From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The law is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve justice. When the law fails to deliver justice, we must be willing to reform the law, not abandon the pursuit of justice.
There's a joke within Facebook that if you want to know which countries will have a genocide in the next couple of years, look at the ones that have Facebook free basics.
We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life.
Historically, conflicts typically ended with the major players negotiating peace agreements, often including amnesties. The more brutal and involved in crimes a party was, the more significant their role at the negotiation table. This approach changed after the Second World War with the Nuremberg trials.
If technology is just for the privileged few, then it will concentrate power in the hands of those who already have it.
Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.
In my experience, unless you are directly affected by a human rights abuse, you are unlikely to give it a second thought. How many times do you draw breath a day? It's about 22,000 times – you don't think about it until you can't. That's exactly how most people view human rights- they are generally apathetic and may express some concern or sympathy when they hear about something on the news, but they don't mobilise unless it affects them directly.
poverty seems to be an aggravating factor in all types of violence
It's amazing how little data the world has about women and girls. There are even gender gaps in the data we use to measure gender gaps.
The complexity of the topic combined with significant political and social blindness towards it, has led to disability becoming one of the most significant un-addressed issues of modern time.
Beyond the atrocities of mass murder and rape, ISIS also set out to systematically destroy the Yazidi community by ensuring that we did not have the resources to survive in our homeland. They poisoned wells, burned farms, took out electrical grids, and destroyed schools, homes, temples, and hospitals.
I firmly believe that a society cannot heal from the wounds of war without accountability for serious international crimes. How can a society move towards a shared future while fundamental disagreements about the past and about responsibility for past crimes persist?