Samantha Power Quotes

Nations have lost their traditional exclusive jurisdiction over their treatment of their citizens.

Preserving peace does not always coincide with the promotion of human rights.

The world is full of nations that are part of the community of nations that don't respect rights.

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

The U.S.-led western alliance, while acting as an advocate of democracy, rule of law and human rights, is acting from the opposite position, rejecting the democratic principle of the sovereign right of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for others what is good and what is bad.

I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms.

Nothing in the constitutions of Western states requires them to get involved in every foreign conflict.

Every government is in some respects a problem for every other government.

Foreign policy begins with domestic policy.

The sovereignty of states is a fairly archaic notion. If the rulers abuse their power and the people, what do you do then. The must be an international duty to protect.

There is an urgent necessity that our system of international law not allow heads of state to violate the fundamental rights of their citizens or their neighbor with impunity. But a consistently amoral U. S. foreign policy has made this necessity all the more difficult to address.

The way governments treat their own citizens matters; it matters because it can have a direct impact on international peace and security - and on our respective national security interests.

It is both wrong and short-sighted to believe that we can better protect our national security interests by ignoring or sidelining human rights.

The 'responsibility to protect' is a very important concept.

Like other countries in the world, China must uphold its own sovereignty, territorial integrity and development interests. At the same time, we are willing to properly handle differences and disagreements in state-to-state relations.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.

Every state has not only the right but the duty to make adequate provision for its own defense in the way it thinks best, providing it does not do so at the expense of any other state.

The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests.

There is a movement to get an international criminal court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states-but with the noticeable absence of the United States of America.

President Obama, like every other leader on Earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don't cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.

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

I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.