Emily Thornberry Quotes

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.

I'd personally like to see the Human Rights Act go because I think we have had some problems with it.

While scrapping the HRA would severely curtail people's ability to seek legal redress in U.K. courts for violations of their fundamental rights, the Tories' threat to withdraw the U.K. from the ECHR are far more frightening.

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

It was in that uncertain world that the European Convention on Human Rights was shaped. Written by Conservatives, it set out the principles which should lie behind a modern democratic state, where human rights were respected.

Strip away the factual misinformation repeatedly peddled about the Human Rights Act and almost everyone acknowledges that it works well in practice. Police up and down the country have found the Human Rights Act a much clearer and firmer basis for practical policing than the common law ever was.

The key to understanding the impact of the Human Rights Act in the U.K. is to appreciate that civil liberties and human rights are not two sides of the same coin.

The Human Rights Act is not a terrorists' charter. It enables ordinary citizens to seek redress when the government breaches fundamental freedoms enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights such as the right to a fair trial, the right to life and free expression.

From my experience both as DPP and previously as a human rights lawyer, I know that human rights and effective protection from terrorism are not incompatible. On the contrary, they go hand in hand.

We need to curtail the role of the European Court of Human Rights in the U.K.

The implementation measures of both Covenants, but especially those of the Covenant concerning civil and political rights, were considerably weakened to the point where they assumed an optional character.

We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act... about the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because, and I am not making this up, he had a pet cat.

If we destroy human rights and rule of law in the response to terrorism, they have won.

We also intend to deal with the issue of incorporating basic human rights into our new constitution.

… the international Magna Carta of all mankind

It is my sincere opinion that the Constitution ought to be revised, and that the first Congress meeting under it, ought to prepare and recommend to the States for ratification, the most satisfactory provisions for all essential rights …

I refuse to allow human rights to become a slogan to protect terrorists.

The Americans are out, and as far as I’m concerned, in Rwanda, that ought to be the end of it.

Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.

Global human rights law prescribes global norms of conduct. It leaves the question of how to enforce these norms to the countries themselves.

The classic Human Rights Watch strategy of “naming and shaming” rights abusers is irrelevant in cases where, for example, the imposition of sharia law is considered desirable by those who must be shamed for change to happen.

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.

Stability is a reasonable foreign policy goal, but not at the expense of human rights.

We have laws against torture. The Constitution says nothing whatever about torture. It speaks of punishment; 'cruel and unusual' punishments are forbidden.

What I'm trying to bring attention to is that human rights is a big important part of how to prevent conflict in the first place if we focus on how the governments are treating their people.