International Day of Zero Tolerance To Female Genital Mutilation

International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation is a UN-sponsored awareness day that takes place February 6 each year.

It is an effort to make the world aware of female genital mutilation (also called female genital mutilation or FGM) and to promote its eradication.

First, on February 6, 2003, Stella Obasanjo, the First Lady of Nigeria and spokesperson for the Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation, made the official declaration on "Zero Tolerance to FGM" in Africa during a conference organized by the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (IAC). Then the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights adopted this day as an international awareness day.

Famous quotes containing the words day, tolerance, female and/or mutilation:

    I watch the white stars darken;
    the day comes and the
    white stars dim
    and lessen
    and the lights fade in the city.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.
    New Yorker (April 23, 1990)

    This is mere madness,
    And thus a while the fit will work on him.
    Anon, as patient as the female dove
    When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
    His silence will sit drooping.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country—it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
    James Fenton (b. 1949)