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seminar on democracy in the coming weeks, motivated by Lula’s situation. The seminar was the suggestion of Dominique de Villepin, who was French foreign minister and prime minister during the government of [President Jacques] Chirac. Villepin is a republican in the French sense, a democrat, but he isn’t a man of the Left. He recently said to me, ‘The world misses Brazil,’ because Brazil was bringing a soft power that isn’t only for its own benefit. As soon as we put our house in order… sure, it is clear that we need to stop cutting down the Amazon
grounds of morality and human society. For example, the Czech President Václav Havel wrote that the action ‘happened . . . out of respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states . . . for human rights’. 85 And the French President Jacques Chirac spoke of ‘une conscience universelle de ce que sont les Droits de l’Homme’. 86