Miliband speech at publication of Human Rights Report

Miliband speech at publication of Human Rights Report; Our guiding thought in all our work has to be the importance and the dignity of individual human lives – of their stories and their hopes. That is what struck me last April, on a visit to Peshawar, when I sat and talked with the relatives of some of those killed whilst attending political rallies in Pakistan. Their tragic losses had left them angry, but had not dimmed their belief in democracy. They all wanted their voices to be heard and they wanted the power to shape their lives and futures. It was at the front of my mind again when last July I met Zimbabwean refugees at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. These were the faces of human catastrophe. After years of poverty and repression under Mugabe these people had fled their homeland in desperation. Some of them had then been attacked by poor South Africans who said the refugees were stealing jobs and housing. And one of my most poignant memories to my visit to Georgian refugee camp in August. I talked to one woman who had fled as Russian tanks rolled into her orchard. She hadn’t objected to the soldiers eating her peaches. But then they had started to destroy the trees. It is these individual stories, not just of rights denied, but of lives and livelihoods destroyed, that lie at the heart of our work on human rights and that shape our foreign policy. It is the thoughts and the images of people’s personal suffering, and the desire to alleviate that suffering, that will be in my mind and, I know, those of my staff, as we continue our endeavours over the coming year.