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The World Council of Churches, the Muslim Council of Elders and Rose Castle Foundation are hosting an Emerging Peacemakers Forum for young men and women working in civil society and international organizations, or for influential people in their societies, at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey. Young people who have previous experience in peace-making, conflict resolution, or conflict management, are also invited to apply, in addition to young people who are interested in spreading the values of peace where they live.

Ours is a world of migration. Yet myths and mystification persist in our understanding of the journey – particularly when it comes to transmittable diseases such as HIV.

There are currently over 65 million people around the world who have been forced from their homes, according to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, but all those who are displaced are not mere statistics. They are people, something that can be missed by the mass media in reporting on them. This observation was highlighted in a discussion at the WCC on 30 January when representatives of church groups, the United Nations and a Christian media organization discussed media coverage of refugees at a “tray-lunch” presentation.

Convening a range of international representatives and partners in Geneva on 24 May, the WCC reiterated its commitment to the ministry of health and healing for all people, taking new steps towards a new Global Ecumenical Health Strategy.

Almost forty years after the advent of HIV and AIDS, people around the world living with HIV still endure assaults on their dignity and basic human rights—from stigma and discrimination to denial of legal protection and even medical care.

“The way we handle the refugee crisis, not least the settling in and integration process, will be of utmost significance, both for the attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers in the future, and for the long-term stability and sustainability of our own societies”, said Knut Vollebaek, ambassador and former Norwegian foreign minister, in his speech at the recent WCC/UN conference on Europe’s refugee crisis.

A High-Level Conference in Geneva of governments, United Nations agencies and civil society organizations, including churches and faith-based organizations, has underlined the need for urgent action to strengthen coordination and cooperation in Europe's response to the refugee and migrant crisis.

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.