Mr. Spe
aker, I rise to pay tribute to the heroic memory
of Vaclav Havel, an inspirational colleague and friend for over 30 years, the architect of charter 77, the human rights manifesto that inspired not only the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, but the march of democracy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and more recently, charter 08 of human rights defenders in China, whose words and writings moved and mobilized the powerless as they exposed and brought down the politburos of the powerful, who chaired a dissidents gathering five years ago that
...[+++] inspired prospective dissidents of the Arab awakening, who wrote movingly and compellingly of the responsibility to protect, not only in terms of the responsibility to prevent, but the responsibility to remember, le devoir de memoir, as he wrote recently in the introduction to a book I co-edited, The Responsibility to Protect.
Monsieur le Président, je tiens à saluer l'héroïsme de Vaclav Havel, un collègue et ami qui, pendant plus de 30 ans, fut une source d'inspiration. Il fut l'architecte de la charte 77, un manifeste des droits de la personne qui a inspiré non seulement la révolution de velours, en Tchécoslovaquie, mais aussi le mouvement démocratique de l'Europe de l'Est et de l'Union soviétique, et plus récemment, la charte 08, un manifeste publié en Chine par des défenseurs des droits de la personne.
