Statement on Guarding Against Atrocity Crimes

No longer will violence be heard in your land, nor ruin or destruction within your borders.

Isaiah 60:18

Atrocity crimes against individuals and communities have marred human history since ancient times, and are attested to even in the Bible. In modern international law they are recognized especially in three main categories – genocide, crimes against humanity (including the crime of apartheid), and war crimes. Since its establishment, the World Council of Churches – along with many member churches and ecumenical, interfaith and civil society partners – has advocated for the development of and respect for international law to protect people and communities from these and other abuses by the powerful. However, we recognize that the development of international legal frameworks governing these crimes took place at a time when many of the world’s peoples – especially colonized and racialized communities – were systematically excluded from processes of global norm-setting. And we recognize that atrocity crimes, whether or not strictly meeting the current legal definitions and requirements of proving such crimes under international law, carry profound impacts on the affected people and communities that are transgenerational in nature.

Meeting on the continent of Africa, the WCC Central Committee lifts up the catastrophic impacts of the campaign of ethnic extermination and collective punishment waged against the Herero and the Nama people by the German Empire in German South West Africa during 1904-1908 – the first genocide of the 20th century. We remember the suffering of the Congolese people under the brutal colonial administration of King Leopold II of Belgium in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1885 to 1908. We think also of the systemic atrocities of colonialism and slavery, and the innumerable victims of the transatlantic slave trade, whose emancipation from slavery is commemorated in the United States of America on 19 June – Juneteenth – which we observed during the days of our meeting. We do not – and will not – forget the genocidal impacts on Indigenous Peoples in many settler-colonial countries, from the arrival of Christopher Columbus and other Spanish colonizers on Hispaniola in 1492 and the annihilation of the Taino people, and their continuing legacy up to the present date. We acknowledge and lament the historic complicity of churches in many of these crimes, for which repentance and reparation is an ongoing responsibility. 

We recognize that current categories of crimes under international law cannot encompass the full spectrum of suffering, dislocation, and existential fragmentation endured by victims, or the consequences still carried by their descendants and members of affected communities. We call especially for the following experiences – common among survivors and descendants of atrocity crimes in the Global South – to be explicitly acknowledged as constitutive of the enduring trauma of such crimes, even if they fall outside the narrow purview of conventional legal definitions:

• Forced displacement into neighbouring territories and diasporic spaces including internal displacement, often resulting in a condition of statelessness, landlessness, and life in precarious, undignified squatter settlements;
• Deliberate dispossession and structural impoverishment, engineered through racialised economic policies and colonial expropriation;
• Cultural and identity fragmentation, intensified by pressures to assimilate into dominant ethno-national identities, both in host countries and in the historical homeland;
• Objectification through racial science and experimental violence, in which survivors were subjected to dehumanising biological studies aimed at asserting white supremacy;
• Transgenerational shame and unprocessed trauma, often erased from public memory and excluded from national historical narratives;
• Minoritisation and marginalisation, both in their homelands and in diaspora, rendering communities politically voiceless and socially invisible;
• Perpetual othering and social exclusion, wherein survivors are treated as encroachers upon the resources, opportunities, and belonging reserved for the dominant group;
• Living with the imprint of mass death, haunted by the spectral legacy of annihilation and the unresolved grief of dislocated memory;
• Social, economic, and political exile, and enclavization, in which entire communities continue to exist at the periphery of the state and the global moral imagination, long after the formal violence has ceased.

We acknowledge that these experiences have marked, and continue to mark, the lived experience of many in our churches and communities in many parts of the world.

On this occasion we also acknowledge that one hundred and ten years ago, in 1915, whole populations of Armenians, Syriac-Aramaic-Assyrian Christians, and Pontic Greeks became the victims of Turkish nationalist movements in areas under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire. The atrocities committed against them were of such a scale and breadth that they provided the initial inspiration for the Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin’s quest to have ‘genocide’ recognized as a crime under international law.

Though the dispossession, deportation, starvation, murders and extermination of Armenians provoked international revulsion at the time, still today the lack of accountability commensurate with the scale of the atrocities against an entire population group is a grave injustice. Moreover, the lack even of recognition of – let alone accountability for – the similar crimes perpetrated against populations of Syriac-Aramaic-Assyrian Christians (referred to as the ‘Sayfo’ – or ‘Sword’, implying extermination) and Pontic Greeks in the same historical, political and geographic context is a shame on the conscience of the international community.

Christian churches and communities in Cyprus recognize a continuation of this history in the events of 1974, the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, and the impacts on Greek Cypriot communities. 

In a very different geographic, historic and cultural context, the Christian Indigenous Papuan people of the Papuan provinces of Indonesia describe a continuous ongoing history of atrocity crimes against their people since their lands were annexed by Indonesia in 1969. 

Today, we bring all these events and all the people who suffered atrocity crimes in these contexts – and who continue to suffer in some places – into our thoughts and prayers, and lift them up before the God of justice and compassion.

The lack of recognition, remembrance and accountability for such crimes committed in the past has enabled and encouraged their repetition. This catastrophic legacy is exemplified by Adolf Hitler’s rhetorical question in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”. The industrialized extermination of 6 million European Jews – together with Orthodox Serbs, Roma-Sinti people, homosexuals, and people with disabilities – perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazi regime and the collaborative regimes in Europe over the years that followed plumbed the uttermost depths of humanity’s capacity for evil. 

It was in revulsion at this evil that in 1946 the newly-established United Nations General Assembly recognized genocide as an international crime, and that in 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) was adopted.

However, it appears that the Genocide Convention has been invoked too infrequently and ineffectively, given the number of instances in which acts which the convention seeks to prevent and punish have since been committed or are plausibly alleged to have been committed during the intervening years, including in Cambodia/Kampuchea, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Burundi, Darfur, Iraq, Myanmar, and Gaza (where Israel’s actions have recently been adjudged by the International Court of Justice as constituting a plausible case of genocide).

The WCC therefore welcomed the adoption and entry into force in 2002 of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the prosecution and adjudication of the most serious international crimes, i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Unlike the Genocide Convention, which applies to states parties, the Rome Statute provides for individual personal criminal liability for the stipulated crimes. This innovation in international law brings a powerful new constraint on the commission of such crimes.

At the same time, we recognize the structural biases that have impacted the role of the ICC, including the relative paucity of cases against leaders from the Global North as compared with those from the Global South, and the lack of cooperation or even direct opposition by some leading powers.  

Indeed, it is a matter of great concern that the principles and mechanisms of international law that provide for accountability for genocide and the most serious international crimes are being attacked and undermined by some States to prevent them, their nationals, or their allies from being held accountable, putting power and privilege before the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, and betraying all victims of such crimes, past, present and future. In particular, we reject the US Government’s imposition of sanctions against individual judges of the ICC. Such efforts to weaken these principles and mechanisms for the prevention and prosecution of the most serious crimes under international law are immoral, and put us all in greater peril of their repetition.

Moreover, acts that may constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes under international law are continuing now as we meet, not only in Gaza, but also in other places highlighted by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide including Sudan (Darfur and the Blue Nile), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Sahel, and Ethiopia, fuelled by ethnic mobilization and hate speech.

In addition to these drivers, it is important to address other root causes of actions and consequences that are tantamount to genocide and other serious international crimes, including land dispossession, resource extraction and exploitation, and sources of ongoing structural violence that particularly impact Indigenous Peoples in settler-colonial countries.

The WCC Central Committee, meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 18-24 June 2025:

• Condemns the historic atrocity crimes – including genocide, enslavement, brutal colonization, systematic dispossession and erasure of histories – committed against the Herero and Nama peoples, the people of the Congo, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade (‘the middle passage’), Indigenous Peoples across settler-colonial nations, Christians and members of other religious communities targeted on the basis of their religious identity in Nigeria, Cameroon, Pakistan, India and elsewhere, and many others known and unknown to history, and demands reparations for the enduring legacy of suffering, stolen lands, and fractured identities borne by their descendants to this day, and which continues to shape injustices across generations requiring tangible acts of justice and reconciliation.

• Calls for the WCC to play a central role, with and through its member churches and ecumenical partners and within the resources at its disposal, in addressing this legacy of unresolved injustices, unhealed memories, and fractured communities due to historic atrocity crimes, through long-term accompaniment and programmatic engagement.

• Commemorates the 110th anniversary of the Armenian, Syriac-Aramaic-Assyrian (SAYFO 1915), and Pontic Greek genocides, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust.

• Invites all WCC member churches and ecumenical partners to join in remembrance and prayer for the victims and survivors of these and all such atrocity crimes – including gender-based atrocity crimes – and in advocacy and action for justice for the victims and accountability for the perpetrators, and for early warning and prevention of such crimes.

• Condemns the promotion of hatred of people and groups on the basis of their ‘otherness’ through ‘hate speech’ which has historically been shown to be a precursor to genocide and other atrocity crimes, and underscores the fundamental faith principle that all people are created equally in the image of God.

• Highlights the importance of early warning and prevention mechanisms, including African regional mechanisms such as those established through the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR). Such mechanisms should be much better recognized, supported and funded.

• Recalls the ‘Plan of Action for Religious Leaders and Actors to Prevent Incitement to Violence that Could Lead to Atrocity Crimes’, in the development of which WCC cooperated with the UN Office for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, together with other ecumenical and interfaith partners, and commends this document to all members of the WCC fellowship of churches.

• While acknowledging the limitations of existing international legal definitions and mechanisms, urges all responsible members of the international community to respect and support the principles and mechanisms to protect all from the most serious crimes under international law, to abide by the rulings of relevant tribunals, and to recommit to respect for the rule of law and for the independence of the judiciary, and denounces efforts to undermine such principles and mechanisms of international law.

• Requests the General Secretary to explore ways in which the WCC might engage and work with governments and other institutions in defence of these essential principles and mechanisms.