Our organization is committed to the universality of human rights. Human rights are inherent and inalienable for everybody erverywhere in the world – without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status (art. 1 and 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

Usually a veto is used to stop an official action. In the context of human rights we believe that human rights have a higher status than any national law and say VETO! to any kind of violation, restriction and discrimination. That’s how our name was born!

With the exclamation mark we want to underline the importance and the sustainability of our task to put up a veto whenever one is needed, believing that the protection of human rights is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace (Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The hand (or a bird?) inside the last character ‘O’ of VETO! is the Universal Logo for Human Rights which was created during a worldwide competition starting in May 2011. It was chosen by an international jury among 15.375 logo submissions from over 190 countries.

We use the Universal Logo for Human Rights to support the idea of the initiators that the logo ” is now available to everyone at no cost as an open source product for the promotion and protection of human rights.” Our organization wants to ensure this logo is seen by as many people around the world as possible, helping to spread its message, which is why we chose to combine it to our name and logo. veto! sees itself as a network, linked to other organizations in the human rights defenders’ family in the world.

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• Human rights logo