Today is World Human­i­tar­ian Day, August 19th. It’s a day to salute the aid work­ers through­out the world and to remem­ber those who have died while try­ing to help.

From the Huff­in­g­ton Post, this com­men­tary from Navi Pilay explains why we have such a day.

August 19 is a date that is etched deep in the con­scious­ness of the United Nations and the mem­o­ries of those involved in human­i­tar­ian and human rights work around the world: the day in 2003 when 22 peo­ple, mostly UN staff, were killed in cold blood by a sin­gle bomb at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad.

It was by no means the first time that human­i­tar­ian aid work­ers, human rights defend­ers, peace­keep­ers and oth­ers work­ing to improve the lot of the dis­ad­van­taged had been delib­er­ately tar­geted by ruth­less forces deter­mined to cre­ate insta­bil­ity or sub­vert the basic laws and norms on which civ­i­lized soci­ety depends. My own orga­ni­za­tion, Office of the United Nations High Com­mis­sioner for Human Rights, expe­ri­enced its first loss of staff on 4 Feb­ru­ary 1997, when five mem­bers of the Human Rights Field Oper­a­tions were killed in Rwanda.

And sadly, since 19 August 2003, there have been numer­ous other assas­si­na­tions of indi­vid­u­als and fur­ther bombs — most notably the one in Algiers on 11 Decem­ber 2007 which took the lives of a fur­ther 17 UN staff mem­bers — tar­get­ing UN and NGO staff. And I have just learned that two more UN staff are among those killed on Tues­day by a sui­cide bomber in Kabul. I would like to offer my deep­est con­do­lences to their fam­i­lies and colleagues.

In the case of the Bagh­dad and Algiers bombs, the per­pe­tra­tors of these crimes were ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions. How­ever, in other cases, the killers have some­times acted on behalf of a gov­ern­ment, or for organs meant to be under the con­trol of governments.

Killing those who are try­ing to help oth­ers is a par­tic­u­larly despi­ca­ble crime, and one which all gov­ern­ments should join forces to pre­vent, and — when pre­ven­tion fails — to pun­ish. It is there­fore appro­pri­ate — as a first step — that last Decem­ber the global forum for all the world’s gov­ern­ments, the UN Gen­eral Assem­bly, agreed to des­ig­nate 19 August as World Human­i­tar­ian Day.

Human­i­tar­ian aid work­ers are on the front­line, try­ing to pro­vide at least a min­i­mum of mate­r­ial sup­port and pro­tec­tion for the dis­placed, and for pop­u­la­tions affected by con­flict, chronic poverty, food short­ages, nat­ural dis­as­ters and other crises.

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