Search results

The general secretary of the WCC, Dr Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, has condemned the 24 May attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels which resulted in the deaths of four persons including two Israeli citizens.

A reflection on the recent United Nations meeting on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, by Jonathan Frerichs, WCC programme executive for peace building and disarmament, and member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

People have the right of access to archives of public bodies, argued Trudy Huskamp Peterson, an archivist from the United States, in her recent talk organized by the WCC Archives in Geneva, Switzerland. She said public access to information is particularly relevant for archives documenting human rights violations.

Father Ioan Sauca of the Romanian Orthodox Church and Peter Prove, a Lutheran lawyer and international affairs expert from Australia, have been named to key staff positions in the WCC.

Leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church have marked the 99th anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide with calls for recognition of that historic event. Beginning in April 1915, more than one million Armenians were killed by troops of the Ottoman Empire, a world power with its capital in what is now the Republic of Turkey.

A communiqué adopted at a WCC consultation describes human trafficking as a “serious human rights violation” and its consequences are “most horrific results of the economic and social disparities that increase the vulnerability of millions of people”.

Five of the world’s major arms exporters are among a group of mostly European countries ratifying the world’s first Arms Trade Treaty today, 2 April, a year after the treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

An “inter-generational dialogue on faith, culture, HIV and sexual reproductive health and rights” was initiated on 11 March in New York City by the World YWCA in partnership with the WCC and other international organizations. The dialogue was organized as a side event at the United Nations 58th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women.

Public health and human rights remain woefully unprotected from nuclear disasters. This is a key assessment of a “Human Rights and Natural Disasters” workshop, three years after the Fukushima disaster and 30 years since Chernobyl. The workshop was hosted by the WCC on 28 February in Geneva, Switzerland

The WCC has expressed “great concern” over the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgment in the case of Perinçek v. Switzerland, recalling that the Swiss National Council and the Federal Tribunal in the past have clearly recognized the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.

“The immediate end of the suffering of the people in Syria must now be the focus for all parties in the Geneva 2 talks,” WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit said in a meeting today, 14 February in Geneva with members of the Syrian opposition. And “this includes all parties in the conflict,” he added.

Strong concerns were expressed by the WCC Executive Committee over the increasing number of internally displaced persons and the on-going conflict in South Sudan in statements adopted by the committee on 12 February, during its meeting in Bossey, Switzerland.

“As faith communities and religious leaders, we are obliged constantly to remind people about the obligation and responsibility to choose peace through dialogue,” said Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.

The WCC Executive Committee, currently meeting in Switzerland, is working to translate the mandate of the WCC 10th Assembly into strategic plans and visible actions, focusing on the churches’ efforts toward a “pilgrimage for justice and peace”.

Nearly one hundred representatives of the German member churches of the WCC met from 16 to 18 January at the Evangelical Academy of Loccum in order to share their experiences from the WCC 10th Assembly and to discuss how they would continue their way together on their pilgrimage of justice and peace.

The WCC general secretary, following a session on climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, stressed the “significant role of financial policy-making by the states in addressing climate change.”

While the Geneva 2 talks for peace in Syria are scheduled to begin in Switzerland today, 22 January, churches from around the world continue to call for visible actions to be taken to put an end to the conflict in Syria, leading the way towards justice, peace and stability.

In a talk organized by the Archives of the WCC, Elisabeth Baumgartner, a Swiss lawyer and head of the project “Dealing with the Past” at the Swiss Peace Foundation (swisspeace), stressed the importance of archives and documentation in dealing with the past, which she said is pertinent to the institutional and informal mechanisms seeking justice, reconciliation and conflict resolution.

A statement from churches around the world urging an end to the armed conflict in Syria, ahead of the Geneva 2 talks scheduled to take place on 22 January was presented to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations-Arab League joint representative for Syria, by the WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit today in Geneva, 20 January.

With the Geneva 2 talks on Syria scheduled for 22 January, some 30 church leaders from Syria and around the world gathered a week ahead of time at the headquarters of the WCC in Geneva, Switzerland, and called for substantial action be taken at the talks to end the armed conflict.