From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Children are the future of humanity. If we cannot protect our children, if we cannot ensure their rights, their education, their protection from exploitation, then we are failing humanity itself.
More girls have been killed in the past fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century.
Our economic measures aren't wrong, they're incomplete. Smith noted that a successful economic system is one where everyone who participates can flourish. That's not about equality of outcome, but about the fact that everyone has the ability to flourish, equality of opportunity.
The minute they had a job, the minute they started working, that's when they lost the sense of being a refugee and became part of the community. That was the moment they started to regain their dignity and became independent.
I am also here to send a message to the world: these unprecedented floods demand unprecedented assistance
Even the most untrained eye can sense the degrees of discrimination seen in foreign policy responses to natural disasters and conflict. Discrimination which can only rationally be explained by morally abhorrent flaws in foreign-policy.
There have been well-known people who actually have advocated rights for great apes – chimps and orangs and gorillas. They're our closest genetic relatives; but why should we exclude any creature that can suffer? If you hold the paw of a little rabbit or a mouse or whatever so hard that it squeaks or screams, isn't that cruel? isn't that hurting it? What right have we got to hurt animals like that? We don't have any right at all.
We're talking about massive amounts of money that have been shifted from poorer countries to richer ones. Almost all of this constitutes a permanent outward transfer. In our estimate, only about 10-20% of global illicit money ever finds its way back into the country of origin.
The sad reality is that if we tried to pass that declaration today, the UN General Assembly would fail to do so. Firstly, we don't have someone like Eleanor Roosevelt as an advocate for human rights, and where previously the US played a leadership role, Trump would no doubt block virtually every human rights pillar associated with the declaration.
If you don't give people legal routes to hope, they will find illegal routes and put themselves in the hands of criminals. That's the reality. We have record numbers of refugees and displaced people, and so for criminal gangs this is a business which is at scale.
I think the scale is potentially huge. Frankly, this is one of the reason why investigation is so important. The best approach is to keep an open mind and let the investigation go where it may.
There's a huge amount of corruption in some of these countries, but when you have traceability and transparency that's been pushed through consumer and shareholder pressure into global value-chains, it can act as an antidote to the corruption which may exist in the market.