Helena Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
Helena Ann Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws, LT, KC, FRSA, HonFRSE (born 12 May 1950), is a Scottish barrister, broadcaster, and Labour member of the House of Lords. A Bencher of Gray's Inn, she is President of Justice, the law reform think tank, and a director of the International Bar Association's Institute of Human Rights. She was Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2018.
Quotes
[edit]- This is Schindler's List time. These women were in mortal danger. They were running courts on things like domestic violence and child marriage and many of them locked up [the] Taliban. As soon as [the] Taliban came back they had to flee.
- Cited by Christina Lamb in "Afghan female judges rescued by Baroness Kennedy", The Times (31 October 2021).
- Baroness Kennedy raised more than a £1 million in donations from individuals such as J.K. Rowling to airlift from Afghanistan 500 people (including 103 women who were on the Taliban's "kill list") who were female judges, other endangered women and their families.
- [On the situation for women in Afghanistan after the 2020–2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan] They were not allowed to leave home without a male escort. They were not allowed to go to work. They were not allowed to continue with their education. Their sex became the limitation on what they could do or be. This is true for all women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban reign.
- "Europe faces Schindler’s List moment", The New European (4 November 2021)
- I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying "please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn't get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn't leave at the time, but now they are after me."
- Sometimes they are Afghanis who have worked for us.
Sometimes they are Afghanis of a particular minority called the Hazara, who get slaughtered as soon as the Taliban look at them.- "Baroness tells of 'terrible texts' from trapped Afghan women pleading for help", The Independent (25 June 2003)
Foreword to Nothing But The Truth
[edit]- "Foreword". Politkovskaya, Anna (2011). Nothing But The Truth: Selected Dispatches. Vintage Books, London. pp. ix-xi. ISBN 978-0-099-52668-1
- Her fearlessness in the face of grave danger made her one of the few international journalists whom human rights activists and lawyers held in awe.
- We owed her a debt of gratitude for helping the West reach a far better understanding of the emerging landscape in post-Soviet Russia and for shining a clearer light on the true nature of the occupation of Chechnya, a brutal conflict wilfully misprepresented as Russia's private front in the war on terror. No democracy is worthy of the name if freedom of the press is curtailed or writers and journalists are crushed; yet here was a writer who – at great personal risk – defied state intimidation to speak truth to power.
- As this collection of her writings shows, the reach of her journalism extended far beyond coverage of individual cataclysmic events. She frequently lifted the veil on more systematic inhumanity which did not attract as much international interest. Her tenacious investigations involved dogged correspondence and days sitting in court.
- Anna painted a haunting portrait of Putin's Russia, a country governed by an administration which bore many of the hallmarks of Stalin's; here was a land whose own secret services suppressed civil liberties and where fear stalked universities, newsrooms and every corridor in which democracy might have flourished.
- I remember taking leave of her the night of the award [PEN] and asking whether she might not think of leaving Russia, at least temporarily. She held my hand, smiling, and said, 'Exile is not for me. That way they win'.
