Thinking Peace 6: Human right to peace
28. 11. 2024 | Politics
Marking this year’s Human Rights Day, we invite you to the sixth event in the Think Peace series – a lecture by Yurii Sheliazhenko, a peace activist from Ukraine. Tuesday online event in English language will be held on December 10, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. CET.
Please register your presence here before December 5 and we will send you a link to the online lecture.
Yurii Sheliazhenko is Ukrainian peace scholar and human rights defender. He holds a PhD in jurisprudence. He is active in local and international peace networks, such as Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, International Peace Bureau, War Resisters’ International, World BEYOND War. He also maintains the peace education project Free Civilians School of Pacifism. Regardless of his unequivocal and systematic condemnation of the Russian army’s attacks on Ukraine, the Ukrainian authorities are prosecuting him for his pacifist appeals and defence of the right to conscientious objection to military mobilization.
From Yurii’s lecture:
One of the necessary measures needed to stop the war and curtail post-Soviet militarism that exacerbates it, is improvement of peace culture, starting from human rights education and further development of democratic institutions. It is especially important to protect fully the human right to conscientious objection to military service in any time, especially in wartime, as institutional safeguard of existence of peace activists and movements, peace thinkers and writers, peace entrepreneurs and benefactors, peace academies and churches, able to mobilize people for effective nonviolent resistance to aggressors and oppressors, maintaining dialogue and social cohesion, caring for needy and suffering, advocating sanity, morality and diplomacy, preserving democracy from self-destruction in the fog of war. These policy prescriptions could be derived not only from urgent necessity to remove from power in Russia the Putin’s criminal warmongering regime and resurrect democracy, but also from a need to stop militarist brinkmanship in Ukraine with persecution of peace activists and human rights defenders like myself.
