Mary Robinson Quotes
The term 'human rights' has been too often associated with conditionality, and with concerns of developing countries that in order to benefit from open trade they would be required to implement immediately labour and environmental standards of a comparable level to those applied in industrialised countries. At the same time, debates about the primacy of trade as against human rights legal codes have contributed to maintaining the unfortunate impression that the two bodies of law are pursuing incompatible aims.
Robinson, Mary. A Voice for Human Rights. Edited by Kevin Boyle, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson is an Irish independent politician who served as the seventh President of Ireland from December 1990 to September 1997, becoming the first woman to hold this office. She also served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002 and a Senator for the University of Dublin from 1969 to 1989. She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister and campaigner. She defeated the Fianna Fáil party's Brian Lenihan and the Fine Gael party's Austin Currie in the 1990 presidential election, becoming the first Independent candidate nominated by the Labour Party, the Workers' Party and Independent Senators. She was the first elected President in the office's history not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil.