Kofi Annan Quotes

Those who still believe the United Nations is a human rights organization with the best of intentions are kidding themselves.

The world is full of nations that are part of the community of nations that don't respect rights.

Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

The United Nations is an organization of sovereign states, but the rights that it upholds belong to individuals.

I think the United Nations is a useful format to discuss matters, but I think it's a weak institution in being able to carry out matters and, in many respects even, it has been harmful on things like human rights.

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

International law now grants rights to all human beings, not only to citizens.

Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.

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.

The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

The UN Commission on Human Rights, whose membership in recent years has included countries - such as Libya and Sudan - which have deplorable human rights records, and the recent Oil-for-Food scandal, are just a few examples of why reform is so imperative.

Over the past year, several cases of human rights abuses, specifically sexual exploitation and abuse, by individuals involved in U.N. peacekeeping operations have raised the suspicions of many Members of Congress and members of the International Relations Committee.

The respect for human rights is nowadays not so much a matter of having international standards, but rather questions of compliance with those standards.

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.

The single outstanding exception was the broad yet precise mandate communicated by the General Assembly in 1946 to prepare as soon as possible the Charter of Human Rights which the San Francisco Conference had not had the time or the courage to draw up.

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The U.S. government engages with many countries around the world in official dialogues on human rights.

I do not think that it is right for me to start giving opinions about the human rights situation of any country, including Gambia, except when those crimes translate into the crimes that I have to investigate.

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.

Nations have lost their traditional exclusive jurisdiction over their treatment of their citizens.

My government believes that those who commit crimes against humanity should be brought to justice.

To have a body of humanitarian law, built up over decades and accepted by the great majority of U. N. member states, without an enforcement mechanism is a fruitless exercise.

World leaders always prefer to ignore a genocide, but when forced to face the horrors … they figure out ways of responding. The most acute need is not for policies but for political will.

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation in 1789 the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the U.S., and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries...

Until now, when powerful men committed crimes against humanity, they knew that as long as they remained powerful, no earthly court could judge them.