Post-genocide Rwanda has managed to implement a good universal health insurance scheme that covers a large proportion of the population. This came about because of the severity of the country's problems and the resulting high proportion of women in the parliament and among professional caregivers, which had a positive effect on policy.
Mary RobinsonWhen globalisation means that many of the services that individual governments used to have direct power over are privatised, in education and health, even prison services, nonetheless national sovereignty still needs to be exercised.
Mary RobinsonDemocratic governments are not delivering on their promises, which is partly due to the fact that governments are less powerful than they were after the Second World War. There were fewer governments then, but they actually had more political power.
Mary RobinsonWe will not let governments off the hook. We will look to civil society to help us, to pin governments, to what they have committed to here. And we will report on it.
Mary RobinsonThere are numerous issues that governments used to deal with that they now no longer deal with to the same extent: Prisons have been privatized in a number of countries; education and health are becoming privatized. Governments don't have the capacity to deliver - or not in isolation.
Mary RobinsonI believe we should try to move away from the vocabulary and attitudes which shape the stereotyping of developed and developing country approaches to human rights issues. We are collective custodians of universal human rights standards, and any sense that we fall into camps of "accuser" and "accused" is absolutely corrosive of our joint purposes. The reality is that no group of countries has any grounds for complacency about its own human rights performance and no group of countries does itself justice by automatically slipping into the "victim" mode.
Mary Robinson