Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice - Softcover

One of the most inspiring women of our age, Mary Robinson has spent her life in pursuit of a fairer world, becoming a powerful and influential voice for human rights around the globe. Displaying a gift for storytelling and remembrance, Robinson reveals, in Everybody Matters, what lies behind the vision, strength, and determination that made her path to prominence as compelling as any of her achievements.

As an activist lawyer, she won landmark cases advancing the causes of women and marginalized people against the prejudices of the day, and in her twenty years in the Irish Senate she promoted progressive legislation, including the legalizing of contraception. In l990, she shocked the political system by becoming Ireland's first woman president, redefining the role and putting Ireland firmly on the international stage. In her role as UN High Commissioner for human rights, beginning in 1997, she won acclaim for bringing attention to victims worldwide but was often frustrated both by the bureaucracy and by the willingness to compromise on principle. Now back in Ireland and heading her Mary Robinson Foundation--Climate Justice, she has found the independence she needs to work effectively on behalf of the millions of poor around the world most affected by climate change.

Told with the same calm conviction and modest pride that has guided her life, Everybody Matters will instill anyone who reads it with the belief that each of us can, in our own way, help to change the world for the better.

Mary Robinson served as the seventh, and first female, president of Ireland from 1990-1997, and as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002. Robinson has been honorary president of Oxfam International since 2002, and has chaired numerous bodies, including the GAVI Alliance, vaccinating children worldwide, and the Council of Women World Leaders (of which she was a cofounder). She is a member of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela. A member of the American Philosophical Society, she is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Indira Gandhi and Sydney Peace Prizes. She is president of the Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice, and lives with her husband, Nick Robinson, in Dublin and Mayo.