69 Quotes About Human-Right

The human-rights movement is a relatively new concept, but one that has grown to be so important in today’s society. It is a movement of people who are committed to creating a world where all people have the right to equality, freedom, and respect. It is being used by activists to fight for justice on different levels and in different ways. These human-rights quotes prove that we should never take these rights for granted and we should always fight to make them a reality for everyone.

The rights of every man are diminished when the rights...
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The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. John F. Kennedy
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Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe. Elie Wiesel
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Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory. Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Peygamber dedi: 'Kadın akıllılara ve gönül sahiplerine tam galip gelir. Cahillerse kadına üstün olur, çünkü onlar sert ve serkeş davranır.' İncelik, letafet ve insaf onlarda az bulunur, çünkü tabiatlarında hayvanlık galiptir. Sevgi ve incelik, insanlık vasfıdır. Öfke ve şehvet, hayvanlık vasfıdır. O, Hakk'ın ışığıdır; sevgili değil. O, sanki yaratıcıdır; yaratılmış değildir. Jalaluddin Rumi
We are just two people. Not that much separates us....
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We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought. Kathryn Stockett
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At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong. Heidi Postlewait
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Under the Iranian code, the worth of a woman’s life equals half of a man’s, a point that often leads to grotesque legal judgments that effectively punish the victims. In this instance, the judge ruled that the ‘blood money’ for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions. Shirin Ebadi
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To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. Nelson Mandela
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If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. Desmond Tutu
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We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly. John Pilger
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Fear is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear–it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds–fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself. Then there is fear which has to do with aspects of experience and detailed states of mind. Our homes, institutions, prisons, churches, are crowded with people who are hounded by day and harrowed by night because of some fear that lurks ready to spring into action as soon as one is alone, or as soon as the lights go out, or as soon as one’s social defenses are temporarily removed. The ever-present fear that besets the vast poor, the economically and socially insecure, is a fear of still a different breed. It is a climate closing in; it is like the fog in San Francisco or in London. It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere. It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded. It has its roots deep in the heart of the relations between the weak and the strong, between the controllers of environment and those who are controlled by it. When the basis of such fear is analyzed, it is clear that it arises out of the sense of isolation and helplessness in the face of the varied dimensions of violence to which the underprivileged are exposed. Violence, precipitate and stark, is the sire of the fear of such people. It is spawned by the perpetual threat of violence everywhere. Of course, physical violence is the most obvious cause. But here, it is important to point out, a particular kind of physical violence or its counterpart is evidenced; it is violence that is devoid of the element of contest. It is what is feared by the rabbit that cannot ultimately escape the hounds. . Howard Thurman
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May you let the authentic colors of your heart illuminate and may you feel the light within others. Leta B.
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Every person has the choice to contribute to or drain from this world. Leta B.
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No ideology is worth a Human life. Adriano Bulla
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Look at yourselves. Some of you teenagers, students. How do you think I feel and I belong to a generation ahead of you - how do you think I feel to have to tell you, 'We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights - and you've got to be born into a society where you still have that same fight.' What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did. Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made.. Malcolm X
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Life in this form is one-time chance, death is the inevitable consequence for anyone who is born. The record of one’s death is the primary respect one could render to the lost one. Tears of all relatives of missing people are indeed flowing due to this invaluable action by the authority. Nilantha Ilangamuwa
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The greatest obstacle to human liberty is that the vast majority of people do not wish to be free. Michelle Templet
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I work for a human rights organization, which strikes me as, if not interesting in the day to day sense, at least an interesting thing to tell people at parties. I'm pleased to be doing something that sounds significant and adult. Nell Stevens
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The views of the Courts in regard to imprisonment have however undergone modification in the last ten years. Imprisonment is seen more and more as a harsh and drastic punishment to be reserved for callous and impenitent characters. We wish to adopt a more enlightened approach in which the probable effect of incarceration upon the life of the accused person and those near to her is carefully weighed. V.G. Hiemstra
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They talk about human rights until the rights include things they personally do not like as alternatives. There needs to be Frank discussions. And Shirley can join too because the pun works. The ideas of human beings of all demeanor and venues are at stake here. Leviak B. Kelly
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Respect for Human rights preserves us as A nation. Auliq Ice
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Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle.... Goats are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions. B.R. Ambedkar
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If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.” This became my first big fight. While I consider myself to be fantastically boring, I realized that if I took on my own sexual identity and came out and just told people about it and tried to have a chat with them–tried to be offhand and casual about it–and tried to build our place in society and humanity, then that would be a good mission. This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life–what you do to add to the human existence–that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing. . Eddie Izzard
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Being lesbian isn't a way of life, it's a trivial attribute that doesn't change your character. Lisa Wheeler
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But *why* do clean torture and democracy appear to go hand in hand? This is an important puzzle (though by no means the only one suggested by the data). My explanation for this pattern generally is this: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection, and, to the extent that public monitoring is not only greater in democracies, but that public monitoring of human rights is a core value in modern democracies, it is the case that where we find democracies torturing today we will also be more likely to find stealthy torture. Darius M. Rejali
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I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Victor Hugo
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It is vital to acknowledge the new reality before taking any steps to change the existing policies. The world is not the same anymore. Tackling religion-based terrorism is perhaps one, if not the most serious threat the world face in the 21st century. Unfortunately, more terror attacks like the ones in San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris are expected to occur. While those attacks were a reminder of the challenges that lay ahead, they exposed the need to have an improved early warning system that may ultimately save civilian lives. Such a system should take into account the shortcomings of the current warning frameworks and evaluate the usefulness of warnings generated by improved models that would cover a broad range of attacks, larger geographic areas within the country in question and a wide range of potential attack scenarios. The system is likely to facilitate well informed decisions on the assessment of information gathered from different sources. In this vein, finding a balance between protecting human rights and ensuring national security is key. Widad Akreyi
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Every second you spend holding someone else back is time not running the race yourself. Rebecca Murphy
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Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. . Kofi Annan
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If the prisoner is beaten, it is an arrogant expression of fear. Unknown
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Rights are either God-given as part of the divine plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government. Ezra Taft Benson
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One cannot fail to notice the inconsistency of those rejecting human rights: their rejection takes place in the public square created by human rights. It is difficult to reject human rights without using them. Filip Spagnoli
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Turn the cell into a classroom and the prison into a university Khalil Osiris
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Human Rights directs my path"~ ~ Minnie Estelle Miller 2011 Minnie Estelle Miller
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Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'. . Wole Soyinka
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No voting on who gets to be people. N.K. Jemisin
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Those who object to human rights protection laws typically do so because they want to be above those laws. Christina Engela
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Rights are honored only in the breach. most people don't get agents or cops assigned to them until they're already raped or dead. Patricia Cornwell
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Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx. Adam Hochschild
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We’re currently faced with two entirely different challenges — facing down Islamism and jihadism on the one hand, and advancing human rights and democratic culture on the other. Maajid Nawaz
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Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents. Ramez Naam
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The simple truth is that every human being should be born with basic human rights without suffering from discrimination. Leta B.
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The irony of the present day is, the more human rights jurisprudence seems to be fortified, the more there are human rights violations in newer and newer forms and some recidivism all due to the conflicting deductions of protecting even human rights of offenders. No doubts offenders deserve their rights to be protected but in cases of serious offenses such as ‘rape’ where the offender consciously commits the act while being aware of the justice system in his particular country, prefers to cross the precincts of the law. Worst still, is increasing crime rate of offenses such as rape committed against children and infants. Henrietta Newton Martin
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Do the words 'human rights' even exist in this country anymore? Mamoru Oshii
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Thus there is a need for analogical process of deduction of laws and rules in the decision making process by the UN at this juncture, where the world is facing innumerable human rights violation (reported and unreported) pretermitting antithetical implementation of what each nation or any disputing party understands, in its own misinterpreted version of international laws. There is a need for world comity. Henrietta Newton Martin
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It must be instilled in man that ‘peace’ is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights. Henrietta Newton Martin
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The irony of the present day is, that, the more human rights jurisprudence seems to be fortified, the more there are human rights violations in newer and newer forms and some recidivism all due to the conflicting deductions of protecting even human rights of offenders. No doubt offenders deserve their rights to be protected, but in cases of serious offenses such as ‘rape’ where the offence is proved beyond all reasonable doubt against the offender and where the offender consciously commits the act while being aware of the justice system in his particular country and prefers to cross the precincts of the law, the question of a lighter punishment vis-a vis the gravity of the offence is a big question. Henrietta Newton Martin
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There is no Zionism except the rescue of Jews. Golda Meir
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To disrespect a person made in the image and likeness of God is a lot worse than desecrating a flag. We should be offended and repulsed in the same way when God's image bearers are desecrated — abused, beaten, neglected, discriminated against, and not loved and taken care of as they should be. James MacDonald
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If a rare golden heart is sacrificed in the process of trying to research or help many, then the world loses. Leta B.
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Until we align our minds with our souls, we will continue to grieve for our highest selves as individuals, a society, and as a world family. Leta B.
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Prejudice is poison in the veins of the world. Leta B.
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The character of society coincides with how we treat our most vulnerable members of society. Leta B.
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Every precious human being born should have the right to live, love, and maximize his or her potential without suffering from discrimination. Leta B.
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To every person who has never experienced genuine love and kindness, may you still have the strength to find the love and light that exists within your soul to give, thrive, and shine. Leta B.
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First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered. Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me. Then they came to take homosexuals, and I was relieved, because they were annoying me. Then they came to take the Communists, and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me, and there was nobody left to protest. Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller . Bertolt Brecht
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The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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We can be of many nations, but earth is our land. We can be of many races, but we are just one clan. Ricardo Derose
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Every child born in the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is this new to him as it was to the first that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind. Thomas Paine
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A human rights activist is the worst type of person to mess with. If I can choose an enemy between the worst finance CEO, or the worst human rights violating dictator, and a human rights activist, I would choose the former. A human rights activist doesn't let go; doesn't have a peace of mind till responsibility for a wrongful act is finally reached. That's the uncomfortable type of person that cannot stand injustice, the type of person that doesn't fear "social desirability" sanctions for confronting wrongdoers directly, upsetting the silence and the status quo, and for screaming loud. That's the person that dares to stand up -- for themselves, for others. That's the type of person who doesn't lay low, doesn't fear being perceived as uncomfortable, the type of person that doesn't just "go along". I do not want as an enemy a person who cannot let go and forget injustice, but who instead will plug away till the very end, till justice is reached. I do not want that man or woman as an enemy. Iveta Cherneva
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All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them. . Thomas Jefferson
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The question, he (Lincoln) said over and over, is not what a man's particular abilities may be, but what his rights are as a human being made in God's image. Elton Trueblood
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By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality. Mary Midgley
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We must dilute and disperse all forms of concentrated power that refuse to be accountable to majority wishes. Bryant McGill
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Sexual rights are not only a basic element of human rights but should have an integral part in moves towards Arab reform ... Brian Whitaker
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Ah, my dear friend Hassim, seems our paths cross once again, how fortunate for this humble Sheik.” As Abdullah spoke in his usual self deprecating manner I realized that a favor was on the tip of his tongue and that I was about to be offered a quid-pro-quo. We were sitting crossed legged on large fat pillows with gold fringe. The tent was large with partitions dividing living, sleeping and cooking space. It was made from heavy cotton canvas erected on thick poles in the center giving the structure a peaked circus tent appearance. The women serving us were young, wearing harem pants low on their hips with cropped gauze tops made from sheer silk. Their exposed midriffs were flat and toned, their belly buttons were decorated in precious stones that glittered in the torch light as they moved. They were bare footed with stacks of gold ankle bracelets making the only sound we heard as they kept our glasses filled with fresh sweet tea and our communal serving trays piled high with dates and sugar incrusted sweets of undetermined origin. Abdullah took no notice of these women, his nonchalance intrigued me as I was obviously having trouble keeping my mind focused on the discussion at hand, this was all part of the Arab way, when it came to negotiation they had no peers.“ So my dear friend, tell me, the region is on fire is there a solution?” I spoke in a deliberate and flat tone, little emotion just concern, one friend to another.“ We were shocked by the American response in Egypt and Libya, never had we seen them move so fast with such efficiency. The fall of Gadaffi was unexpected and Mubarak’s fate stunned us; he had been a staunch supporter of the US in this region we fully expected the Obama administration to prop him up one more time, as they had done so many times in the past.” I looked carefully at Abdullah, . Nick Hahn
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Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition. A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain. The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. . Steven Pinker
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It’s not our place to judge the guilt or innocence of the prisoners, Nurse Webster. The sooner you learn that the better. Any other approach just leads to conflicts of duty and undermines the smooth running of the institution. We are here to ensure that the prisoners are dealt with firmly and professionally. It’s up to their lawyers to handle matters pertaining to their sentences. Rachel Dax