Justice

I think it's down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, '…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?'

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

To me the question is, why are we denying them the obvious rights they should have? They are flesh and blood, they feel pain as we do, they experience joy, they have their own behaviours and their own languages among themselves that they understand and we don't.

Founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

These models depend entirely on government statistics. They automatically leave out many forms of illicit money such as drug trading, human trafficking, some forms of trade mispricing and so forth. That is why we feel our estimates are very conservative.

Architecture has the power to democratize space - to create environments where all people, regardless of their background, can participate in civic life.

Renowned British Architect & Designer of Iconic Modern Buildings

They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again.

The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days…. After a few days of hanging, being denied sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire life.

They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The nails in the ears were the most painful.

That experience [of being tortured] has altered my whole life. You can never be the same person and anything you do is in reference to that moment. I have never been able to pass it.

We even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don't have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist & New York Times Columnist

Since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear.

Economist & Director of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

The virus doesn't discriminate, but our response to it has. We've seen how stigma and discrimination have fueled this epidemic more than the virus itself ever could.

There were people transferred to Guantánamo who were sold for bounties, transferred there because of the watch they wore, where they slept or even just because they were Arabic men in Afghanistan. They were rounded up, brought to Guantánamo and many of them have remained there over 11 years.

What makes Guantánamo so horrible is the fact that the majority of these men are innocent and have no hope of release in the future. Our government has made no concrete steps to releasing these men.

Guantánamo has created more terrorists than have ever passed through. It is the major recruiting tool used… it inhibits the United States' ability to talk about human rights on a global scale… when you have the UN calling-up the United States on their human rights abuses at Guantánamo it makes it very difficult for the United States to then go to other places in the world and demand that they apply human rights.

It was the brainchild of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfwitz. They picked Guantánamo as they believed it was beyond the reach of all law. Obviously United States law, but also international law and beyond that the Geneva Conventions. It was picked purposely to be a legal black hole where the United States could bring people for interrogation purposes.

What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime.

Founder of Integral Institute & Author on Evolutionary Spirituality