Adam Schiff Quotes

The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history's worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.

I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture … and we are leading this fight by example.

What the hell is happening to the world when those who were at the origin of... international humanitarian law start questioning in public debates whether it has any relevance or should be respected?

At Al Jazeera, the first story I did was to sit down with a former Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, and grill him about crimes against humanity. Al Jazeera is giving me the opportunity to tell important stories and stories that I want to tell.

I care about people's human rights and, as a country, we have a very proud record indeed. But I'm also realistic about what we can do... we can raise those issues with leaders and we can talk about those issues, and we do that.

The war against terrorism is a war against those who engage in torture.

So I've gone in and out of the U.N., working on counter-terrorism, on U.N. reform, on peacekeeping, peace and security issues, many things through the years but always with a strong interest in humanitarian issues, and human rights issues as well.

As Brian Urquhart has said quite correctly, I don't think that individual countries in the international community can stand aside and let all of these slaughters continue without doing anything.

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.

Under the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the United States has given up the moral high ground that we used to occupy as an international leader.

As a consequence of these hesitations and of the vague character of such innovations, the Commission on Human Rights itself had doubts from the beginning about its role and its functions in general.

For more than two centuries since winning our own freedom, we the people of the United States have repeatedly answered the call to lead the quest for freedom around the globe.

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

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights.

We will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can made the most useful.

Human rights enforcement at the international level needs to be handled in a manner similar to the treatment of military aggression under a collective security regime. The violation of human rights in one state must be considered the concern of all, and enforcement mechanisms must provide for a unified response on the part of the entire international community.

It is necessary to take the further step of using the right to intervention as a preventive measure, to stop wars before they start and to stop murderers before they kill ... We knew what was likely to happen in Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo long before they exploded into war. But we didn’t act. If these experiences have taught us anything, it is that the time for a decisive evolution in international consciousness has arrived.

The greatest gain of this conflict between Democracy and Fascism lies in the fact that it has drawn together everything that was good in humanity. The unity of the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain is the best guarantee to the peoples of the world that Nazi horrors will never again be repeated.

Armenians, as a people that have survived the Genocide, have a moral duty towards mankind and history in the prevention of genocides. We have done and will continue to do our best to support the persistent implementation of the Genocide Convention. Genocide cannot concern only one people, because it is a crime against humanity.

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.

War is inevitable, and this time, it will be truly world wide. It will unravel everywhere and there will be no limit to its battlefields. The condemnations of Nuremberg will be one of the main reasons, which will cause this war to be a conflict whose horror will be unparalleled. These condemnations gave birth, in fact, to a new conception which makes the victor a hero and the vanquished an odious criminal. By this fact, each leader will wage war like a demon in order not to be the loser and become, consequently, a criminal.

… all governments have the moral duty to do everything possible to ensure humanitarian assistance to those suffering because of … conflict, both within and beyond the country’s borders.

China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the U.N. Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights.

We tend to think of World War II and all the atrocities that happened, and people say, 'Never again.' But these things are still happening. The Amnesty International files are big.