.

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

This is not to condone torture, which is still prohibited by the Torture Convention and federal criminal law.

I can tell you categorically that any mal-treatment of any detainees by U.S. forces or coalition forces is totally unacceptable - that our orders have and will continue to be that we will treat everyone in our charge with - humanely and with respect.

I believe the only time when we can call for intervention is when there is an ongoing genocide.

Saddam has committed many crimes against humanity and against his own people.

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.