Thank you very much. It is my great honor to introduce this remarkable panel on a topic that is at the very core of everything that the Carter Center does. The norstar for this organization forever and ever will be human rights because that has been the norstar for my grandparents for ever and ever and we are honored to do that. Many of these people have been introduced to you. I will introduce you say prop introducing many very unique way for the first time ever. I would like to introduce you to jonathans greatgrandfather. That is the easiest applause line of the whole day. And in all seriousness, we are all thrilled that you are here and we are excited that you have devoted your life to human rights and all of us as we discussed yesterday are doing our very best to ensure that that incredible, incredible legacy on this particular issue is preserved forever. Thank you very much and welcome to president carter. Jonathans greatgrandfather. Another person who needs no introduction is fritz mondale, he was the 42nd Vice President of the United States and served with my favorite president of all time and, i think, you can see this morning at breakfast that the relationship that these two great leaders have is one that is perhaps unique in history. They are great friends and have an enormous amount of respect for each other and the way that they are getting to hang out today is a treat for both of them. Thank you very much for that. Karen ryan is the Senior Advisor for human rights on women and girls at the Carter Center and has been there in various aspects since 1988 assisting on human rights issues as i said human rights is the heart and soul of the Carter Center in all of this first asked and karen has been the heart and soul of that throughout this time. It is a giant treat to have karen here and i know youve heard from her before. We also are blessed to john meacham here is a Pulitzer Prize biographer and contributor to time and new york time review. Those are print periodicals. He is professor of university and he is from chattanooga and there is a significant border dispute between georgia and tennessee. He is from north georgia which is nice. You are obviously not running this year. Im not running into the sea. He has embarked on a project in addition to the numerous books that he has written and have been bestsellers and is last year published a book called the soul of america the bowels for better angels and that project, i think it belongs well in this group and might be better to introducing them to you i will introduce them to you which is to say this is a group of people who share your desire to find out what it is and to remember what it is that our country is based on and we believe the Carter Center has a special place there, my grandparents have been a part of that into the heart and soul of this country and human rights forever. What we will do as we get ready, he is ready for the spotlight again. We are going to have a Panel Discussion and there is a video we will show very briefly that highlights the work that the Carter Center supports. As i said yesterday the Carter Center has done its very best to focus not on ideals only, but ideals as put into practice and support people on the ground every day are fighting the battle for human rights in their own community and these examples are remarkable. You will hear more about them. I will show the video briefly and john will direct the rest of the panel. Once we get here we will let them go for while and we will cut it off after we have had too many questions. First the video. Thank you for coping here. [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] [ music ] thank you all and i am the diversity as the tennessean here and i appreciate it very much so the only reason we are here is because of mrs. Carter. Thank you. I know thats the reason you got this far. I want to start with a little bit of what is happening right now and interested, mister president , in your views what is happening at the border with the family situation and what you think ordinary americans can do about it. Every day we send this great signal around the world that this is what the United States stands for is torture and kidnapping of children andthousands of unknown children that are still incarcerated. I think what they are doing under the direct orders of the president is a disgrace to the United States and maybe not until 2020 election. Im not sure. Either then or before that. Would be just a basic political activism you would advised people who are worried about it . Get in and try to change the president . If everyone in the United States would take the same position that the Carter Center does and promote human rights for the number one basic measurement of how governments are performing that would be the best thing to do. What we do is apply human rights in the most precise way we can and as fulfilling as we can for the universal declaration as is humanly possible and basic human rights standards and actual diplomacy and in everyday life. I hope all of americans will take this on. Bucket what would a Carter Mondale administration, how would the administration have reacted to the murder by saudi arabia of the journalists . I hope and i believe we would have demanded a complete accounting of how high up the order came from. As you know they sent about 15 people to the embassy where he was destined to be and scheduled to be and they killed him, cut him up in pieces and buried him in an unknown place and that could only have been done under orders from some of the highest people in the government. I would demand an accounting for that. We always tried, when i was president , to put human rights as a measuring stick. We didnt always succeed. One more and we will dive in. Russia has been proven or by our Intelligence Community to have interfered with one of our human rights which is the right of free and fair elections. How should we deal with russia clicks bucket the president should condemn it and admit it happened which 16 intelligence agencies have agreed and there is no doubt that they interfered in the election and i think the enter parents although not yet defied fully invested would show he didnt actually went so the election and he was put into office because of russian interference. Do you believe he is an illegitimate president . Based on what i just said which i cant retract. Lets talk about Eleanor Roosevelt. That to me is news. Talk about your interest in human rights. Given both your background in the segregated south and your International Experience in the navy and it into your public career. I grew up in a Little Village which had about 50 families, farm families. My family was the only one that was white, all the rest were africanamerican and i grew up completely immersed in an africanamerican culture and i can see as a little child that there is a great distinction between white and black. My mother was a registered nurse and she never paid any attention to racial distinctions. She treated everyone was the same. She was part of the medical establishment. I grew up in that environment and later became chairman of the board of education and i demanded that the other Board Members go with me to visit the schools and to see what was going on there. We found that the black kids were going to school as close to where they lived because they didnt have school buses. White kids have school buses and black kids diff didnt and the africanamerican kids got and down textbooks and later, on our own board of education insisted africanamericans get school buses so when they finally got school buses everybody that saw the school bus with no it was being done in a segregated way. That is how i grew up in a culture that was completely segregated. I went into the navy when i was 18 i went to georgia tech into the Naval Academy and i was in the submarine force in 1948 and harry truman and whom i still think is the best president in my lifetime. He ordained that racial segregation be abolished and it went into effect because he commanded it and because of that i thought an easy transition in my submarine and the other ships around me and how much benefit it brought to everybody and fellow citizens and officers and being treated equally. That was a very good seven or eight years before Martin Luther king became famous or before rosa parks and seven or eight years earlier harry truman started the desegregation of america. Stuck in your religious upbringing mustve been essential. To my father was a sunday School Teacher and the sermon on the mounthe spells out the essence of what is known as universal human rights. The proper relationship between powerful and the weak and and gentiles between men and women and everyone should be treated equally and that was the foundation of what Eleanor Roosevelt did andwhen the United States has gone through the religions and the essence of what the primary ethical is andthat has never happened before or since and im afraid that they are being basically abandoned in many ways from around the world. The Carter Center is fighting against that abandonment. When you are running for president , did you know that the human rights agenda would be as central if you got there . There is a general sigh of relief in america than that finally we have resolved the race issue. We had gotten over years of slavery and 100 years of official discrimination and we breathed a sigh of relief that lately developing in the white house and other places has become a very burning issue again and a great deal of discrimination and racial animosity that has evolved again and come to the forefront. One of the demonstrations of that is not only be quite africanamericans and white peoplealso at the border the way you assume someone is trying to come in like my grandparents did many years ago. That discrimination against newcomers and relieved from persecution is an indication of a serious human rights mistake in our country that is being propagated worldwide and every country on earth. We are opposed to some basic human rights and without being embarrassed about it. One of the things you hear and i disagree with this is when people say about the current moment, this is not who we are. It kind of is. It is. We are southerners, faulkner was right the past is never dead is not even past and isnt it really and when i look at your work i think about europe and an army on the right side of this in this perennial struggle between our better angels and our worst instincts and it is never on this side of paradise going to be resolved so is it fair to think, is there a benefit to the country to our being more honest about our worst instincts . It is parts of the american character and our struggle is to make them add to the flow . That is part of our political situation and the fact is in the past overcoming slavery and Racial Discrimination and it was officially abolished and it is a way for the United States to correct this longstanding mistake. Sometimes it is not easy for us to do and it takes a lot of altercation. We are having a war of political factions and i would say that in general the Democratic Party is now standing on the side of presenting the finest aspect of america concerning civil rights to the world and i hope it will continue to show everybody in the United States and around the world is equal to everybody else not only as human beings but also in the eyes of god. Mister Vice President , we talked about 1948 which is a huge Inflection Point in the formation of the human rights question, you have the declaration and you have the breakup of the Democratic Party after your fellow minnesotans of the party had to walk out of the shadows and into the sunlight which sent Strom Thurmond back to the south pretty fast. Can you talk about your upbringing in minnesota and how you were shaped in these questions and when you signed on with president carter, did you know this was a lifetime gig . I do now. While our upbringings were different, a lot of similarities. My dad was a farmer and then administer. He was a devout methodist, he would give three sermons every sunday morning. And i would go to sunday School Wednesday night prayer and i would sweep and cleanup the church. That was my religious leadership. Stuck wasnt bad preparation for the Vice President. [ laughter ] you are not being helpful. Sorry. I will be quiet now. Stuck one of the things i found about our years together is how much the background moves us to Work Together even without anyone briefing. I think even though his background in the south was different in fundamental ways was very similar. We had more than 100 years without a southern president until jimmy carter and the idea was that he stood for civil rights and one of the great contributions in our country and in the world was his personal courage and that small town in southern georgia standing up for civil rights when it was not the thing to do and then going into the white house and speaking out for human rights and filling in the blanks of what america should do as the leader in the world in human rights. It was my privilege over those four years to try to work with the president as he led us in this remarkable direction which set a precedent which is not perfectly complied with say, but it made a difference which still has a big effect in the world. When you think back is there something you would point back to as a case study . I thought the boat people issue was a good example of human rights leadership. The Chinese Government decided to push their citizens of chinese, ethnic origin out to see and many of them lost their life as a result and president carter tried to intervene in a positive way to provide an alternative for the people to live a decent life. There were 12,000 a month of refugees you might say from there. A lot of them were drowning at sea and we got the navy to pick these people up. It wasnt a very popular thing at the time. I think it proved to be a great step forward because the first thing these poor people in the boats saw was the American Navy trying to help them and set them on a new way. That was his leadership. When you went up to the hill to talk to your former colleague about these kinds of issues, did they get it . Some of them dead and some of them still havent gotten it. We had pretty good support on the hill. In both parties. As one of the positive memories i have of that time, we spent a lot of timethe main thing is people are afraid of it and they say, you are right, i know you are right, but i have to get elected and this is not going to be very popular and i remember we got some of them were a couple of them i will vote for you, but i will lose the election and i want president carter to put me on the federal bench afterwards. The jobs broker. And a lot of them ran and lost. I can think of five of them who lost their seats. What about latin america and south america . I think this is where it began with the panama canal. You say what does that have to do with human rights . That was a symbol of colonial rule with the hundred years or more and we would employee the locals and they had no role in policy or the leadership of the program or management of the program. The president went out and said let the people of panama run this program. We will help them. They have the right to come back in if the security is in peril and you know that work very well. It is working well now. And it wasnt going to work. I remember the general in charge of our troop down there said there is no point in trying to stay out here with military force because there is so much anger about us and that has worked and been very successful. We had to go up in the hill and lobby a lot and push a lot and we got it done. Those are beneficial changes in latin america. When we got in office i would say that at least two thirds of those in south america were military dictatorships and the previous president s had been in bed with military dictators because they have a benefit and the general in charge and i took the other way around and implementing human rights and within six or eight years every country in south america was a democracy. That was a profound and very rapid change from one development to another. [ applause ] we are watching around the world and withgiven those threats, those challenges, what effect does that have on human rights agenda and what do you wish ordinary people can do . What can they do to participate in trying to push back against that . The Carter Center under his direction has made a very thorough analysis of what has happened to the human rights on a global basis and as a result of 9 11. The unprovoked attack on the United States and as a result of 9 11 and some of thiswe have been in a work for no more than 15 years in afghanistan. We have also greatly restricted the prophecy of the average american citizen. We have offended some of the principles of human rights geneva convention. So in those ways they would be violators and to be restrained and they have have that lifted and they have become abusers more than they would have because the United States is no longer an example of a champion of human rights. I also they see in the president a cheerleader in this rifling currently in the world. Rhetoric and harshness, all of this is a hateful thrust and we are going to the righ