11th December 2016 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
This week we celebrate the 68th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For the people of Yemen who have suffered during two years of war this must feel like an abstract and distant concept. Prior to the conflict Yemen was already one of the poorest countries in the region and now, as a […]
10th December 2016 London, UK
10 December is Human Rights Day and around the world British Embassies will be expressing their commitment to universal fundamental rights. We do this because human rights are important in themselves. But they are also good for our societies and economies. The World Bank have said respect for human rights can “improve development outcomes and […]
10th December 2016 London, UK
Box-ticking, or changing the real world? That was a question posed at our Minister’s event to mark Human Rights Day. Most people I talk to are ready to agree that the UK government tries to do the right thing. But many wonder whether we are getting past the level of generic reassurances, from other governments […]
9th December 2016 Guatemala City
Saturday 10 December marks UN Human Rights Day, which commemorates the day on which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Speaking in London on the eve of her visit to Guatemala, the Minister at the Foreign Office with special responsibility for human rights, Baroness Anelay, said: “All […]
28th November 2016 London, UK
25 November marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, I have seen first-hand the impact of sexual violence against women and girls in countries like Bosnia, Burma, Colombia, DRC, Iraq, Kosovo, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. I have seen the […]
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23rd November 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
To appreciate the paradox of globalisation, consider this: – The first of the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals was to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income was less than $1.25 a day. This target was met five years early. Over half those lifted out of extreme poverty during this period, […]
21st November 2016 Chennai, India
On Wednesday, I will launch British Deputy High Commission Chennai’s violence against women (VAW) project at Kerala’s Baby Memorial Hospital (BMH) in Kozhikode (Calicut). Here’s a great blog by Rudy Fernandez who’s leading on this project which we’re running across several Indian states over the next couple of months to support better government responses and […]
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7th November 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
So what do the elections to the UN’s Human Rights Council tell us about the state of human rights in the world today? The elections took place ten days ago. There are 47 members of the HRC, and each has a three year term. A third of the membership is elected each year. All the […]
18th October 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
Violent extremism is of course nothing new, but today we are confronted by the rapid growth of a particular form of it which is linked by its perpetrators to the tenets of one of the world’s great religions, Islam. It is worth just pausing for a moment to consider that violent extremism is not new, […]
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10th October 2016 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Today is World Day against the Death Penalty. With more than 50 years of positive experience of abolition in the UK, we believe that the death penalty neither deters, nor keeps people safer. It is error-prone, and its use in the modern world if often arbitrary and in breach of international standards. It also risks […]