1995

• United Nations Year for Tolerance
• World Year of Peoples' Commemoration of the Victims of the Second World War

Events

January

• January 1
• * The World Trade Organization is established to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
• * Austria, Finland and Sweden join the European Union.
• * Final The Far Side comic by Gary Larson is published.
• January 9 – Valeri Polyakov completes 366 days in space while aboard the Mir space station, breaking a duration record.
• January 10–15 – The World Youth Day 1995 festival is held in Manila, Philippines, culminating in 5 million people gathering for John Paul II's concluding mass in Quirino Grandstand.
• January 17 – The 6.9 Great Hanshin earthquake strikes the southern Hyōgo Prefecture of Japan with a maximum Shindo of 7, leaving 5,502–6,434 people dead, and 251,301–310,000 displaced.
• January 25 – Norwegian rocket incident: A rocket launched from the space exploration centre at Andøya, Norway, is briefly interpreted by the Russians as an incoming attack.
• January 31 – Mexican peso crisis: U.S. President Bill Clinton invokes emergency powers to extend a $20 billion loan to help Mexico avert financial collapse.

  February

• February 13 - Twenty-one Bosnian Serb commanders are charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a tribunal on human rights violations during the Wars in the Balkans.
• February 21 - Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
• February 25 - The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization is formed.
• February 26 - The United Kingdom's oldest investment banking firm, Barings Bank, collapses after securities broker Nick Leeson loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

  March

• March 1
• * Julio María Sanguinetti is sworn in as President of Uruguay for his second term.
• * Polish Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak resigns from Parliament and is replaced by ex-communist Józef Oleksy.
• March 3 - United Nations Operation in Somalia II, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Somalia, ends.
• March 14 - Astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space aboard a Russian launch vehicle, lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
• March 20 - Members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo carry out the Tokyo subway sarin attack, killing 14 people and leading to over a thousand injured.
• March 22 - Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov returns after setting a record for 438 days in outer space.
• March 26 - The Schengen Agreement, easing cross-border travel, goes into effect in several European countries.
• March 31
• * Murder of Selena: Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez is shot and killed by her fan club president Yolanda Saldívar at a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas.
• * TAROM Flight 371 from Bucharest to Brussels crashes shortly after takeoff killing all 60 people on board.

  April

• April 7 - First Chechen War: Samashki massacre - Russian paramilitary troops begin a massacre of at least 250 civilians in Samashki, Chechnya.
• April 19 - Oklahoma City bombing: 168 people, including eight federal Marshals and 19 children, are killed at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and 680 are wounded by a bomb set off by Timothy McVeigh.
• April 30 - The United States government stops funding the NSFNET, making the Internet a wholly privatized system.

  May

• May 7 - Jacques Chirac is elected president of France.
• May 10 - The Vaal Reefs mining disaster at Vaal Reefs gold mine in Orkney, South Africa. A runaway locomotive falls into a lift shaft onto an ascending cage and causes it to plunge to the bottom of the deep shaft, killing 104.
• May 11 - More than 170 countries agree to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely and without conditions.
• May 13 - The 6.6 Western Macedonia earthquake strikes northwestern Greece with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII, injuring 25 and causing $450 million in damage.
• May 14 - The Dalai Lama proclaims 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, but 3 days later the boy is detained by Chinese authorities and not seen again.
• May 16 - Following the Tokyo subway sarin attack two months earlier, Japanese police besiege the headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo near Mount Fuji and arrest cult leader Shoko Asahara. Further police operations result in over two hundred arrests and thirteen members of the cult, including Asahara, are sentenced to death.
• May 17 - 1995 San Diego tank rampage: In San Diego, Shawn Nelson steals an M60A3 tank from a local California Army National Guard armory and goes on a rampage for 25 minutes, damaging over $149,201 of property. The rampage ended when San Diego police forced the hatch open and fatally shot him.
• May 20 - English football team Everton win the FA Cup, beating reigning champions Manchester United with a score of 1 – 0. A goal at 30 minutes by Paul Rideout secured the win for Everton their first major trophy in 8 years and also constituted their last title ever since.
• May 24 - AFC Ajax wins the UEFA Champions League at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna by defeating A.C. Milan 1–0.
• May 25 – June 24 – The 1995 Rugby World Cup takes place in South Africa and is won by the host nation after beating New Zealand in the final; this was the Springboks tournament debut after World Rugby lifted their ban following the end of apartheid.
• May 28 - The 7.0 Neftegorsk earthquake strikes northern Sakhalin Island in Russia with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX, leaving 1,967 people dead and 750 injured.

  June

• June 2
• * A United States Air Force F-16 piloted by Captain Scott O'Grady is shot down over Bosnia and Herzegovina while patrolling the NATO no-fly zone. O'Grady is rescued by U.S. Marines six days later.
• * Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke is extradited from Argentina to Italy.
• June 6
• * U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard breaks NASA's space endurance record of 14 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes, aboard the Russian space station Mir.
• * The Constitutional Court of South Africa abolishes capital punishment in South Africa in the case of S v Makwanyane and Another.
• June 13 - French President Jacques Chirac announces the resumption of nuclear tests in French Polynesia.
• June 16 - The IOC selects Salt Lake City to host the 2002 Winter Olympics.
• June 22 - Japanese police rescue 365 hostages from a hijacked All Nippon Airways Flight 857 at Hakodate airport. The hijacker was armed with a knife and demanded the release of Shoko Asahara.
• June 29
• * English yachtswoman Lisa Clayton completes her 10-month solo circumnavigation from the Northern Hemisphere.
• * STS-71: Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian Mir space station for the first time.
• * Sampoong Department Store collapse in the Seocho-gu district of Seoul, South Korea, kills 502 and injures 937.
• * Iraq disarmament crisis: According to UNSCOM, the unity of the U.N. Security Council begins to fray as a few countries, particularly France and Russia, become more interested in making financial deals with Iraq than in disarming the country.

  July

• July - Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraq threatens to end all cooperation with UNSCOM and IAEA if sanctions against the country are not lifted by August 31. Following the defection of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam Hussein makes new revelations about the full extent of Iraq's biological and nuclear weapons programs. Iraq also withdraws its last U.N. declaration of prohibited biological weapons and turns over a large amount of new documents on its WMD programs.
• July 1 - Iraq disarmament crisis: In response to UNSCOM's evidence, Iraq admits for first time the existence of an offensive biological weapons program, but denies weaponization.
• July 4 - Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Major is re-elected as leader of the Conservative Party, ending an internal challenge to his position.
• July 9 - Sri Lankan Civil War: 125 civilians are killed in Navaly as result of bombing by the Sri Lanka Air Force.
• July 10 - Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from house arrest.
• July 11
• * Srebrenica massacre: Units of the Army of Republika Srpska, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, enter Srebrenica with little resistance from Dutch peacekeepers of the United Nations Protection Force, going on to kill thousands of Bosniak men and boys and rape many women.
• * President Clinton announces the restoration of United States–Vietnam relations twenty years after the Vietnam War.
• * A Cubana de Aviación Antonov An-24 crashes into the Caribbean off southeast Cuba killing 44 people.
• July 21-26 - Third Taiwan Strait Crisis: The Chinese People's Liberation Army fires missiles into the waters north of Taiwan.

  August

• August - The International Rugby Football Board declares that rugby union players may be professional.
• August 4 - Croatian forces, with the cooperation of the ARBiH, launch Operation Storm against rebel forces of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, which subsequently ceases to exist as a political entity.
• August 7 - The Chilean government declares a state of emergency in the southern half of the country in response to an event of intense cold, wind, rain and snowfall known as the White Earthquake.
• August 14 - Nepali Prime Minister Man Mohan Adhikari along with seven other high-ranking officials survives a helicopter crash.
• August 24 - Microsoft releases Windows 95 to the public.
• August 29 - Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian head of state, survives an assassination attempt in Tbilisi.
• August 30 - Operation Deliberate Force, the NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb artillery positions, begins in Bosnia and Herzegovina, continuing into September. At the same time, ARBiH forces begin an offensive against the Bosnian Serb Army around Sarajevo, central Bosnia and Bosnian Krajina.