The General Council of the Baptist World Alliance, meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, July 20- 25, 2008;
Laments that the Italian government, without objection of the European Union, is practicing the involuntary fingerprinting of all Roma people within its borders, including children, which we regard as ethnic profiling;
THANKS the Union Bautista Latino Americana (UBLA) for the guidance they have provided the Council on what a Christian response should be to the Fifth Centennial of the coming of Columbus and the Europeans to the Americas, and the beginning of a different way of live and thought for the people of the hemisphere;
“Aware of the unprecedented suffering through which the people of Israel have passed during recent years, millions of them being exterminated by the most inhuman means; aware also that these sufferings are not yet at an end, but that hundreds of thousands are still in concentration camps or wandering homeless from land to land; aware, further, that the poisonous propaganda and destructive designs of anti- Semitism are still at work in many lands: this Congress puts on record its sense of sorrow and shame that such conditions prevail.
The U. N. Convention defines genocide to mean certain acts (enumerated in Article II) committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.
“Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”
WHEREAS, The Baptist World Alliance in 1934, 1939 and 1947 condemned racial discrimination;
WHEREAS, The question of race relations is world-wide in scope and is one of the most serious and baffling problems confronting mankind today;
“Race relations is one of the perplexing problems which the Christian Church must face in the world to- day. There are many conditions and attitudes which strain and impair human relations and cause great concern; but we cannot solve the problem unless we face it forthrightly as Christians.
We urge the nations to dispense with all testing of nuclear weapons and the production of the same; and co-operatively, to agree on satisfactory methods of inspection designed to ensure that all nations shall exercise good faith in this matter.