Awareness
International Day of Sign Languages
On 19 December 2017, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 72/161, fixing 23 September as the International Day of Sign Languages — a …
Topic
Awareness
Observances that raise awareness of social causes, human rights and the issues that shape our world.
36 articles
Awareness
World Refugee Day
On 4 December 2000, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 55/76 and fixed 20 June as World Refugee Day, to be observed from 2001 …
Awareness
World Press Freedom Day
On 3 May 1991, a room of African newspaper journalists in Windhoek, the capital of newly independent Namibia, signed a document that ran to barely a …
Awareness
World Freedom Day
At a televised press conference on the evening of 9 November 1989, an East German official named Günter Schabowski was handed a note about new travel …
Awareness
World Elder Abuse Awareness Day
On 15 June 2006, a small ceremony at the United Nations headquarters in New York launched something the international calendar had conspicuously …
Awareness
World Day of Social Justice
On 26 November 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 62/10 and proclaimed 20 February as the World Day of Social Justice, to be …
Awareness
World Day for International Justice
On 17 July 1998, after five weeks of negotiation at a diplomatic conference in Rome, 120 states voted to adopt the Rome Statute — the treaty that …
Awareness
World Day Against Child Labour
On 12 June 2002 the International Labour Organization marked the first World Day Against Child Labour, and it did so with a number rather than a …
Awareness
World Consumer Rights Day
On 15 March 1962, President John F. Kennedy sent a Special Message on Protecting the Consumer Interest to the United States Congress. In it he set out …
Awareness
World Braille Day
A French army captain wanted his soldiers to read orders in the dark without striking a light that would betray them to the enemy. His clumsy system …
Awareness
Womens Equality Day
At eight o’clock on the morning of 26 August 1920, behind the closed doors of his own house in Washington, D.C., the United States Secretary of …
Awareness
Universal Childrens Day
On 20 November 1959, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, ten principles asserting that a child, …
Awareness
Universal Children’s Day
In 1924, in the aftermath of a war that had killed and orphaned children on an industrial scale, the League of Nations adopted a short document …
Awareness
Unesco International Literacy Day
In September 1965, delegates from 88 countries gathered in Tehran for the World Congress of Ministers of Education on the Eradication of Illiteracy. …
Awareness
Undiagnosed Childrens Awareness Day
For a family whose child has spent years in and out of clinics with no name for what is wrong, the most painful word in medicine is sometimes the one …
Awareness
Self-injury Awareness Day
The orange ribbon, the message written in biro along a forearm, the small butterfly drawn on a wrist: the symbols of Self-injury Awareness Day are …
Awareness
Restless Legs Awareness Day
In 1672 the English physician Sir Thomas Willis, the man who first mapped the blood supply of the brain, described patients whose legs grew so …
Awareness
Parental Alienation Awareness Day
In 2005, a woman in Oakville, Ontario, named Sarvy Emo watched a close friend struggle to keep contact with his children after a separation, and …
Awareness
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day
On 22 June 2007, the United States Senate passed a concurrent resolution, S.Con.Res. 40, designating 11 January as a day to confront a crime that most …
Awareness
Moebius Syndrome Awareness Day
In 1888, the German neurologist Paul Julius Möbius published a description of a rare condition in which a child is born unable to move the muscles of …
Awareness
Intersex Awareness Day
On the morning of 26 October 1996, a small group of demonstrators gathered outside the Boston hotel where the American Academy of Pediatrics was …
Awareness
International Workers Day
On the evening of 4 May 1886, a labour rally was winding down in the rain in Haymarket Square, Chicago. As police moved in to break it up, someone …
Awareness
International Womens Day
In August 1910, at a conference of socialist women in Copenhagen, a German activist named Clara Zetkin stood up and proposed that there should be a …
Awareness
International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness Day
On the evening of 7 October 2013, a series of famous landmarks across the world were deliberately bathed in teal light. Trafalgar Square in London …
Awareness
International Stuttering Awareness Day
Joe Biden has described lying awake as a boy, memorising whole passages of speech to predict which words would catch in his throat. He stuttered …
Awareness
International Missing Childrens Day
On the morning of 25 May 1979, a six-year-old boy named Etan Patz walked the short distance towards his school bus stop in the SoHo neighbourhood of …
Awareness
International Migrants Day
On 18 December 1990, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a treaty with one of the longest names in international law: the International …
Awareness
International Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome Awareness Day
In September 1966, neurologists from around the world gathered in Marseille for the second of a series of symposia convened by the French clinician …
Awareness
International Human Solidarity Day
When the United Nations drew up its Millennium Declaration in the year 2000, it listed a handful of values it considered essential to relations …
Awareness
International Day of Women and Girls in Science
In 1903 a Polish-born physicist named Maria Sklodowska Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel; eight …
Awareness
International Day of Education
On 3 December 2018, the United Nations General Assembly passed, by consensus, a resolution that had been put forward by Nigeria and co-sponsored by …
Awareness
International Anti-Corruption Day
Between 9 and 11 December 2003, delegates from across the world gathered in the colonial city of Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, to do …
Awareness
International Albinism Awareness Day
In June 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a Nigerian lawyer named Ikponwosa Ero to a post that had never existed before: …
Awareness
Human Rights Day
Late in the evening of 10 December 1948, in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a document that ran to a …
Awareness
Freedom of information day
James Madison was born on 16 March 1751 at Port Conway, Virginia, and grew into the small, soft-spoken, formidably read man who would do more than any …
Awareness
Canada Family Literacy Day
A child whose parent reads aloud to them for fifteen minutes a day arrives at school having heard, over five years, well over a million more words …