Press Releases

Human Rights Day is celebrated every year on December 10, the date on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The Universal Declaration is a milestone, as it includes the inalienable rights of all people, regardless of race, color, religion, language, political or other belief, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. It is the most translated document around the world and is available in over 500 languages.

This year’s Human Rights Day theme “Recover Better - Stand Up for Human Rights”, relates to the COVID-19 pandemic and focuses on the need to build back better by ensuring Human Rights are central to recovery efforts. We will reach our common global goals only if we are able to create equal opportunities for all, address the failures exposed and exploited by COVID-19, and apply human rights standards to tackle entrenched, systematic, and intergenerational inequalities, exclusion and discrimination. 10 December is an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of human rights in re-building the world we want the need for global solidarity as well as our interconnectedness and shared humanity.

Human rights are at the "heart" of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals, as there can be no sustainable development without human dignity. Progress on human rights is interlinked with progress on the 17 Goals.

The current crisis, due to the pandemic, has exacerbated poverty, inequality, discrimination and other gaps in the protection of human rights. Measures must be taken to address these gaps so that we can properly recover and make our world better, more resilient, just and sustainable.

At the Office of the Commissioner for Volunteerism and Non-Governmental Organizations, we honor Human Rights Day and share the great messages it contains. We emphasize the active participation of organized Civil Society and promote Civic-mindedness, especially among young people. This is an important tool for strengthening participatory democracy, as well as broadening participation in state policy-making. Especially in this difficult period that we are going through, due to the pandemic, volunteering contributes to the fight against inequalities and to the strengthening of human rights in our country.

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