Wethen, 6 March 2025 – The Board of Church and Peace holds to the biblical call for justice and peace. The current threat to the rule of law, international law, and climate justice requires a clear sense of direction.
Current developments show that political coordinates may shift, leading to a spread of fear and resignation; this concern preoccupied the Board of the European network Church and Peace at its meeting hosted by the ecumenical Bammental Community. The residential community was founded almost 50 years ago by Mennonites in Bammental, a town near Heidelberg, Germany.
The rule of law and international legal orders, along with warrants for arrest by the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court, risk being undermined. This also applies to the internationally valid right to freedom of religion. These concerns arose in the reports from the network, e.g on the Republic of Srpska, Serbia, the United States of America, Israel/Palestine, but also on Ukraine and Germany.
The biblical call for justice and peace is counteracted when the international legal order is violated. Breaking the law is not justified even by undeniably grave concerns about unrest or the threat of a political vacuum, a brutal war of aggression, risks to bilateral relations, or confrontation with an autocratic government and the transfer of political power to oligarchs. Instead, multilateral orders and their institutions have to be strengthened precisely in these times.
Focusing on militarisation as a solution to the shift of political coordinates is also to the detriment of climate justice. This fact became clear through the report on the conference on ‘Climate and Military – Resisting the Principalities and Powers’, which Church and Peace held in late 2024 together with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the German Mennonite Peace Committee.
Weapons production, arms build-up and war are to a high degree directly responsible for environmental destruction and so the cause of further conflicts and wars. They threaten people and ecosystems, destroy infrastructures, economies and the democratic climate – and lead to people fleeing and being displaced.
The European Union’s aim is to promote peace, its values and the welfare of its peoples. For that reason it is irresponsible, according to the Board of Church and Peace, to declare a ‘pre-war situation’ and so legitimize massive armament, especially as this might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In view of the imminent distancing of the United States from its European allies, the latter seem to see the solution only in terms of military build-up, and ignore the fact that NATO owns multiple times more usable military weapon systems vis-à-vis Russia even without the United States.
Church and Peace counters the risk of spiralling arms-build-up with the biblically founded hope for peace. The Board recalls successful peace processes in spite of supposed hopelessness. It holds fast to the vision of nonviolent strategies and processes leading to peace, in spite of the currently propagated lack of positive prospects. If we read history as an inevitable chain of hate and violence, we block the viewpoint of discovering that history bears witness to opportunities breaking out ever anew, and we do not make use of it. Hence the Board of Church and Peace calls for regarding the present situation as a ‘pre-peace situation’ and acting accordingly.
Instead of plunging into an unlimited arms race with unforeseeable consequences for the social and democratic cohesion of our societies (For Germany alone, a rise to 3.6% of GDP is under discussion for the defence budget, which would mean a rise to approx. 144 billion euros, with a planned approx. 489 billion euros for the whole budget.) Europe should promote, e.g. civil society initiatives against the authoritarian and rightwing extremist tendencies being mobilised by Russia and the United States. Likewise, according to Rethinking Security (SND), Europe must “strategically invest much more strongly in the instruments of civil crisis prevention, civil crisis intervention and promoting peace, and in inclusive security systems like the OSCE, the UN and the recognition of international courts and international policing than in military security policy”.
“Three years after the start of the brutal Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and in view of the escalating global crises, we stress: a lasting and just peace presupposes the respect for the rule of law, international law and advocacy for climate justice. If the European states constantly call for that and act credibly by it, they can make a convincing contribution to peace in the world,” says the Board of Church and Peace.
The Board invites you to the next conference of Church and Peace on 24 and 26 October 2025 in Herrnhut, Germany, with the topic: “Don’t let yourself become hardened in these hard times” … Resist – Reconcile – Transform “.
Press contact:
Rev. Antje Heider-Rottwilm, Chair of Church and Peace, +49 172 5162 799
You can download this press release as PDF.
