We are citizens of the Mediterranean, gathered in the Convention on the rights of the
Mediterranean, signed in Palermo on 19 March 2022, by 97 people, coming from 20 countries
bordering our sea. The intent of the Convention is to create a permanent community of
confrontation and collaboration capable of restoring centrality to the Mediterranean identity
and making it a space that creates humanity and participatory democracy.
Mayors, Associations, Personalities from the world of culture are committed to creating ever
closer links between civil society in the Mediterranean and national institutions.
Today more than ever it is essential that this area of the world, the cradle of one of the most
ancient civilizations, with extraordinary historical, artistic, cultural and landscape heritages,
join forces to contribute to social and civil development, as an example of peaceful and fruitful
coexistence.
The Mediterranean must become an area of peace, of true cooperation, of rejection of the violent
and oppressive logic that is seriously endangering humanity.
We would like to see crowned the unanimous aspiration of the peoples of the nations that you
represent for a future aimed exclusively at the well-being of people, animals, air and water.
Freedom, respect for differences and collective and individual identities, hospitality,
brotherhood, love for the Earth and its inhabitants of all species, are the characteristics that
unite the peoples of the Mediterranean.
Wars, occupations, local conflicts, violence, oppression, cause unspeakable suffering to those
who suffer them.
We ask for a profound commitment from your governments to initiate a process that will lead
to the declaration of the “Mediterranean Sea of peace, which unites peoples and their cultures”.
A nuclear-free, demilitarized, neutral Mediterranean.
The threat of a nuclear conflict that will lead to the destruction of humanity is very strong and
concrete.
After the failure of the blitzkrieg In Ukraine, started on February 24th by a mad decision of the
Russian authorities, due to the strong reaction of the Ukrainian people and the massive aid of
weapons and means provided by NATO and the EU are precipitating the world towards
catastrophe of a generalized world war.
Peace must be preserved through negotiation, not by seeking an impossible total victory.
War is only the most evidently catastrophic outcome of an intrinsically destructive and biocidal
social, cultural, and economic system. A system sick with greed. Obsessed with the growth of
economic values and which pushes towards permanent competition for the grabbing of
resources and markets, causing, in addition to wars, global warming, the destruction of
biodiversity, the poisoning of the seas, air, earth, zoonotic pandemics.
All the companies involved in the armaments and equipment production market are getting rich,
diverting resources from the civil economy. The war economy becomes the continuation and
extension of the market economy. The integration between systems of “production” and
systems of “destruction” is increasingly highlighted in a logic of increasingly destructive
competition.
It is necessary to emancipate oneself from everything that generates war, it is not tameable,
regulated, juridical. War is a crime.
According to us citizens of the Mediterranean, war must be abolished at its root, through
complete disarmament, starting with nuclear, anti-personnel, chemical, bacteriological, robotic,
white phosphorus and depleted uranium weapons. The only effective form of deterrence and
prevention of war is the prohibition of the use of weapons.
Wars operate a systematic destruction of structures and infrastructures, including warehouses,
factories, power plants, generating all kinds of pollution. The presence of active or
decommissioned nuclear power plants on the terrain of war constitutes in itself a danger on a
global scale. Even the countryside and ecosystems are not spared from the fury of war, wildlife
is exterminated. Biodiversity cancelled.
Wars are a holocaust of human and non-human lives, a gigantic waste of economic assets and
public resources, an unspeakable aggravation of natural environmental conditions, a
determining factor of the ongoing biocide, of overstepping the planetary ecological limits of
the Earth system.
A powerful voice rises from the peoples of the Mediterranean asking: Peace and Prosperity of
the Communities.
As a member of the International Movement for Ecological and Social Justice, we feel part of
the movement of non-violent civil disobedience against war, rearmament, nuclear.
In order to win peace, it is necessary to mobilize the cultural resources, the reasonable, the
democratic ethos, the desire for justice which animates people, and which persists even when
they are oppressed.
We look to you, Ambassadors of the Mediterranean Nations to initiate a process leading to a
Peace Conference in the Mediterranean. Civil Society will support with all its strength all the
efforts you make in this direction.
Thank you for your attention
Mediterranean Sea, January 1st 2023
The Convention on the Rights of the Mediterranean.
