History
Since 1959, World Refugee Year, the UN has designated specific years in order to draw attention to important issues. Governments of Member States, assisted by civil society, are encouraged to take the themes as opportunities to raise awareness and promote policy initiatives among citizens (The same rationale is applied to a lengthy list of annual days and special decades).
The work of many UN Agencies and programmes has direct connections with aging issues and will reflect IYOP priorities. That is certainly true for the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
In 1992 the United Nations General Assembly decided, "in recognition of humanity’s demographic coming of age and the promise it holds for maturing attitudes and capabilities in social, economic, cultural and spiritual undertakings, not least for global peace and development in the next century" (resolution 47/5), to declare 1999 as the International Year of Older Persons (IYOP). The theme of this year is Towards a society for all ages.
At the launching ceremony, the World Health Organization (WHO) called upon policy-makers to recognise the importance of population ageing and put this recognition into action. In 1999, there were some 580 million people aged 60 years and over in the world. By 2020, this number is estimated to pass over the 1 billion mark. By that time, over 700 million older people will live in developing countries alone. It was therefore indispensable to bring ageing into the development agenda, she emphasized.
Read more about this topic: International Year Of Older Persons
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)