A Quote by Sekou Odinga
This country maintains that there is no political prisoners, that everybody is criminals, but it's just not true.
Related Quotes
The U.S. government does not recognize the existence of political prisoners in our country. The identity of political prisoners is concealed and, consequently, their right to justice is denied.
Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.
There are no 'political prisoners' as such in Bahrain. People are not arrested because they express their views, we only have criminals.
My sense, and I'm sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that. Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It's a curious thing.
We wish to be treated 'not as ordinary prisoners,' for we are not criminals. We admit no crime - unless, that is, the love of one's people and country is a crime.
There should be no political prisoners in a democratic country.
We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.
There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.
I'm sure that those - well, I know for a fact that the prisoners, the political prisoners in the federal system, is asking [Barack Obama] for clemency or for some kind of release.
These 2.3 million prisoners, somehow we've convinced ourselves that's normal and rational, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, more than one per cent of the adult population, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada or any Western European country.
The question of crime is one of concern to everybody. But the position is that the security forces in our country for the last four decades did not concentrate on suppressing crime. Their main objective was to suppress, to crush political activity. And in the process, crime grew to unacceptable proportions. And criminals were able to form powerful syndicates, and they virtually took over the control of the life of the community in certain areas.
As our country bled . . . its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners.
The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
I'm fighting for real change, not just partisan change where everybody else gets rich but you. I'm fighting all of us across the country are fighting for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media donor political complex that's bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by, and for the people.
It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
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