Note to Correspondents

UN PUBLIC INFORMATION DEPARTMENT, NGOS TO HOST STUDENT-LED INTERNATIONAL DAY

OF PEACE COMMEMORATION AT HEADQUARTERS IN NEW YORK, 21 SEPTEMBER

 

On 21 September, the Department of Public Information, in collaboration with non-governmental organizations Pathways to Peace, the World Peace Prayer Society and the United Religions Initiative, will host a student commemoration beginning at 10 a.m. in Conference Room 4, on the theme “Peace:A Climate for Change”.  United Nations Messengers of Peace, Elie Wiesel, Jane Goodall, Michael Douglas and a new Messenger from the Middle East, will interact with 800 middle and high school students assembled at Headquarters and, through satellite, with young people at peace missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon and the Sudan.  Short films documenting the impact of conflict on the lives of people in these places will be shown during the two-and-a-half hour event.

Kiyo Akasaka, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, will moderate the student event, at which UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and the President of the sixty-second session of the General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim will address the students.  The commemoration will be webcast live at www.un.org/webcast; and a database set up by UN Cyberschoolbus (www.un.org/cyberschoolbus) will allow those watching from their computers to send messages of peace, some of which may be read during the event, time permitting.

Participants in the student observance will include a refugee, former child soldier from the Sudan, a 15-year-old CNN hero, who set up her own non-profit organization and has raised over $40,000 to help orphaned children in her homeland, Peru; representatives of the youth movement, Peace Jam, which is affiliated with 12 Nobel laureates, and was itself recently nominated for a Nobel peace prize; and a youth representative from Jane Goodall’s global youth movement, Roots & Shoots, about its youth activities and projects in the United Republic of Tanzania and Ghana.

The youth event will feature Chris “Kazi” Rolle, hip hop artist and star in the box office movie The Hip Hop Project, produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, and will be co-hosted by two youth leaders, Kymberly Stewart of MTV, and Sarah Nadeau, Deputy Director of the Council for Prejudice Reduction, a public-private partnership that advances equity and reduces prejudice in collaboration with United States public schools.  The student commemoration will end with a colourful Parade of Nations, in which, one by one, the flags of the nations of the world will be presented and a mantra repeated that the people represented by that flag might live in peace, and that peace may prevail on Earth.  

The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly to coincide with its opening session every September.  Twenty years later, the General Assembly fixed observance of the Day on 21 September as a day of non-violence, ceasefire and “devoted to commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples”. On this day, offices worldwide observe a minute of silence at 12 noon, while various volunteer groups express their support for the United Nations through community work, prayer, meditation, environmental activities and simply by commemorating and promoting the Day.

For more information, please contact Dawn Johnston-Britton, Chief, Public Inquiries Unit, Outreach Division, Department of Public Information at e-mail:  Johnston-britton@un.org; tel.:  212 963 6984.

* *** *

For information media • not an official record