20th August 2015
Yesterday was World Humanitarian Day. Geographically and geopolitically Ethiopia lies at the heart of a deeply unstable region, with neighbouring Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Eritrea all engaged in conflicts. Enjoying comparative peace for some time now, it has been hosting refugees since the 1990s. But recent times have seen a dramatic rise in the […]
19th August 2015 Istanbul, Turkey
Today, 19 August, is World Humanitarian Day. It’s invidious to choose among the most pressing humanitarian crises around the world. But there’s one very close to my heart: Syria. I work with my team across three countries – Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan – to help resolve the Syria crisis. So far, the Syria crisis has […]
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5th August 2015 London, UK
A change of government is a golden opportunity to look at things afresh, even in an area – like human rights – where our national interest and reputation both argue for continuity, if not for doing more. The new government’s manifesto commitment to supporting universal human rights was an invitation to raise our game, not […]
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4th August 2015 London, UK
There has been much written this week about the UK’s position on the death penalty. Most has been inaccurate and I want to set the record straight. It remains Government policy to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle and this has not changed. Our view is clear. We believe […]
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9th July 2015 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
The people of Yemen have been suffering for too long. On 1 July the UN declared the crisis in Yemen to be a Level Three Emergency: a category reserved for the most severe, large scale and complex crises in the world. This highlights that the Yemeni people are in dire peril. Many civilians have died […]
7th July 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
UN diplomats spend much of their lives fretting about securing exactly the right words in international documents. I’ve seen a whole day of negotiations conclude with only a comma added, to mutual back-slapping and a general sense of a job well done, and have spent weeks painfully debating the insertion of a footnote or an […]
22nd June 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
The more time I spend at the Council, the more things seem to be getting out of control at home. The kids cope well enough, but our cat Pixie has spent the week continuing her recent hunting spree in a blatant show of attention-seeking. This week I’ve had to dispose of a shrew, two field […]
19th June 2015 London, UK
Florence Ayot was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda when she was nine years old. “I was given to a Major and forced to be his slave. If I didn’t do what they ordered, they beat me,” says Florence in the documentary The War Against Women. “The most painful thing was that the girls […]
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18th June 2015 Beirut, Lebanon
This week is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. This was celebrated in the UK as the moment when the barons imposed on the monarch an agreement for greater liberties and rights, a milestone on the way to many of the freedoms we enjoy today. That journey reached a high point with the Universal […]
16th June 2015
On 15 June we celebrated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. It is extraordinary how a document agreed in 1215 between a medieval English king and his leading subjects continues to resonate down the ages, wherever people believe in the rule of law. I recently wrote an article trying to set Magna Carta in its proper […]