Alternative Westphalian Peace Prize: Conscientious objector network honored with peace prize

epd | The international conscientious objector network Connection from Offenbach received the first Alternative Westphalian Peace Prize from Münster and Osnabrück on Friday evening. His actions call into question common military logic, said the chairwoman of the Alternative Westphalian Peace Prize Association, Juliane Brüggemann, at the opening of the award ceremony in Münster. Connection knows no just or unjust wars. The network helps deserters and objectors from Ukraine as well as from Russia or Croatia, she emphasized. The prize is endowed with 10,000 euros.

In her laudatory speech, the Protestant theologian Margot Käßmann praised the Offenbach association's international commitment to young people who want to refuse to serve in the army. “Conscientious objection as a human right, that is the central theme of Connection,” said Käßmann, according to the text of the speech. The association also advocates recognizing conscientious objection and desertion as grounds for asylum. “Both of these are not the case in the EU,” complained the theologian. At the same time, she criticized the increasing normalization of military service in Germany.

The Connection association was founded in Offenbach am Main in 1993. According to its own statements, the organization promotes international understanding, educational work for peace as well as tolerance and non-violent conflict resolution at regional and international levels. Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, the association has been campaigning for Russian and Ukrainian conscientious objectors and deserters.

The journalist Heribert Prantl, who served on the prize jury, gave a keynote speech at the award ceremony on the right to conscientious objection regulated in Article 4 of the Basic Law. It is an “unloved fundamental right”. Anyone who takes advantage of this has always had to live with the accusation that they are a “notorious shirker,” he emphasized. Nevertheless, a significant increase in conscientious objection has recently been observed.

Prantl criticized the practice of examining the conscience that the young men had to undergo. He called the decision of the Federal Court of Justice last year in the case of a Ukrainian, according to which the right to conscientious objection in the event of war could no longer apply in Germany, an “insult to the Basic Law”.

The alternative peace prize was launched at the beginning of the year as an alternative to the Peace of Westphalia Prize, which will be awarded to NATO this year. The Economic Society for Westphalia and Lippe wants to hand over the prize to the defense alliance on October 1st, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) giving the laudatory speech. The award, worth 100,000 euros, commemorates the peace agreement in Münster and Osnabrück that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648.

Peace should not be reduced to military strength and loyalty to alliances, emphasized the chairmen of the Alternative Peace Prize Association, Brüggemann and Rüdiger Sagel. The new prize should therefore contribute to a social debate about the concept of peace. It should therefore be awarded every two years.

Before the award ceremony in the historic town hall festival hall, a peace and culture festival took place on Münster Cathedral Square. There, Franz Nadler from Connections e.V. explained, with a view to the award ceremony to NATO, that this is a military alliance that coordinates arms deliveries. “It plans wars and also wages them,” he emphasized. “How you can award a peace prize to such an organization is a mystery to me.”