Recognizing ecocide as the 5th Crime Against Peace in the International Criminal Court. Is it a utopia?

From this website we will be announcing the activities that will be carried out in our 10th International Symposium of the World Center for Humanist Studies, which will take place from May 8 to 11, 2025. 

Between the 8th and 11th of May 2025, the tenth edition of the International Symposium of the World Center for Humanist Studies will be held, which on this occasion is entitled “UTOPIAS IN PROGRESS: Paths towards the Universal Human Nation”.

UTOPIA IN PROGRESS
Pathways to the Universal Human Nation
May 8-11, 2025

This Symposium is interested in unveiling the structure of the personal and social crisis that is going through the current historical moment. A crisis that causes deep discomfort to individuals and peoples and is fueled by the accumulation of distorted narratives of a capitalist, individualistic and predatory global system, which imposes its structure based on violence.

The 9th International Symposium of the World Centre for Humanist Studies (WCHS) will take place the 28th, 29th, and 30th of April. Since the beginning of the WCHS international symposiums, 15 years have passed and the organisational deployment of volunteers around the world to make it happen has multiplied in each edition of the symposium.

Human rights do not have the universal validity that corresponds to their purpose.

To begin with, human rights suffer the physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual and psychological or moral violence strikes, considering violence as a methodology of the different forms of discrimination.

And there are wars, poverty and social exclusion, racism, religious intolerance, gender inequality, censorship, defamation and coercion, as concrete expressions of daily attacks on human rights around the world.

In the context of the 9th WCHS Symposium, dedicated to the limits to overcome in order to get out of the unprecedented crisis that affects us, the eradication of violence is obviously one of the issues at stake.

The persistence of political and economic powers in using violence as a means to maintain or extend their hegemony, and the generalisation of violence as a basis of expression for human existence, lock humanity into destructive, pusillanimous and dead-end patterns.

The dimension of the current crisis shows that the current economic system - based on a productivist and consumerist model dependent on the domination of the great international financial capital - does not work; that it is taking the terrestrial ecosystem that supports life to the limit of the point of no return; that is governed by the value of money; that it sits in the paradigm that grants capital the power to decide on the direction of profit, while the worker only receives the salary; that it has a skewed distributive matrix of capital and that leads to usury, speculation and the gene

The gender issue is crossing our borders of thought. Today the issue of gender raises not only sexual diversity, but also includes identity, the relationship between peers and with other generations, the relationship with the world, the interpretation of reality, etc.

In parallel, it is increasingly evident to society that violence against women is an undeniable historical fact over the centuries; An issue that, according to feminist currents, responds to the patriarchal structure of today's society.

In different regions of the world, entire towns were devastated by invaders who converted them into slavery and through territorial invasion and material looting, entire population strips remained submerged in poverty until the present.

But not satisfied with this type of holocaust, an attempt was made to suppress the Cosmogony of these Ancestral peoples with different campaigns of "Extirpation of Idolatry", as in the case of America.

The world is in crisis, however, there are overcoming actions that, driven by the people, cross borders. At the same time, the forces that are still dominant, responsible for the serious current social and environmental problems, seek to sustain discourses that slow down the processes of change and deepen conflicts, often reversing important achievements of social groups.