Hillary Clinton Speaks OUT on Rights

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown in which she responded to criticism from the human rights community about various issues across the globe.  During this speech she addressed the “death penalty” bill in Uganda and other LGBT issues.

From her speech:

Calling for accountability doesn’t start or stop at naming offenders. Our goal is to encourage—even demand—that governments must also take responsibility by putting human rights into law and embedding them in government institutions; by building strong, independent courts and competent and disciplined police and law enforcement. And once rights are established, governments should be expected to resist the temptation to restrict freedom of expression when criticism arises, and be vigilant in preventing law from becoming an instrument of oppression, as bills like the one under consideration in Uganda to criminalize homosexuality would do.

We know that all governments—and all leaders—sometimes fall short. So there have to be internal mechanisms of accountability when rights are violated. Often the toughest test for governments, this is essential to the protection of human rights. And here, too, we should lead by example. In the last six decades we have done this—imperfectly at times but with significant outcomes—from making amends for the internment of our own citizens in World War II, to establishing legal recourse for victims of discrimination in the Jim Crow South, to passing hate crimes legislation to include attacks against gays and lesbians. When injustice anywhere is ignored, justice everywhere is denied. Acknowledging and remedying mistakes does not make us weaker, it reaffirms the strength of our principles and institutions.

Second, we must be pragmatic and agile in pursuit of our human rights agenda, not compromising on our principles, but doing what is most likely to make them real. We will use all the tools at our disposal. And when we run up against a wall we will not retreat with resignation—or repeatedly run up against it— but respond with strategic resolve to find another way to effect change and improve people’s lives.

and

Success stories deserve our attention so that they continue to make progress in building sustainable democracies.

And, even as we reinforce successes, conscience demands that we are not cowed by the overwhelming difficulty of making inroads against misery in the hard places like Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, and Zimbabwe, or on the hard issues like ending gender inequality and discrimination against gays and lesbians—from the Middle East to Latin America, Africa to Asia.

Read the entire message from Clinton at: Politico