Right to Refuse to Kill report to eCouncil, 2016

Hi everyone,

For those who don't know me I am Hannah, working in the WRI office in London.

I work on the Right to Refuse to Kill Programme, and I thought I would give a report in person, and then we can discuss the future and the programme and ideas for the work in the eCouncil forum here.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about what we've been doing in the last year, and some of the things we're going to do in the future, and also ways that you can be involved.

I'll start with saying a few things that are coming up.

Next month myself and two members of World Without War, the conscientious objector (CO) movement in South Korea, are travelling to Thailand to meet a CO there. His name is Netiwit, and he is the first CO that has publicly declared in Thailand. We're going to meet him, and hopefully other human rights groups in Thailand, including a group for transgendered people - who are recruited to the army through conscription - to see how we can support Netiwit, and more generally to understand the situation for conscripts in Thailand. If you have any contacts that you think it would be good for us to meet there, anyone involved in nonviolence training or campaigning, I'd be really glad to hear.

Secondly coming up is the 1^st December, Prisoners for Peace day. As usual we're asking people to write to COs that are detained in prisons around the world, and will be offering an address list so that you can write to them. This year we're also involved in a campaign run by Mersavot, a refuser group in the state of Israel, they are asking people on or around the 1^st December to visit arms factories of Israeli companies that are involved in the occupation of Palestine. The idea is that alongside the COs that are going to jail in November and December, they are using the slogan #refuse2occupy. They say that they will refuse to occupy Palestinian territories militarily. And in order to highlight the role of other countries and companies in the occupation of Palestine, they are asking CO and refuser supporters around the world to go to those arms companies that are involved in the occupation around that day, to say that they refuse to take part in the occupation as well. They'll be more information going round about that.

In the last year we've been working on a couple of different projects. One that will come to fruition very soon is a report that looks at ways in which members of the armed forces in Rwanda find it difficult to leave. There is no right to conscientious objection, but also lack of contracts means it's generally at the will of the commanding office whether or not someone can leave the army. We've been working with a Rwandan researcher who's been interviewing Rwandans in Diaspora. That article should be published soon. For that work we've been working with Connection, a CO support organisation in Germany.

This year has also seen the publication – around the time of the last Council – and since then, the sale, of the book Conscientious Objection: A Practical Companion for Movements. Sales of that have been going well, and we've been able to send some free copies of the book to COs around the world, because people have donated their own copy. We've arranged a Spanish translation, and that will be published soon. I'm grateful to Lexys Rendón who has been checking the Spanish translation.

This year the 15^th May – International Conscientious Objection day – was quite a big event compared to usual. Lots of groups all around the world, both groups in countries where there is conscription, and groups that are acting in solidarity with COs, used the 15^th May to highlight militarism, especially through conscientious objector repression. So perhaps think about ways in which your group could use the 15^th May as an opportunity to act with others internationally to spread the word about conscientious objection.

At the moment we're also working on a web resource for refusers especially in the Eastern Europe region – people in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania – for example, and perhaps Belarus as well, where there is a lack of information, in some cases – not all – around how you access rights to CO – where they exist – and also in terms of asylum in neighbouring countries. We're working on that resource at the moment. If you have contacts in any of the countries in any of the countries that I've listed, then I would be really pleased to hear from you. In many of those countries there is risk to be in touch with international organisations and we're very happy to take necessary security precautions with online communication, to manage that.

As usual, we've been spreading awareness of conscientious objection through our CO Update, which is a newsletter that gets sent every two to three months. This gives news of conscription and conscientious objection around the world. If you are not subscribed to that there is a link below, and it would be great to share that. I think we're the only international organisation that's sharing that news regularly about countries everywhere, and for all types of objection, so I think it's quite an important resource. [Subscribe here http://lists.wri-irg.org/sympa/subscribe/co-alert]

Secondly, we regularly send out CO Alerts. CO Alerts are advocacy alerts where we ask you to contact relevant authorities in countries when a CO is imprisoned or at risk of detention or at risk in some other way. This is a great way also of informing people about what the situation is for COs, as well as potentially making a difference to individuals. So it would be great if we could get more people to sign up to that as well. [Subscribe here http://lists.wri-irg.org/sympa/subscribe/co-alert]

At the moment for WRI generally we're working on a new website. On this new website it should be really obvious how to subscribe to those newsletters, and also we're creating a map which is a way in which you can see really simply the countries where CO is somehow provided for, or where conscription still exists, so we're basically using information that we already have, but trying to make it more accessible.

Lastly I'll say that this year we're really glad to say that the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, who funds the Right to Refuse to Kill Programme have agreed to extend that, so we have funding for this work until 2020 at least. But we're always looking for more ways to work on particular projects, and allow us to fund that, so if you have any suggestions, as ever please get in touch.

This discussion now, this thread, is a chance to think about ways that the Right to Refuse to Kill programme could work in future. So as well as continuing the kind of 'traditional' work we do supporting conscientious objectors, it's possible to see the work of the Right to Refuse to Kill programme in a more general way, supporting refusal to take part in militarism in many forms, so if you have ideas for ways that we can take that forward, please contribute. My email is hannah@wri-irg.org.

Thanks very much.