Resolutioner Rom
On Conscription in Europe
Referring to the 1930 manifesto “Against Conscription and the Military Training of Youth” signed by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Selma Lagerlöf, Emanuel Rádl, Stefan Zweig and others stating that “Conscription subjects individual personalities to militarism. It is a form of servitude. (...) Military training is schooling of body and spirit in the art of killing. Military training is education for war. (...) It hinders the development of the desire for peace.”
Considering that ...
... the concept of conscription is incompatible with liberal values and a number of principles enshrined by several conventions as human rights, e.g. the right of free choice of employment, non-discrimination between the genders, the principle that no one shall be held in servitude, the right to freedom of conscience;
... conscription reduces the economic potential of a country that enforces it since the time spent in the military or the time spent performing alternative service cannot be used in a productive way as the entry of a young person into the workforce or into higher education is delayed or interrupted;
... similarly, conscription is costly. Any notion that this is not the case is a great example of the broken window fallacy as described by Frédéric Bastiat;
... young people in countries where conscription is enforced suffer from indirect discrimination compared to young people in countries where it is not enforced;
... 14 CoE countries have abolished conscription since the year 2000 or have agreed on abolishing it by 2010 at latest;
... only a minority of EU Member States (8 out of 27: Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden) and a minority of other CoE Member States (16 out of 47: EU countries mentioned plus Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Moldova, Russia) still enforce conscription and have no concrete plans to abolish it in the near future;
... a number of countries, although having no concrete plan yet, are considering to abolish conscription (e.g. Serbia, Sweden);
...some countries that in practice abolished conscription still retain a legal possibility to enforce it (e.g. Belgium, France, Netherlands);
... conscript armies do not meet the levels of professional training required by today’s militaries;
... this issue should be of considerable important for LYMEC in its function as both a liberal and a youth organisation.
LYMEC calls for…
1) The abolishment of mandatory military service or any other form of mandatory alternative public service in all European Countries;
2) The removal of the possibility to enforce conscription in countries that have merely suspended and not abolished it;
3) The European Union and the Council of Europe to define mandatory military or alternative service as incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
