Moynihan's law

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former Senator (D-NY) and United Nations Ambassador under Gerald Ford, said regarding allegations of human rights abuses: "The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country."

In other words, countries in which human rights are most severely violated are those where no freedom of speech or press is permitted. Also, complaints tend to be a direct function of the possibility of redress.