Human rights abuse

“ Reiterates its firm condemnation of all violence committed against civilians, including women, children, internally displaced persons and foreign nationals, and other violations and abuses of human rights, in particular enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, killing and maiming of children and rapes and other forms of sexual violence ”

“ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and the similar measures concerned with eliminating all forms of discrimination based on race, sex or religious belief; upholding the rights of the child; protecting all persons against being subjected to torture ”

“ My understanding of the purpose of this list however is that it serves to draw attention to cases that are, obviously or possibly, violations of human rights. Four government officials killed along with members of the armed forces in the course of performing security duties cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as cases requiring the attention of the Human Rights Commission, unless of course the Law and Society Trust believes that all violent deaths or crimes imply a violation of Human Rights. ”

“ Let every man choose and pursue his own aim in life, and have for himself the reward of his efforts. But where an abuse develops to such an extent that it becomes a menace to public safety, or an invasion of the rights of others, we are prepared to so legislate as to defeat the offender, whilst restricting individual enterprise to the least possible extent. ”

“ Then at once began one of those great laws by which human affairs right themselves, to operate. It is the law that a great abuse, urged on by its necessities, must render itself insupportable and defy destruction. Slavery grew up under your fostering care ”

“ To suppose that any one of all these ten millions of male adults would voluntarily surrender a single one of all his natural, inherent, inalienable, human rights into the hands of irresponsible men, is an absurdity ”

“ Because not all human relations of violence are accompanied by tortures and murders, the men who enjoy the exclusive prerogatives of the ruling classes assure themselves and others that the privileges which they enjoy are not due to any tortures or murders, but to other mysterious common causes, abstract rights, and so forth. ”

“ The advent, along the XXth century, of international organizations, has much contributed to put an end to abuses against human beings, and gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. ”

“ Still, the fact remains that even as we celebrate Bill of Rights Day and Human Rights Day, human rights are frequently violated in many nations. In the Soviet Union, for example, brave men and women seeking to promote respect for human rights are often declared mentally ill by their government and incarcerated in psychiatric institutions. ”

“ In fact, the assault is so iniquitous in its conception and is being executed with such wicked and violent disregard of political morals and human rights, as by comparison to render almost beneficent the realization of the perils which the imagination of the assailants pretends to fancy. ”

“ The term ‘serious human rights offenses’ includes violations of Federal criminal laws relating to genocide, torture, war crimes, and the use or recruitment of child soldiers under sections 1091, 2340, 2340A, 2441, and 2442 of title 18, United States Code.’’. ”

“ The men denied the first right of manhood, to protect the ones they loved. Deprived legally of purity and honor, and all the rights of commonest humanity—worn with unpaid toil, beaten, whipped, tortured, dispised and rejected of men. ”

“ These measures helped to create an enabling environment for human rights violations to occur, including disappearances, unlawful killings and torture, which have gone largely unpunished, despite formal legal and constitutional protections against such abuses.12 Gender-based violence, including rape, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation, has also occurred despite legal protection. ”

“ If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. ”

“ By the Fugitive Slave Bill, we are forbidden to shelter or assist the forlornest stranger who ever appealed for sympathy or aid. We are required by absolute law to shut out every feeling of compassion for suffering humanity. Fines and imprisonment impend over us, for exercising one of the holiest charities of our religion. Virtue and humanity are legislated into crime. Let us meet the issue like men! Let us assert our utter abhorrence of all human laws, that compel us to violate the common law of humanity and justice ”

“ Strongly condemns all armed groups operating in the region and their violations of international humanitarian law, as well as other applicable international law, and abuses of human rights, including attacks on the civilian population, MONUSCO peacekeepers and humanitarian actors, summary executions, sexual and gender-based violence and large scale recruitment and use of children, and reiterates that those responsible should be held accountable ”

“ In violation of the primitive law of humanity, thousands of women and girls, even children, of all social conditions have been systematically torn from their families and submitted to inhuman tortures and treated as slaves. ”

“ I will return to this when I trace the outline of the positive system of social defence against criminals.
The positive school, precisely because it aims at an equilibrium between individual and social rights, is not content with taking the part of society against the individual. It also takes the part of the individual against society.
In the first place, the very reforms which we propose for the indemnification of the victims of crime, regarded as a social function, as well as the operation of the punishment, have an individualist character. ”

“ In how far the actions of the suffering party are a necessary reaction against oppression, justifiable acts of defence against inflicted injustice, natural attempts at compensation for rights withheld, a forcibly sought outlet for a nature perverted by force, unavoidable outbreaks of inclinations falsely directed by binding circumstances, — all this our present courts of justice shrink from investigating, because such an investigation would overthrow our entire barbaric justice, together with its barbaric foundation. ”

“ They saw nine and one-half millions of human beings. They saw the spawn of slavery, ignorant by law and by deviltry, crushed by insult and debauched by systematic and criminal injustice. They saw a people whose helpless women have been raped by thousands and whose men lynched by hundreds in the face of a sneering world. ”

“ But when the expressions of public execration trample on all the rights of humanity, and violate the laws of nature, of the land, and of God—when the sufferings of a criminal are magnified beyond the laws, and rendered intense to a degree surpassing endurance—when, in fact, crime is punished at the expense of every principle of justice, humanity and religion, it is time to speak out, and inquire to what extent public indignation at crime may innocently go. ”

“ As awareness of human rights increased, as their definition expanded and as new, often authoritarian polities, resorted to torture and repression - human rights advocates and non-governmental organizations proliferated. It has become a business in its own right: lawyers, consultants, psychologists, therapists, law enforcement agencies, scholars and pundits tirelessly peddle books, seminars, conferences, therapy sessions for victims, court appearances and other services.
Human rights activists target mainly countries and multinationals. ”

“ All external changes of life’s forms that are not founded on shifts in consciousness not only fail to improve people’s situation but, by and large, worsen it. It was not government decrees that abolished child-beating, torture and slavery, but a change in people’s consciousness that called for the necessity of these decrees. ”

“ So also in regard to crimes against humanity. The right of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner shocking the sense of mankind has long been considered to form part of the law of Nations. Here, too, the Charter merely develops a pre-existing principle. If murder, raping and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries shall those who differ only from the common criminal by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation? ”

“ Society cannot forcibly prevent any man or woman so devoid of personal dignity as to place him or herself in voluntary servitude to another individual; but it can justly treat such persons as parasites, not entitled to the enjoyment of political liberty, though only for the duration of their servitude.
8. Persons losing their political rights will also lose custody of their children. Persons who violate voluntary agreements, steal, inflict bodily harm, or above all, violate the freedom of any individual, native or foreigner, will be penalized according to the laws of society. ”

“ And when this law penetrates consciousness as the SUPREME law of life it will, of its own accord, bring an end to that attitude, so harmful to morality, whereby the most extraordinary injustices and cruelties people perform on one another are regarded as natural, inherently human behaviour. And that which is dreamed of, desired and promised by the Socialist and Communist regimes of future societies will come to pass, and more besides. ”

“ The custom of burning human beings has become so common as scarcely to attract interest or unusual attention. I have always been among those who condemned in the strongest terms crimes of whatever character committed by members of my race, and I condemn them now with equal severity, but I maintain that the only protection to our civilization is a fair and calm trial of all people charged with crime, and in their legal punishment, if proved guilty. ”

“ There were on this side of the line many who, believing themselves humanitarians, were mere mischievous agitators, lawless in deed and treasonable in design, reckless of those rights of property which are as sacred in regard of the law as the rights of man. There were, too, in the North wicked slave catchers and kidnappers whose brutalities aroused the just resentment of the communities in which they operated, even when they kept within the limits of strict and technical legal rights. ”

“ Every abuse in Church or State may be ferreted out and exposed, except the cruelties practiced upon the slaves, unless when they happen to exceed the ordinary standard of cruelty established by general usage. ”

“ Those who suffer wrong from the more powerful. They are to be found in all conditions of society, in the bosom even of the family and the church. All relationships which involve authority are liable to be abused to the infliction of injustice and outrage.
Who are THE OPPRESSED, distinctively? The enslaved. These differ from all other victims of abused power in this essential point, that, by the law, they are regarded not as men, but things, the property of men. Denied humanity, they are denied all human rights, and excluded from all human relations. ”

“ Even here, however, one knows that it is against the interests of the State and of the race that we should admit the right to kill. Once allow crimes of indignation, and every indignant man will claim to be a law to himself. It may be that the prohibition of murder—even murder with the best intentions—is in the interests of society rather than of any absolute code of morality. But even so society must set up its own code of morality in self-defence. ”

“ Your policies are cruel and evil. You are empowering criminal organizations that prey on innocent men, women, and children. You put your own false sense of virtue before the lives, wellbeing, and [of] countless innocent people. ”

“ We believe that men should appeal to the civil law for redress of all wrongs and grievances, where personal abuse is inflicted, or the right of property or character infringed, where such laws exist as will protect the same; but we believe that all men are justified in defending themselves, their friends and property, and the government, from the unlawful assaults and encroachments of all persons, in times of exigencies, where immediate appeal cannot be made to the laws, and relief afforded. ”

“ Again, fresh he is no doubt to the charge, with the thrust, "but this fact of many of the slaveholders treating their slaves with cruelty, shows there ought to be no slavery!" Avast, friend! is the abuse of a system a just cause of condemnation? Do you say it is: then the system of apprenticeship—of guardianship—of matrimony—Liberty—and Christianity themselves, ought to be condemned, for they all have been abused—all have had the most cruel—tyrannical—and Satanic acts, committed under their names! ”

“ We may be sure indeed that any ordinary crime—nay, perhaps even that of the 'disinterested rebel'—implies the operation of some motive which is morally bad, for though it is not necessarily the worst men who come into conflict with established rights, it probably never can be the best; but the degree of badness implied in such a conflict in any particular case is quite beyond our ken, and it is this degree that must be ascertained if the amount of punishment which the state inflicts is to be proportionate to the moral badness implied in the crime. ”

“ Given the necessity of the aggregation of mankind, and given the covenants which necessarily result from the very opposition of private interests, a scale of offences may be traced, beginning with those which tend directly to the destruction of society, and ending with acts of the smallest possible injustice committed against individual members of it. Between these extremes are comprised all the actions opposed to the public welfare which are called crimes, and which by imperceptible degrees decrease in enormity from the highest to the lowest. ”