The (violation of the) right of conscientious objection to military service during the Russian-Ukrainian war
Originally published by World BEYOND War
Speeches of Dr. Yurii Sheliazhenko at the International Summit for Peace in Ukraine
Dear friends, greetings from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Thank you for joining our working group on conscientious objection to military service. It is also my honor to share the stage with brave resisters to war machines of Putin and Lukashenko, their noble cause deserves much support.\Right to refuse to kill is a cornerstone of hope for and vision of a better world ruled not by cruel great powers of geopolitics, but by the great power of truth in every mind and love in every heart. In a world where everyone refuses to kill there will be no wars. And this is our goal, to abolish all wars, starting with refusal to kill and advocacy of reconciliation.
We gathered at this International Summit for Peace in Ukraine to call for immediate ceasefire and peace talks in Ukraine, – not to surrender to shameful Russian aggression, not to rearm and fight again, but to stop mass deaths and destruction of cities, to start fair and inclusive process of reconciliation directed towards living together, not killing each other, to design and build in our countries and in the world reformed system of nonviolent governance and management, to achieve universal liberation of economics and politics from yoke of militarism.
Make no mistake: militarism is never good, and no war could be just. As we are saying in War Resisters’ International: war is a crime against humanity, therefore we are determined not to support any kind of war and to strive for the removal of all causes of war.
When in the same dark day in spring you learn that Russian rocket ruined a condo and killed six children, and Ukrainian rocket burned a minibus and killed a kid, you feel deeply in your heart the moral obligation to stand with peace, to stand with peace-loving civilians on all sides of the frontline, to not take the side of any army, either aggressive or defensive, that inevitably kills civilians, because any war is mass murder, a threat to civilians, not the defense or protection.
Like many Ukrainians, I am a victim of aggression of Russian army which bombs my city and also a victim of human rights violations of the Ukrainian army which tries to drag me to the meat grinder denying my right to refuse to kill, to leave the country for my studies in University of Münster, et cetera.
Think about it: all men in age from 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country, they are hunted on the streets and forcibly abducted to the army’s serfdom. You can’t study, work or even marry without military registration which means great risk of conscription. Evasion of draft is punishable from 3 to 5 years of prison. The Armed Forces of Ukraine stubbornly denies human rights to conscientious objection, only under international pressure has our parliamentary human rights commissioner recognized obligations of Ukraine under Article 18 of ICCPR and Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Vitaly Alekseenko was imprisoned for his Christian faith in the commandment “you shall not kill,” recently the Supreme Court released him, but he was not acquitted and further retrial could bring bad surprises.
Former prisoner of conscience Ruslan Kotsaba is still under trial for his 2015 YouTube blog denouncing war and calling to boycott military mobilization; he managed to escape to the United States but prosecution seeks to arrest and imprison him again, despite that he’s already spent more than year and half in prison.
Conscientious objector Mykhailo Yavorsky was sentenced to prison despite that his deep religious beliefs incompatible with military service were recognized in the court sentence, but only as so-called mitigating circumstances, contrary to Article 35 of Constitution of Ukraine which demands alternative non-military service for people with anti-militarist beliefs.
Another objector Andrii Vyshnevetsky, dragged into trenches against his conscience and religion, from the frontline under Russian shelling, filed a lawsuit to President Zelensky through an online court system asking to establish the procedure of discharge from army on the grounds of conscience, non-existent today.
We need international attention to problems of conscientious objectors. We need more calls to Ukrainian legislators to reform unconstitutional discriminatory law on alternative service in line with the Constitution and international human rights treaties of Ukraine.
We need international civil society and media attention to coming court hearings in Yavorsky’s case on 12th June, Alekseenko’s case on 22nd June, and Vyshnevetsky’s case on 26th June, and we need more amicus curiae briefs for Ukrainian judges calling to abandon Soviet-time doctrine of presumption of guilt in case of refusal to serve in army, making no difference between evasion of draft and conscientious objection to military service.
And of course, we need to admit that no civil people on Earth, only governments want war; people could be tricked to vote for war but they refuse to support all armies’ neglect for the sacred value of human life.
That’s why peace-loving people in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine mostly quietly but sometimes openly and bravely resist the anti-human conscription system imposed on all our people in times of the Russian Empire, enforced by Stalin’s law on death penalty for refusal to fight in wartime, that was abolished after democratic transformations but still lurks in some informal practices on both sides of the war in Ukraine.
We must resist nonviolently militarism and war, commit to unarmed protection of civilians, to call for peace and build peace, stand with civilians and refugees. And we must stand with peace in a fair, genuine, nonviolent way: by refusing to kill.
