• We dedicate the 1st flame to the people of Tibet, a proud nation that was annexed by China in 1951, and remains subject to Chinese authority.
  • We dedicate the 2nd flame to the Muslim Uyghurs, and the other ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang province of China, who are being subjected to ethnocide – cultural genocide – involving arbitrary detention, political indoctrination, suppression of religious practices, forced labour, forced sterilisation, contraception, and abortion.
  • We dedicate the 3rd flame to the 25,000 Muslim Rohingya people murdered by the military forces of Myanmar in 2016-17, in addition to the 36,000 who were thrown into fires, the 116,000 beaten, the 18,000 women and girls subjected to sexual violence, and the more than 1 million forced to flee, mostly to Bangladesh.
  • We dedicate the 4th flame to the 580,000 people, including 306,000 non-combatants, killed in the Syrian Civil War that has involved the destruction of the ancient cities of Aleppo and Homs, the forcible displacement of 14 million Syrians, and caused 7 million to flee as refugees.
  • We dedicate the 5th flame to the over 150,000 people killed in the Yemeni Civil War, and more than 227,000 people who have died of ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities as a consequence of the war.
  • We dedicate the 6th flame to the 10,000 people killed and up to 12,000 injured in the war between rival factions of the military government of Sudan, the 4.8 million who have been internally displaced, and more than 1.3 million who have fled the country as refugees.
  • We dedicate the 7th flame to the people of Ukraine following the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022 that has resulted in tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands of military casualties, 8 million Ukrainians being internally displaced, and more than 8.2 million fleeing the country, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
  • We dedicate the 8th flame to the people of Israel and Palestine, caught up in a cycle of violence following the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, which has included wars of annihilation launched against Israel by its Arab neighbours, and since 1967, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the expansion of illegal settlements, the active dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians, and campaigns of terror on the part of extremist Palestinian groups in response. In particular, we dedicate the 8th flame to the memory of the 1400 people massacred by Hamas terrorists on 7 October 2023, the 240 adults and children taken hostage, and the thousands of Gazans killed and hundreds of thousands displaced as a consequence of Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas.