UN General Assembly
1963

82. Now is that wrong? Is there any member, for instance, of the Special Committee of Twenty-Four who would quarrel with what I have said? Yet we in the United Kingdom constantly find ourselves in the dock on matters of colonialism. I hope that from now on —and that is the reason I mentioned this matter to the Assembly today at all— that we can go along with the majority of the United Nations in these colonial matters, for this reason. We have accepted the principle of self-determination without qualification; We have accepted that the majority should rule. We insist, as far as we are able to do before independence, that minorities must be protected. I do not think that any of you would quarrel with that. But if having established the rule of majority, and because of our scrupulous care to safeguard the interest of minorities —because that after all is the essence of democracy— we are going to be put into the dock, then I or the representative of my Government here will stand in the dock with our heads high.