Peter Maurer Quotes

The principal cause of suffering during humanitarian crises is insufficient respect of applicable rules of international humanitarian law.

I think we are challenged in how we define humanitarian action today and how we relate to long-term needs. We are also confronted with legitimate expectations from the people who want us to respond far more thoroughly to their basic pleas than we would have done in a much more contained form of conflict.

The International Committee of the Red Cross visits roughly half a million detainees in nearly 100 countries each year. It's our job to try to prevent and put an end to torture and ill-treatment.

Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.

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.

I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.

If there's a clear genocide somewhere, don't we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn't that what we're all about? Isn't that what we've always been about?

We can make a difference. We can save lives. We can stop the genocide.

The U.N.'s humanitarian agencies rely on charitable donations from the public as well as the generosity of governments to continue their lifesaving work in response to natural disasters, armed conflicts and other emergencies.

The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.

If we don't like the Human Rights Council, then let's not fund it. We should pick and choose cafeteria style which groups we want to help.

Mass killing has very clearly not been eliminated, nor has the 'international community' developed a response that will avert it or bring it to a quick end.

Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.

I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and to relieve the nation from the terrible distress with which it is burdened.

The first law of disaster relief could well read: every political decision has humanitarian consequences, and every humanitarian program has political implications.

Two contractors were paid $80 million to conduct this torture.

There is never a humanitarian solution for a humanitarian crisis. The solutions for the humanitarian crisis are always political ones.

Well, human security is a concept that I am very committed to enshrining in American foreign policy.

While conflicts have expanded and deepened and transformed, actors have transformed, and humanitarian assistance is transforming. Protection work is transforming and taking on another character.

Not enough countries, not enough armies, not enough armed groups are abiding by the fundamental human values enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.

The E.U. intends to be one of the biggest humanitarian donors on the Syrian crisis.

As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.

We need to continue to modernise current humanitarian work while at the same time drive a more systemic shift in how we envision the operation and financing of humanitarian solutions.

We need to be able to demonstrate that what we do in today's world, in humanitarian aid, the enormous effort to minimize the tragic situations that we see all over the world, I think, without the U.N., people would suffer much more, and the situation would be much more terrible.

The humanitarian ecosystem is diverse - not only is there a variety of traditional humanitarian actors, but the system should also embrace an increasing diversity of private sector actors.