The International Day of Conscience (IDC) on 5 April has been established in 2019 by the General Assembly of the United Nations to invite all human beings to focus their minds every year on how to build a culture of peace with love and conscience. The International Day of Conscience (IDC) 2025 offered an opportunity for people and community from around the globe to reflect and plan and act on what we can do to Leave No One Behind. The event took place at the UN Headquarters in Geneva.
Prof Scherto Gill provided a keynote for the 2025 IDC. In her speech, she highlighted that:
“In a world riddled with crisis, atrocity and uncertainty, United Nations and other global institutions have the clarity to see that peace is more than an absence of violence. Through this international Day and related activities, we can appreciate peace’s positive attributes.
As an inspiring concept, positive peace underscores that all human beings are bearers of non-instrumental value, and that all life is sacred, and that in no circumstances should a person be treated as less human. Violence of any kind precisely violates our intrinsic value, violates the sacredness of life. Perpetuating violence or participating in violence is a failure to see each person as ‘a spiritual subject’, or a ‘soul’. It is a failure to recognise that each ‘I’ is already constituted in our collective ‘WE’.
The International Day of Conscience is a reminder that peace involves this unique quality of our awareness. This awareness is fundamental to our self-dignity, self-respect, or self-love. According to Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, this consciousness denotes that our collective mission is to thrive through being and becoming more fully human together. Similarly, from the perspective of African Ubuntu cosmology, no one can thrive alone, and that our well-being involves and is realised through our relational flourishing with other people and other beings on the planet. Ultimately, shared flourishing is positive peace itself.“
At the end of her speech, Prof. Gill concludes:
“On this International Day of Conscience, we must face history, face ourselves, and face the future – let’s remember those who came before us who pioneered peace and their message to us today and to the generations yet to come: “Our salvation can only be through love and in love.”