desire to reveal the truth". Maguire has also earned a degree from the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin. She works with various interchurch and interfaith organizations and is a councilor with the International Peace Council. She is also a Patron of the Methodist Theological College, and of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education. In April 2019 Maguire collected the 2019 GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information on behalf of Julian Assange who was at the time imprisoned by the United Kingdom. United States Maguire is an outspoken critic of U.S. and British policy in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has also been personally critical of U.S. President Barack Obama's leadership. Her activism in the U.S. has occasionally brought her into confrontations with the law. After initially accepting an invitation to a 2012 Nobel summit in Chicago, she changed her mind because the event was hosted by the U.S. State Department, "and to me the Nobel Peace laureates should not be hosted by a State Department that is continuing with war, removing basic civil liberties and human rights and international law and then talking about peace to young people. That's a double standard". Maguire said in a 2013 interview that ever since her 40-day fast and arrest outside the White House in 2003 (see below), "whenever I now come into America, I'm always questioned as to what my background is". In 2015, Maguire spoke with Democracy Now in a sit-down interview titled, "No to Violence, Yes to Dialogue", which included two other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Jody Williams and Leymah Gbowee. Maguire discussed the desire "to end militarism and war, and to build peace and international law and human rights and democracy". Iraq and Afghanistan Maguire voiced strong opposition to the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, which is alleged by some to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, calling them "unjust and inhuman", "a new kind of bomb", and "even more cruel than weapons". During a visit to Baghdad with Argentinian colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in March 1999, Maguire urged then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to end the bombing of Iraq and to permit the lifting of U.N. sanction. "I have seen children dying with their mothers next to them and not being able to do anything", Maguire said. "They