International Institutions
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Road Safety Collaboration Forum (UNRSC) are encouraging governments and nongovernmental organizations around the world to commemorate the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims as a means of drawing public attention to road traffic crashes, their devastating consequences and immense costs, and to the measures that need to be taken in order to prevent them.
WHO played a pivotal role in the UN adopting the resolution recognizing the World Day “as the appropriate acknowledgment for victims of road traffic crashes and their families”:
in September 2003, WHO hosted a meeting of 12 NGOs working in the field of road victim support and road danger reduction and the meeting resulted in the creation of the UNRSC (UN Road Safety Collaboration) – an informal network of international organizations advocating for road safety and road victims – to start working together at addressing the ‘global road safety crisis’.
FEVR and ASIRT were among the international NGOs invited to be members of the UNRC. They, together with other NGOs in this network, lobbied for the Road Victim Remembrance Day, which FEVR member organization had already been commemorating for a whole decade (since 1995), to be recognized by the UN as a global Day. This led, on 26th October 2005, to the United Nations General Assembly calling for the third Sunday in November every year to become World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims*.
Following the proclamation of 2011–2020 as the Decade of Action for Road Safety, a Plan of Action for the Decade was prepared by WHO and the UN regional commissions, in cooperation with the UNRSC and other stakeholders. Celebration of the annual World Day of Remembrance is listed as an international activity in the Global Plan.
WHO has the role of Secretariat for the Decade of Action. Many road safety publications resulted from the work led by the World Health Organisation since the launch of the Decade: PUBLICATIONS
