Human rights campaigners have welcomed the decision of the Colombian Supreme Court to allow citizens to opt out of obligatory military service because of religious, moral or philosophical objections.

Kingston, Jamaica, will be the host city for the World Council of Churches' International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in 2011, it has been announced - marking a decade of activity promoting practical responses to violence.

Anabaptism, a dissenting Christian tradition associated with the world's historic peace churches, provides a specific way of understanding what it means to follow Jesus, a leading presenter at a major Mennonite consultation has declared.

A major North American peace church agency, Mennonite Central Committee, is adding its weight to a Spring mobilisation against the cruelty of cluster bombs - via a bill in the US Senate.

Against the backdrop of a country still transitioning from civil war to an elected presidential system of rule, Christians representing two of the Democratic Republic of Congo's Mennonite conferences, Communaut?© Evang?©lique Mennonite (CEM) and Communaut?© Mennonite au Congo (CMCO), have welcomed delegates from Mennonite Church USA in a relationships building exercise.

Hundreds of Mennonites living in Canada may face losing their Canadian citizenship on account of the non-recognition of church marriages in Latin America, where some 7,000 of their ancestors moved in the 1920s, reports UPI and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.