A group of 22 Japanese high school students on Tuesday submitted to the United Nations a set of signatures calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons and attended the world body's disarmament conference in Geneva.
The students, aged 15 to 18, who were selected as peace messengers by a Nagasaki-based civic committee, also met with Carolyne-Melanie Regimbal, chief of service of the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs' Geneva Office.
"A world without nuclear weapons is a goal that should be shared by all humanity," said Kosaku Okimoto, a 16-year-old student from Hiroshima, during the meeting with Regimbal.
Seto Sugimori, 17, from Fukuoka Prefecture, said that as the average age of atomic-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, is now over 85, the number "who are willing to share their stories with us is decreasing every year."
The committee selects peace messengers every year from a nationwide pool of applicants. The latest group delivered to the Geneva office a set of 96,428 signatures collected across Japan, bringing the total number gathered through the initiative to more than 2.7 million.
Regimbal said the discussions to prohibit nuclear weapons take time, but "even if some states disagree, we are all in the room to be sure that what happened in Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will never happen again."
"Please continue to raise your voice. We are listening," she said.
Referring to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Palestine between Israel and the militant group Hamas, the students urged relevant states to act as soon as possible to prevent another human disaster.
The peace messenger initiative dates back to 1998, when two high school students from Nagasaki brought signatures calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons to U.N. headquarters after India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests.
The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of World War II in August 1945, with respective death tolls by the end of that year reaching some 140,000 people and some 74,000 people, according to the cities.
