The UN may not be very effective but I am a fan of the idea of the United Nations. I have been there, I know the problems. To parody Winston Churchill: It is the worst system, except we don't have any other.

Feel empowered. And if you start to do it, if you start to feel your voice heard, you will never go back.

I felt when I was elected that the most important task on this island [Ireland] was to extend the hand of friendship right across the board to the people of Northern Ireland, to have the beginnings of a real peace process. In consequence, although I have no role in intergovernmental talks or political discussions, that would be my very top priority.

I can see the immense capacity of business to give leadership.

Using human rights commitments more effectively, either as part of negotiations in the WTO or as part of the trade policy review process, poses issues of equality in a practical venue.

We need a more holistic approach in which we take account of society's most vulnerable sectors. We shouldn't just do broad averaging of country statistics but rather we need to disaggregate the data to determine where the resources are most needed. In most cases, it's usually the reverse: those who are most marginalized - minorities and rural and remote communities - get the least attention and money.

The term 'human rights' has been too often associated with conditionality, and with concerns of developing countries that in order to benefit from open trade they would be required to implement immediately labour and environmental standards of a comparable level to those applied in industrialised countries. At the same time, debates about the primacy of trade as against human rights legal codes have contributed to maintaining the unfortunate impression that the two bodies of law are pursuing incompatible aims.