Ahmet Gorekci Quotes

Open your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government.

The government that has imprisoned more journalists than any other in the world was democratically elected.

If we set the precedent that a government can use their royal prerogative to take away people's human rights, that is taking us into a very dangerous political environment.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

Governments that block the aspirations of their people, that steal or are corrupt, that oppress and torture or that deny freedom of expression and human rights should bear in mind that they will find it increasingly hard to escape the judgement of their own people, or where warranted, the reach of international law.

The raids on Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute, the Adenauer Foundation, and other groups helping Egyptians move toward respect for democratic politics and human rights were of a piece with the practices of Hosni Mubarak - only bolder and more repressive.

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

We must not allow the practices of an anti-democratic State that abuses the powers of government to violate the human rights of Venezuelans.

Our arguments - and those of hundreds more Venezuelans suffering the same injustice - are clear and forceful: political disqualification violates laws in Venezuela and throughout the continent.

But if Russia is to be part of this larger zone of peace it cannot bring into it its imperial baggage. It cannot bring into it a policy of genocide against the Chechens, and cannot kill journalists, and it cannot repress the mass media.

Pakistan is a democracy. We cannot do anything against human rights.

When people think of the American Identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping … or many of the other things that have been happening in the last 6 years…. Singers are like the canary in the coal mine. When things are happening, they must be sung out.

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns

We are mourning the death of rule of law in Uganda.

That's one of the things that I'm going to talk about, is the need for the Human Rights Council to actually deal with human rights. We've got countries on the Human Rights Council right now like Venezuela and Cuba.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It's not like Egypt, where you're going to get murdered by the security forces.

The only situation that I can't be in favour of is the lack of respect to human rights in Venezuela.

I myself hate the communist North Korean system. That doesn't mean I should let the people in the North suffer under an oppressive regime.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

Whereas Canada and our allies see the rule of law, freedom of speech, and fair elections as the guardrails to a more secure world, Beijing sees them as a threat to the rule of the Communist Party.

Russia's inclination toward authoritarianism undoubtedly strengthened the leaders in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Kazakhstan, as they are afraid of normal democratic procedures.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

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.

Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.

Cuba wants to get rid of a dictator, and baseball needs a dictator.