“You could say the term ‘never again’ has become the world's most unfulfilled promise. While we have great aspirations, we have failed to create institutions that would absolutely prevent genocide.”
Elisa Massimino
Executive Director, Human Rights Institute, Georgetown Law

“If you study the genocides of the 20th and 21st century, going all the way back to the Armenian genocide in 1915, what you quickly see is there's a pattern to the buildup of these genocides. There are markers that we have learned to look for to begin to predict when these genocides might take place.”
Alexa Koenig
Executive Director, Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law

“Right now there are over a million and a half Uyghurs that are being held in forced labor camps. There's forced sterilization, they’re not allowed to give their prayers.”
Congressman Tom Suozzi
New York

“Millions of Uyghurs disappeared into industrial scale concentration camps that the Chinese have built. The world has not seen anything like it at this scale since the Holocaust. There is pervasive surveillance starting from collection of waste samples, face samples, DNA, and then they start handing out ID cards and your facial recognition is embedded in that ID card.”
Nury Turkel
Attorney, author, “No Escape: The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs”

“There's a very clear personality profile that we have seen with many of these authoritarian leaders. Unfortunately, we're seeing a whole new wave of authoritarian leaders rise across the globe.”
Alexa Koenig
Executive Director, Human Rights Center, Berkeley School of Law

“The trauma that's associated with genocide has ripple effects through generations. And when we think about our own legacy of genocide and of trauma here in the United States, the legacy of slavery, of Native American communities; it's only been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act. These traumas are still raw, and these traumas are something that we are continuing to pass down, both collectively and individually, through our families.”
Alexa Koenig
Executive Director, Human Rights Center, Berkeley School of Law

“It's very important that we understand sexual violence, or issues of sexual autonomy and integrity, as it relates to genocide. The Rwandan genocide was basically comprised of sexual violence and raping Tutsis women prior to killing them. When we think of sexual violence as usually being acts of rape. But when one thinks sexual violence is acts where you're sterilized or acts where re-productivity is prevented, they're all different means of making that population not be able to reproduce itself.”
Patricia Viseur Sellers
Special Advisor for Gender for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court

“As a young child who saw war and saw devastation first hand, and then also experienced the trauma of a torture survivor in my home, I know physically that it affected me. I would get the shakes. I would have nightmares severely where I thought people were going to come into our house and kill all of my family members, and I was going to be the only one left, like over and over and over again.”
Nahid Abunama-Elgadi
Activist

“Those occurrences and experiences that traumatized people years ago are passed down, even in our bones and in our genetics, and pass through to subsequent generations. I want to hear the truth about what slavery did to black people. I want to hear the truth about how slavery benefited white people. We never really have a chance as black people, I think, unless we're very intentional to help that trauma and that pain and the negative mental health impacts dissipate.”
Dr. M. Alfiee Breland-Noble
Psychologist, AAKOMA Project

“We have to care about human rights. When you see the rise of hate speech or the rise of hate crimes or persecution of a particular group of people. That's a warning sign. The world community needs to say that's not acceptable.” 
Congressman Jim McGovern
Massachusetts

“Where we see evil, where we see genocide, where we see oppression. And where we see assault upon whole communities. We have a moral obligation to speak out.”
Congresswoman Bonnie Coleman Watson
New Jersey

“To think of ‘never again’ as an unattainable goal is the wrong way to look at it. Never again comes from the experience of the Jews after World War II, and it's a vow. The vow is to fight and to do what can be done.”
Todd Buchwald
Ambassador, Office of Criminal Justice, U.S. State Department

“When we speak about genocide. When we fight it. When we legislate against it. We must always remember what it is. And never sanitize it, never reduce it do an abstract concept. That is what was in the minds of the post-war generation of lawyers who drew up the Genocide Convention.” 
Paul Mason
Journalist, author, “How To Stop Fascism”