UN Days January - March
Individuals and groups can help to make UN Days much more effective through meditation and prayer. On this site there is a meditation in support of the UN Days and information on ways to participate in the UN Days & Years Meditation Initiative
Here you will find information on the UN designated Days for January, February and March 2008. Information provided includes some background, links to the UN site on the Day (where such a site exists), together with key thoughts for reflection.
27 January
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF COMMEMORATION TO HONOUR THE VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST
In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution rejecting any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event and condemning "without reserve" all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, whenever they occur.
In this resolution January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, was declared an international day. Member States were urged to develop educational programmes to instil the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again, and requested the United Nations Secretary-General to establish an outreach programme on the "Holocaust and the United Nations", as well as measures to mobilize civil society for Holocaust remembrance and education, in order to help prevent future acts of genocide.
See the United Nations site for the Holocaust Outreach Programme and Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's statement for the Day in 2008
21 February
INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY
Preserving endangered languages is a vital part of securing the culture and heritage of our rich human landscape. Language keeps traditions alive, it inspires knowledge and respect about our past and the planet on which we live, and it links communities across borders and beyond time. Since the year 2000 International Mother Language Day has been observed by UNESCO, and by groups around the world.
Find out more from the Count Me In Calendar , the Dag Hammarskjold Library and the UN Works site.
8 MARCH
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY &
UNITED NATIONS DAY FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Year 2008 Theme: Financing for gender equality
International Women's Day is celebrated by women's groups around the world and is a national holiday in many countries. It has been marked by the United Nations as the Day for Women's Rights and International Peace since 1977.
Few causes promoted by the United Nations have generated more intense and widespread support than the campaign to promote and protect the equal rights of women. The Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was the first international agreement to proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right. Since then, the Organization has helped create a historic legacy of internationally agreed strategies, standards, programmes and goals to advance the status of women worldwide.
Over the years, United Nations action for the advancement of women has taken four clear directions: promotion of legal measures; mobilization of public opinion and international action; training and research, including the compilation of gender desegregated statistics; and direct assistance to disadvantaged groups. Today a central organizing principle of the work of the United Nations is that no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women.
[UN Dept of Public Information]
As the above clearly demonstrates, the Feminine is on the rise in human consciousness and this key festival is widely celebrated around the world. In our time the rights of women, and the rights of children nourished by women, are key issues in every modern society.
For further information see the United Nations WomenWatch site on the Day. See also the UN Cyber School Bus International Women's Day site, and the UK site internationalwomensday.com.
Key thought for reflection:
Have you listened to your heart? Does it beat in rhythm with the Perfect Heart which embraces all of you? ... Let woman affirm this great symbol, which can transfigure the whole of life. Let her strive to transmute the spiritual life of mankind.
The mother, the life-giver, the life-protector - let her become also the Mother, the Leader, the All-Giver, the All-Receiver.
Helena Roerich, Woman
21 MARCH
INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL
DISCRIMINATION
&
21 - 27 MARCH
WEEK OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLES STRUGGLING AGAINST RACISM AND RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually on 21 March. On that day, in 1960, police opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration in Sharpeville, South Africa, against the apartheid "pass laws". Proclaiming the Day in 1966, the General Assembly called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.
Kofi Annan has spoken of March 21st as "a day to celebrate the many steps the world has taken to free itself from racial hatred", and he has also referred to it as "a day to reflect on the challenges that remain, and our commitment to overcoming them".
In the past fifty years much has been done to transform the attitudes and values lying at the heart of racial discrimination. The law has been changed in many countries to make discrimination illegal, and Race Relations Commissions co-ordinate programmes to try to eliminate discrimination. Yet still racism persists as one of the prime diseases of the separative consciousness – an ancient thoughtform in need of transformation.
This important international day reminds us of the work that is needed in all societies to build an awareness of human unity, and to render unacceptable, behaviour based on any sense of racial superiority or separation. The challenge of our time is to foster the ethics of human unity.
See the Office of the High Commisioner for Human Rights and the UN Dag Hammarskjold Library site for a range of links on the Day.
Key thoughts for reflection:
The beauty of the present situation is that even in the smallest community a practical expression of what is needed on a worldwide scale is offered to the inhabitants; differences in families, in churches, in municipalities, in cities, in nations, between races and internationally all call for the same objective and for the same process of adjustment: the establishing of right human relations. The technique or method to bring this about remains everywhere the same: the use of the spirit of goodwill.
Alice Bailey
Tolerance is indispensable for peaceful relations in any society. When it is transmuted into the more active attribute of mutual respect, the quality of relationships is distinctly raised. Mutual respect therefore offers a basis for making a plural society -which is what the global neighbourhood is - not only stable but one that values and is enriched by its diversity....
The world community should reassert the importance of tolerance and respect for 'the other': respect for other people, other races, other beliefs, other sexual orientations, other cultures. It must be resolute in upholding these values and offering protection against the actions of those who would trample them. The guiding principle should be that all groups and individuals have a right to live as they see fit so long as they do not violate the coequal rights and liberties of others.
From: Our Global Neighbourhood: The Report
of the Commission on Global Governance.
22 MARCH
WORLD WATER DAY
Year 2008 Theme: Sanitation
World Day for Water was first observed in 1993. It seeks to raise public awareness, and focus attention on the vital need to protect and conserve water resources and supplies of drinking water. In 2008 the Day will focus on the theme of the 2008 International Year theme: sanitation.
Water, one of the four natural elements, is a necessity of life. Throughout the ages it has been regarded as a symbol of purity. In all religions water has deep significance.
Yet today there are not millions of people, but billions (2.4 billion people to be exact, or one-sixth of the world’s population) who do not have access to clean water. And the same number of people are without access to even a simple latrine. One of the most successful agreements to come out of the Johannesburg Earth Summit was a commitment (with funding for special programmes) to meet the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. People of goodwill need to be aware of this situation so they can keep up pressure on governments to ensure that the commitments made at Johannesburg are kept.
There is further information on the Day on the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre World Water Day site and the UN World Water Day Site.
Key thought for reflection:
A stream, bubbling merrily over the stones, forms countless inner surfaces and tiny vortices, which are all sense organs open to the cosmos, and which perceive the course of events in the heavens. Water passes on the 'impressions" it has received wherever it is absorbed by the earth and the plants, by the animals and man. In moving water the earthly world thus allows the ever changing life in the universe of the stars to flow into the course of its own life....
Water flows and streams on the earth as ceaselessly as the stream of time itself. It is the fundamental melody that forever accompanies life in all its variations. Unremittingly it belabours the solid earth, grinding, milling, destroying, levelling out, and at the same time elsewhere building up again, creating anew, preparing for life. As the life blood of the earth, in the great network of veins, it shifts unbelievable amounts of substance, which everywhere accompany the life processes of the earth and its creatures. In a ceaseless process it transforms the hardest rocks and the highest mountains into a flowing, finely ground stream of substance, and it dissolves finished forms, preparing them for new creation. Water is thus the great exchanger and transformer of substances in all forms of metabolism. Constantly dissolving and solidifying, washing away and re-forming, in perpetual transformation, water is ever-lastingly creating the organism of the earth planet. Is it not as though the stream of time itself becomes visible to physical eyes in this perpetual activity of water? Water always proves stronger than anything too solidly anchored in space, continually leading it back into the stream of time, of living development.
Theodor Schwenk
23 MARCH
WORLD METEOROLOGICAL DAY
World Meteorological Day marks the formation, in 1950, of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has called the WMO "the original networker" because the agency is based on a strong programme of networking and co-operation between national Meteorological services - today 185 member countries contribute to and benefit from this process.
In his message for the World Meteorological Day 2007, WMO Secretary-General, Mr. M. Jarraud, notes:
During the last decades, significant changes were detected in the polar environment, such as a decrease in the perennial sea ice, the melting of some glaciers and permafrost and a decrease in river and lake ice. These changes, which are even more evident in the Arctic than in the Antarctic, have been subject to considerable study. The 2001 Third Assessment Report of the WMO co-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that the Earth’s global mean surface temperature increased by approximately 0.6°C over the 20th century. The Report further estimates that globally averaged surface temperatures would be rising by 1.4 to 5.8oC over the period 1990-2100. Overall, the IPCC has estimated that, by the year 2100, sea-level will have increased between 9 cm and 88 cm, which would pose a very significant problem for many Small Island Developing States and, in general, for all low-lying areas of the world. Currently, the IPCC is in the process of preparing its Fourth Assessment Report, which will be released during 2007.
Shrinking of sea ice might induce serious changes in marine ecosystems, thereby affecting marine mammals and the vast krill populations that feed countless seabirds, seals and whales. Permafrost is also sensitive to long-term atmospheric warming, so there is likely to be a progressive thawing of the frozen grounds around the Arctic, accompanied by the expansion of wetlands and the potential for considerable damage to supported buildings and infrastructure. This melting would also have implications for the carbon cycle through the release of one of the major greenhouse gases, methane, which is trapped within the permafrost.
Climate affects the thinking, and the moods of people – and, many spiritual traditions suggest, the thinking of people en masse affects the climate. For the first time on a global level, it is now recognised that there is a need to alter the way we think and behave in order to offset the serious affects of climate change.
For further information see the WMO site.
Key thought for reflection:
After an orange cloud - formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents - reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all travelling in the same boat.
Vladimir Kovalyonok, cosmonaut
25 MARCH
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE OF THE VICTIMS OF SLAVERY AND THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
The Transatlantic slave trade lasted for 4 centuries. Only one in six of all slaves brought from Africa survived the journey or the work they were forced to do.
In the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon this unparalleled global tragedy was one of the greatest atrocities in history.
In December 2007 the UN General Assembly proclaimed March 25 as an annual day to remember the victims of the trade.
The purpose of this Day is to honour the memory of those who died as a result of slavery as well as those who have been exposed to the horrors of the middle passage and have fought for freedom from enslavement. In addition, it is a day to discuss the causes, consequences, and lessons of the transatlantic slave trade in order to raise awareness about the dangers of racism and prejudice.
More information at the UN site for the Day.
