Democratic 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.

When a genocidal killing occurs, as happened in Rwanda, it is not just an internal domestic matter.

There 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.

We need to be prepared to have multi-stakeholder, well-managed partnerships. That can be very effective. We saw this happen at international level with the UN Convention on Landmines, for example, where some governments didn't want to go forward, but enough governments did and with them many NGOs. At international level we need to see this as the 21st century way of doing things.

It is necessary to ensure that the requirement to combat terrorism is not used to clamp down on freedom of expression, legitimate dissent, freedom of association and so on.

I 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.

Christian fundamentalists seek to roll back women's right to choose in the United States, and then also insist that money against Aids must not go to organisations that help people obtain their reproductive rights. These are extremely worrying trends.