01x03 - The Fight for our Rights

[bunniefuu]

The fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989 symbolised freedom.

An evil empire had controlled
Eastern Europe and it lost control.

That same year in China, cries
for many of the same rights,

were met with b*ll*ts.

The Tiananmen
m*ssacre demonstrated

the extent to which the
Chinese Communist Party

feels threatened by the advance
of universal human rights

and the advancing
demands for Liberty.

The promise of democracy, is
a commitment to human rights.

The only thing that's gonna
make this world more healthy,

is by having gender
equity and justice.

Equality, freedom of thought and
expression, the right to live in peace.

I grieve for a lot of
Americans because

they just seem to have an
endless stream of g*n incidents.

Justice, freedom of
religion and sexuality.

The past few decades have been
defined by the struggle for human rights.

The world has transformed
over the past 30 years.

In the blizzard of
news and events,

it's hard to make sense
of how we arrived here.

But if we stand back, we
can see how things connect.

We can see the road to now.

Seventy-two years ago, after the
horrors of the Second World w*r,

member countries of the newly formed
United Nations, reached an agreement.

The freedoms of the individual
should be Paramount.

We stand today at the
threshold of a great event,

both in the life of the United
Nations and in the life of mankind.

They declared all human beings are
born free and equal in dignity and rights,

a declaration frequently
ignored over the next 40 years.

The 20th century is regarded as the
bloodiest 100 years in recorded history.

After the fall of
the Berlin Wall,

many hoped, that a new international
order could usher in a period of peace.

1989 was a massively
important year.

But the question is, were
the correct lessons learned

and were the correct
conclusions drawn?

And I'm not sure that they were.

Americans tend to expect revolutions
always to be like their own,

to produce a constitution,

to produce some
splendid leaders,

and everybody to live
pretty happily ever after.

We start thinking, for example, to
use Martin Luther King's beautiful line,

that the arc of history
bends towards justice,

that it's a natural phenomenon.

It doesn't require our
action to force that direction,

that it will somehow
magically happen naturally,

instead of being the result of
national choices and human agency.

The Cold w*r had suppressed a lot
of these old, what I call olive tree urges,

you know, urges around
sex, identity, race, tribe.

And when Yugoslavia exploded,

a lot of people then understood,
that we will miss the Cold w*r.

The Cold w*r may have ended,

but the denial of human
rights didn't die with it.

When the Soviet Union began
imploding in the early 90s,

Yugoslavia, a large communist country
in southeast Europe, began splitting apart.

Ethnic and religious tensions, long
restrained by the central government,

exploded in violence.

Slovenia declared independence
and won a short, sharp w*r,

inspiring the Bosnians, Croats and
others, to also break with the Serbs.

But Bosnia and Croatia had
significant Serb populations,

who saw their future in
a greater Serbian nation,

and they were
prepared to fight for it.

The Balkans was brewing.

All of that tribalism
and nationalism

that, we thought, we had left
behind at the end of the Cold w*r,

was starting to bubble
again to the surface.

The fighting was intense around
the historic Bosnian capital Sarajevo.

Rather than let Sarajevo become the capital of
an independent, predominantly Muslim Bosnia,

Serbs drew up their a*tillery.

For four years, the Christian
Serbs blockaded the city,

hoping to starve its
people into submission.

I could not believe
that a medieval siege

was happening in the middle
of Europe in the 1990s.

The Serbs had a raid around
the hills around Sarajevo,

very heavy weaponry,
heavy a*tillery,

and then, closer in,
there were sn*pers,

and they simply
targeted and picked off,

or else shelled in
indiscriminate ways,

to the civilian
population of Sarajevo.

There is no one house
that is not damaged.

All houses were damaged,
destroyed or damaged.

The president of Bosnia-Herzegovina
repeatedly sought

international intervention to
save Sarajevo and its people.

But the leading European
nations and the United States,

dithered on military
intervention.

We need arms that fast and air strikes
against concentration of heavy a*tillery.

It was a very asymmetrical
conflict, because

most of the arms were
in the hands of the Serbs.

So a minimum
reasonable response

was to help the Bosnian
Muslims defend themselves.

It took a very long time
to persuade anybody

in London, much less in
Washington, to do anything.

A denier of human rights, the
president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic,

earned the moniker
"Butcher of the Balkans".

Slobodan Milosevic was the
first post-World w*r II leader

who presided over the
destruction of a part of Europe.

And it was the first white
Christian nationalist rising,

since the Nazis in World w*r II.

He was the patron
of the Bosnian Serbs,

and the project was
called "ethnic cleansing",

and that, of course,
led to genocide.

More than 120,000 men,
women and children

were k*lled in the Balkan
Wars between 1991 and 1995.

In the worst single episode of genocide,
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims

were rounded up by Serb forces near
the town of Srebrenica and shot dead.

Article 10 of the Human
Rights Declaration insists

that everyone is entitled
to a fair and public hearing.

The International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

prosecuted w*r
criminals for genocide.

The lie that was perpetrated
throughout the Bosnia w*r,

was that all sides are
equally guilty, that's not true,

and that this was just a latest

revelation of ancient hatreds that have gone
on for centuries, again, that was not true.

In 1998, Milosevic
pursued ethnic cleansing

in the Serbian
province of Kosovo.

Finally, NATO, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation intervened.

What happened over Kosovo
created a shift in European politics

and in nobody more than Tony Blair,

who quickly became convinced

that there was a kind of missionary
opportunity here for Western power.

That it could be
possible to intervene

on a humanitarian basis
and achieve great things.

Eleven weeks of bombing
the Serbian heartland,

forced the withdrawal of
their forces from Kosovo.

Kosovo declared itself independent
in 2008, but Serbia refused to accept it.

Justice for victims of the Balkan
Wars, was often agonisingly slow.

Milosevic died in
custody while on trial.

In many of the former Yugoslav
states, they're still digging up bodies

and still trying to
identify victims.

Most w*r criminals
have never faced a court

and relations between the
Balkan nations, remain fractured.

While the Balkans
attracted international focus,

much less attention was given to

the horrific violation of human
rights unfolding in central Africa.

Rwanda is made
up of various tribes.

Traditionally, the minority Tutsi tribe,
just 14 per cent of the population,

had dominated the Hutus.

In 1994, the Hutus were in power,
but when their president was k*lled,

extremists began systematically
slaughtering the Tutsis.

It was genocide.

Machetes once employed in the
fields, were used for beheadings.

Article 7 of the UN Human
Rights Declaration says,

"All are equal before the law and
are entitled to equal protection."

It was one of the most shattering
experiences of my time,

to have to watch at a distance

that m*ssacre of
800,000 people occurring

and to have that
sense of impotence.

The slaughter lasted
for three months.

As in the Balkans, UN troops
weren't given authority to intervene.

It only stopped as the Rwandan
Patriotic Front Tutsi militia

progressively defeated
Rwandan government forces.

Soldiers and many Hutu K*llers,
fled across the border to Zaire.

It was a huge failing on the part of
the Security Council, the UN system,

the major players that did not want to
recognise that something was happening.

It was absolutely
unconscionable.

The UN later acknowledged systemic
failures in not responding to mass m*rder.

At least 100,000
Hutus were arrested,

many languished in
overcrowded prisons for years.

Over and over in the prison, people
said, "All we want is a fair trial."

But that could be years away.

Rwanda's judicial system was overwhelmed
and most perpetrators never tried.

The UN Security Council established an
international tribunal in neighbouring Tanzania,

to try those most
complicit in genocide.

Of the mere 93 men charged,
around only 61 were convicted.

The strategic bridge
between Europe and Asia,

Turkey epitomises the struggle for genuine
democracy and individual civil liberties.

Long time Prime Minister and now
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

has fought and won many
Democratic elections,

but has increasingly centralised
power in his office, stifling his critics.

In the last years, we've seen the rise
of this form of authoritarian populism,

leading to a form of illiberal
democracy in many parts of the world.

We see it in a
place like Turkey,

where Recep Erdogan has
essentially become a dictator,

even though he was
originally elected.

In mid-2016, a military faction
tried to seize power from Erdogan,

sending tanks through
the streets of Istanbul

and taking control of
the Bosphorus bridge.

Erdogan responded
via social media,

urging his supporters
onto the streets.

Mother of two, Safia
Bayat heeded the call.

A soldier fired a warning shot.

Later, Safia was wounded,

along with thousands of others
when the sh**ting began.

241 were k*lled.

At one level, people power
helped prevent a coup,

but political freedom is fragile in Turkey
and individual rights were trampled.

In the wake of the coup attempt,

Erdogan has imprisoned
many thousands of journalists,

academics, civil servants,

anyone who was perceived
to be offside with his regime.

And there's very little sign of
him lightening that crackdown.

The famous statistic about
Turkey that everyone quotes,

is that it's the leading jailer
of journalists in the world.

The essential
ingredient of democracy

is expressed in Article 19 of
the Human Rights Declaration.

Everyone has a right to freedom
of opinion and expression.

In 2018, Turkey imprisoned
more than 60 journalists.

In recent years, several thousand
journalists have been fired from their jobs

as the government censorship
of the media has intensified.

Turkey is more and
more authoritarian,

journalists by the shed load of
being silenced and put into jail,

almost no space for any
politics outside the ruling party.

Turkey really has gone
from being a story about

the modernization and
growth of the economy,

combined with a resurgent
Democratic Islamic identity

to one of the most egregious cases of the
new kind of authoritarian populist leader,

seeking to base his control, in
appeals to the idea of identity,

that it's not laws and
institutions that protect people,

but the authority of one man.

In 2018, another authoritarian
would flex his muscles,

turning Istanbul's consulate of
Saudi Arabia into a m*rder scene.

The victim, prominent
journalist Jamal Khashoggi,

a columnist for one of America's
most important newspapers.

There was a meeting
in Saudi Arabia,

where someone in their intelligence
service raised their hand and said,

"I've got a good idea."

Let's lure moderate journalist, Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen,

into our consulate in Istanbul

and let's k*ll him there

and then let's chop
him up with a bone saw,

then boil his bones in acid,

then one of us will dress up in his clothes,
walk out of the street and nobody will know.

And there wasn't a single person
around that table who didn't say,

are you f*cking crazy?

Khashoggi was assassinated
on the 2nd of October 2018.

A United Nations report said he was
the victim of a premeditated execution,

an extrajudicial k*lling, for which the
state of Saudi Arabia is responsible.

The UN investigator insisted

that the Saudi crown prince's role
in the m*rder should be examined.

Saudi Arabia is a member of
the UN Human Rights Council,

despite frequent breaches
of international human rights.

Saudi Arabia continues to be
a very repressive monarchy,

that clearly is ready to silence in
the most vicious ways any critics,

whether it's Jamal Khashoggi
who was butchered to death,

whether it's women activists
who were put into prison.

I think that's a real issue.

The United States protested
the Khashoggi slaying.

But in the end, America's strategic
interests in maintaining good relations

with the world's
biggest oil exporter,

outweighed concerns about freedom
of expression or lack of justice.

As with the oil
rich Gulf states,

US-China relations are
grounded in economic issues

and much less on human
rights and respect for justice.

China makes no pretense
about Democratic principles.

Freedoms are not
seen to be important.

Yet Article 18 of the Human
Rights Declaration states,

"Everyone has the right to freedom
of thought, conscience, and religion."

China seeks to control personal
expression through web censorship.

Employing millions
of cyber sensors,

the country has established the
so-called Great Firewall of China.

Moreover, the country has
become a surveillance state,

rolling out more than
200 million cameras.

Employing artificial intelligence,
state security officials track people,

using facial recognition
software, body scanning,

and by monitoring the GPS
coordinates of mobile phones.

As you become more wealthy,
as the middle class increases,

maintaining that top down control
becomes much more difficult.

China actually spends more
money on domestic security,

than it does on its
external military.

In Xinjiang, on the old
Silk Road trade route,

ethnic Turkic people
known as Uighurs,

have been increasingly targeted
by Chinese security services.

The way they are treating
the Uighurs in Xinjiang,

they are very
tough and ruthless.

They give these guys a
political reliability credit rating,

by keeping track of all the
information about them.

So our conceptions of what would
constitute violations of human rights,

or excessive cruelty,
or even big brother,

is just a totally different
political system.

Some Uighurs want
to separate from China

and there have been attacks on police
stations and other government buildings.

The government cites this violence
as justification for mass surveillance.

China wants to prevent
fundamentalist Muslims

from nearby countries,
radicalising young Islamic Uighurs.

We've been working for a number of years
on the human rights crisis in Xinjiang.

Looking at both the huge
system of surveillance and control

that's been set up by the Chinese
government to monitor the Uighur population

at just about every level,
to collect DNA information,

social media behaviour,
family relationships,

to have facial recognition software running with
cameras up on Poles around towns across Xinjiang.

You have an extraordinary apparatus
of surveillance and total control.

Safely in exile in
the United States,

Tahir Hamut describes
what happened

when he and his wife were
ordered to a police station.

The pair then underwent
rigorous facial scanning.

According to the United Nations,

as many as a million Uighurs

are being detained in massive
centres across the province.

Hong Kong is another
of China's flashpoints.

It symbolises the
fight for freedom,

against the Communist Party's
determination to exert control.

Pro-democracy campaigners
took over the streets in 2014,

in scenes that would
echo within five years.

People feel that if I don't
come out and speak up,

I may not even have a chance
to do so in a few years' time.

Beijing promised Hong Kongers
freedom of assembly and speech,

when the United Kingdom
handed back control in 1997.

The slogan was: "One
country, two systems".

But Beijing hasn't abided by its
commitment to political autonomy,

or political and legal freedoms.

The looming shadow
of the mainland

has eroded a lot of the things
that we've come to associate

with the freedoms that we've come
to associate Hong Kong with.

In 2019, Hong Kongers closed
down the central business district

to stop a proposed
extradition law to China.

The rise of China is
tremendously important,

but it is actually
part of a wider story

of the rise of this authoritarian
hard and soft power.

And that absolutely will help
to set the political agenda

for much of the 21st century.

Many liberal Western
societies made great strides

towards gender equality
across the 20th century.

In 1979, the United
Nations General Assembly

determined that the welfare of
the world and the cause of peace

require the maximum
participation of women

on equal terms with
men, in all fields.

However,
disparities still exist.

Across the globe, men
continue to dominate

political, corporate, academic
and social organisations.

When it comes to women,

I think, we're moving in the right direction,
but we're nowhere close enough to being there.

We haven't arrived yet.

Facts and figures speak
louder than any words

that, unless women
are at the peace table

or at the negotiating table,

or equally represented in
every single walk of life,

then this will be an
ever less healthy world.

I wondered, sir,
could you tell me,

do you believe all of
those women are lying?

Are you ashamed?

For many women, the #MeToo
movement, which went viral in 2017,

highlighted entrenched sexual exploitation
in the entertainment industries.

The scandal smashed the careers
of movie producer Harvey Weinstein,

Fox News supremo Roger Ailes,
actor Bill Cosby and many others.

The fact that several high-profile men
in media, in Hollywood, in business,

were affected by this
in quick succession,

has made a difference in
terms of the general awareness

and acceptability
of that behaviour.

It's about having
everyone to stand together

and to recognise a culture
that's unhealthy and toxic.

There's a sense that people are more
willing to call that behaviour out now,

that they feel enabled by
the #MeToo movement.

We have shown them that hell hath
no fury like a woman underestimated.

Love you, women! Woo!

While there have been strides toward
reform in high-profile Western industries,

in other parts of the world, cultural,
religious and economic barriers

are still obstacles
to female equality.

Pakistan was the first
country in the Muslim world

to elect a female prime minister.

Benazir Bhutto served two terms

and was campaigning for a third
when she was assassinated.

Bhutto's death was blamed
on a teenage suicide b*mber,

but the UN investigation
concluded he did not act alone.

The Pakistani Taliban was
deeply embroiled in the m*rder.

Another young Pakistan woman
almost suffered the same fate.

I've met Malala
Yousafzai several times,

I've interviewed her several
times, including with her father,

and they've really left an
indelible imprint on the world.

All I remember is that I had my
Pakistan Studies exam paper

and I had done it really well,

and then we were in our school
bus and then my mind goes blind.

There were two people
who stopped our school bus.

The one guy came back
and said, "Who is Malala?"

He fired, I think,
three b*ll*ts,

and one b*llet hit me in
the left side of my forehead.

And I remember waking up in
this hospital in a different country

where the doctors and nurses
were speaking in English,

and I found out
that I was in the UK.

Once again, the
Pakistan Taliban,

opposing education for
girls, was responsible.

They made a mistake.

They wanted to silence one girl,

but now there are millions and
millions of girls around the world

who are speaking out
for girls' education.

One book and one pen
can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai says there are
130 million girls around the world

currently not in school, because
of cultural or religious restrictions.

They know that their future is in
school, their future is in learning.

So this is the call that
I get every morning.

Right next door in Afghanistan,

children's education and women's
empowerment, has improved,

since the international coalition
tossed out the Taliban in late 2001.

But now, almost two decades
on, the Taliban is back.

Having fought a long
guerrilla campaign,

they, once again, control
most of the country.

The US, desperate to
quit an unwinnable w*r,

has tried to negotiate
peace with the Taliban.

I wish that we could find a
way to accommodate them

that didn't require sacrificing

the gains that Afghanistan has made
in terms of popular representation,

and in terms of rights for women,
in terms of better governance.

The women of Afghanistan
have been speaking up.

Council Resolution 1325 talks
about women being involved

in every stage of peacebuilding
and peace processes,

which clearly
haven't been to date,

because the Afghan people haven't
been asked what they think of this.

The only thing that's going to
make this world more healthy

is by having gender
equity and justice.

And every single
expert will tell you

that whether it's in the economy,
in health, climate, politics,

if women are equally represented,
we will exponentially be better off.

Equality is essential to the
legal framework of nations.

In the West, women's liberation
has been sought for 50 years.

The journey for g*y liberation
has much further to go.

The term LGBTIQ - l*sbian, g*y,
bisexual, transgender, intersex and q*eer -

is now in common
use in the Western world.

Ireland is a classic case study of
rapid change in social behaviour.

Until the early 1990s,
h*m* was ill*gal in Ireland,

due in part to the strong
influence of the Catholic Church.

But in 2015,

the Irish became the first people to
vote yes to same-sex marriage - 62%.

In the space of my lifetime,
Ireland has been transformed

and the situation for
lesbians and g*y men

has been utterly, utterly
transformed, and it's so fantastic.

Same-sex marriage is now legal throughout
much of Europe, North and Central America.

However, progress
has not been universal.

In 2013, Russian President Vladimir
Putin signed the g*y Propaganda Law,

making it ill*gal to present
h*m* as a norm.

Russia is not a
tolerant society.

When the West was
having a sexual revolution,

we had the Soviet Union.
We didn't have any of that.

The Russian government says the
law is designed to protect children

from non-traditional
family values.

Nobody knows what propaganda
means, and it's deliberately vague.

And our government can
use this law arbitrarily

to apply to anything, any open
expression of h*m*,

to really drive LGBT
people out of public space.

The move was far from unpopular.

It passed the national parliament
without a single dissenting vote.

Public support was overwhelming.

The Russian Orthodox Church, to which
more than 40% of Russians adhere,

views h*m* as a direct
attack on Russian values and status.

It's a sin.

This poisoning of
a Russian society

with these new
standards of liberal

h*m* revolution
would make us weak.

You see status anxiety playing a
huge role in the rise of populism.

Heterosexuals in the country, people
who are religiously traditionalist,

feel that their status in society is
threatened by general social liberalisation.

So it's very easy to turn people who
are already not particularly tolerant,

not accustomed to
talking about these things,

to turn them violently
against a social group.

And that's exactly what's happened. We've
seen a huge rise in anti-g*y violence.

In December 2013,

Masha Gessen and her family
fled Russia fearing persecution.

The law empowered far-right
vigilantes and sparked violence,

as h*m* were lured into
the open to be publicly humiliated.

And all of that appeared
after propaganda laws.

They are posting videos of
young g*y men being tortured

and the police is not doing
anything to investigate.

You can see the status anxiety taking
on different forms in different contexts.

But it is virtually everywhere,
where people who think,

that their social status has
decreased in the last decades,

who are fueling these
populist movements.

Russia's laws were
condemned by many countries.

In 2018, a UN panel
ruled that the laws violate

a legally binding international
treaty on human rights.

Those in Russia affected by the
laws, will continue to live in fear.

America, 2018.

Home to 327 million people.

Home to 393 million g*ns.

The Declaration of Human Rights

says that everyone is
entitled to social order.

But perhaps nothing is more
destabilising to communities

than mass school shootings.

In 2012, Sandy Hook, Connecticut,
was the focus of national attention.

20-year-old Adam Lanza
invaded an elementary school

with an AR-15 as*ault r*fle.

20 children died that day.

One of them was Noah Posner.

His life energy, he
was a bon vivant.

He was very engaged in life.

Now I'm speaking on behalf of
my son, so that he's not forgotten.

Six teachers were m*rder*d
trying to protect the children.

After every mass
sh**ting in America,

people rush to g*n stores,
fearing that g*ns will be banned.

There are weapons of mass carnage,
that are designed for the b*ttlefield.

It just has no place
in society, as I see it.

After the slaughter at
the Sandy Hook school,

there was a brief period where
g*n reform seemed possible.

But the National r*fle Association,
funded by g*n manufacturers

and five million
members, fought back,

lobbying Congress and
running alarmist campaigns.

The only thing that stops a bad guy
with a g*n, is a good guy with a g*n.

I've got to tell you, it's possible shots
fired at Stoneman Douglas High School.

In 2018, another
troubled young man

invaded a high school
in Parkland, Florida,

murdering 17 students and staff.

It doesn't make sense. Fix it.

Should have been one school sh**ting
and we should have fixed it.

Then I'm pissed, because my
daughter, I'm not gonna see again.

President Trump, a strong
supporter of the NRA,

proposed arming teachers, instead
of trying to restrict g*n access.

Student survivors condemned
politicians and police for inaction

and it developed into a
national student crusade.

No-one understood the
extent of what had happened.

No-one could believe that there
were bodies in that building,

waiting to be identified,
for over a day.

The Parkland kids have
been extraordinary.

There is just a group
of high school students

who really seemed to
capture the public imagination

and the kids campaign and the March
for Our Lives, that went on for weeks.

Because it did really seem
like it was a turning point,

that they could
change something.

Yet for all the public
anger and campaigning,

g*n violence is
becoming more frequent.

In the past 18 years, more people
have died in US mass school shootings

than in the entire 20th century.

America's g*n proliferation
exacerbates another issue

deeply rooted in
the nation's history.

Chicago, 1999.

More than 500 people
were k*lled by g*ns.

The victim is a 17-year-old member of a
g*ng, called the Spanish Gangster Disciples.

He's been shot twice
through the heart

by a 9mm semi-automatic p*stol
by a member of a rival g*ng.

They begin desperately clamping arteries
and manipulating the heart by hand.

He has a pulse.

40 minutes after his heart
was restarted, it stopped again.

This time for good.

Fast forward to 2012...

and once again, more than 500
people were k*lled by g*ns in Chicago,

most of them, young black men.

It was also in 2012,

that unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon
Martin was shot dead in Florida,

setting off a wave of
fury around the country.

If I had a son, he'd
look like Trayvon.

Every parent in America
should be able to understand

it is absolutely imperative that we
investigate every aspect of this.

Security guard George Zimmerman
was acquitted of Trayvon's k*lling.

We, the jury, find George
Zimmerman not guilty.

The event sparked the
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

We were blindsided. You
know, he got his g*n back.

Graphic images of police brutality
have given African-Americans

a focus to campaign
against racism and injustice.

And we have targets on our backs,
so we are not seen as innocent.

We're seeing police
k*ll people on camera,

m*rder them, and
nothing gets done.

This idea of what you're seeing in America
today, this Black Lives Matter movement,

is not an assertion that black
lives matter more than others.

It's really an assertion,
"Hey, wait a minute.

Aren't we citizens too? Don't
we deserve equal justice?

Don't we deserve
equal opportunity?

Don't we deserve an equal shot?"

♪ I don't believe that
we shall overcome

♪ I believe blackness
shines brighter... ♪

Young black men are
10 times more likely

to die from homicide
than white Americans.

♪ And I'm confused as ever ♪ How to
bow my head down ♪ My black is beautiful

♪ Beautiful ♪ Wonderful
♪ Wonderful ♪

Fabulous ♪ Fabulous
♪ Powerful ♪ Powerful

In the land of the free, a third of
all black men have been arrested.

Movements like Black Lives Matter, can
only hope to sow the dream of change.

♪ Beautiful ♪ Wonderful
♪ Wonderful ♪

Wonderful ♪ Fabulous
♪ Fabulous ♪ Powerful

♪ Powerful ♪ Powerful

Life, Liberty, freedom
of thought and speech.

Great strides of
the past 30 years,

have ensured that hundreds of millions
of people now enjoy those freedoms.

Nonetheless, in
the 21st century,

the liberal Democratic model
has not become standard.

Many of us believed that
the arc of the moral universe

was bending towards justice

in a way that was dictated somehow
by the laws of political physics.

And I think what we've learned, is that
history does not function in that way

and we find ourselves facing some much deeper
and more complex and profound challenges.

We are still grappling with
20th-century divisions.

Things that are very
deep and old in us,

our quest for identity, tribe,
sect, nation, region, language,

all these identity issues,
emerging into a world,

increasingly defined by
a spreading globalisation.

Very, very quickly, we saw,
what I think is going to be

the challenge of the 21st century,
which is the wars of identity.

The Balkans was a
21st-century w*r of identity.

The Taliban: Who were
we? What do we believe in?

What happened in Rwanda
with the Rwandan genocide,

Hutu and Tutsi, was
a w*r of identity.

It is more important than ever,

that the world strives to promote
equality, dignity and human rights for all.

We see in popular movements,
for rights, for facts, for democracy,

a lot to be encouraged about,

because people rediscover the value of
democratic norms, the rule of law, and rights,

as the framework, on which to
rest their hope for a better life.

That represents a
really important thaw

in what has been a very repressive
environment for a long time.

No more! No more!