Richard Grenell Quotes

Promoting and protecting human rights internationally is not just a matter of principle or morality - doing so also serves our national security interests.

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

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.

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

Abuse of human rights and international law demand resolution - whoever is responsible.

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 refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms.

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.

There are millions of people all over the world, right now, who are looking to the United Nations for protection and redress against the violation of their rights and deprivation of their freedoms.

It is both wrong and short-sighted to believe that we can better protect our national security interests by ignoring or sidelining human rights.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.

I am waiting for the day when the German Bundestag debates the violation of human rights in Saudi Arabia.

The young, the old, women, the disabled, the sick and the wounded are entitled to protection under international law. Too often, the ICRC's calls for those laws to be respected are ignored.

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

I do think that every super power on the globe has a very poor record on human rights.

Countries often prioritise economic interests over human rights - hence all the kowtowing to China.

Human rights in China should absolutely play a role in broader U.S. policy toward China. When we look the other way on fundamental issues of human rights, we are also responsible.

The United States, under President Trump, is abdicating an important moral obligation to all democracies by seeming to shrug off the most egregious of human rights violations from both our allies and our enemies.

Few governments in the world, for example, praise human rights more ardently than does the government of France, and few have a worse record of supporting tyrants and killers.

I hope the example of Saddam Hussein will give a lesson to leaders of other countries where human rights are not respected.

America needs to be secure at home and abroad.

I would say issues around human rights - either you're going to take a hard stance, or you're not. You can't borrow money from China the way the U.S. has done and then turn around and say, 'But you've got a human-rights problem.' You can't be half pregnant.

It's up to any government to decide how to react to the denial of basic human rights anywhere in the world, including Egypt.

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.

I'm more interested in politicians who deal with human rights in their own country rather than lecture the rest of the world.