On October 9, 1985, Olivier Dupuis wanted in Belgium for desertion, gave himself up to the police in Brussels during a demonstration which was taking place in front of the headquarters of the European Commission.

Olivier Dupuis, a militant of the Radical Party, with a degree in Political Science, has been involved for years in the campaign against extermination by hunger which he brought in Belgium to approval of the law "Survie". He was arrested in Dubrovnik for distributing pamphlets asking for "A Yugoslavia based on justice, freedom, and democracy, a member of the European Community". At the time of his arrest, he was a candidate to the Belgian Parliament on the lists of their Ecological Party.

The choice of Belgium to put himself in the hands of justice, was not haphazard. In this way he wished to affirm the need for the European Community to take charge of security problems without delegating them to improbable national defences or to the american alliance; He also requested that in all the Community countries conscientious objection should not be considered a means of escaping the duty to defend the country, but a different way of exercising it.

Olivier Dupuis did not in fact object to the values which are the basis of military service, i.e. the defence of the country, the security. He affirmed these same values and his own duty to maintain them by contesting on the other hand, the legitimacy the adequacy, and the pertinence of the current means of defence based on the national defence and on weapons.

He did it above all, by renouncing the exemption of military duty which was granted him by the military authorities claiming instead his right to contribute to common security: his "state of service" in the war against starvation and totalitarianism had been built up over the years by militant commitment and non-violence.

He was not content with just saying "NO" to the weapons and armies but proposed alternative forms of defence: besides conscientious objection, the affirmation of conscience.

Dupuis affirmed that cannons and missiles were worth nothing if the rights of peoples were not defended and guaranteed, if a constant effort was not made to guarantee the right to life, to civil and political freedom. The violation of the fundamental rights of the individual by the totalitarian States is the true and most dangerous threat to security in our times. In the same way, the rage of millions of desperate in the southern hemisphere, sentenced to death from hunger, to underdevelopment, and world strife. As regards these threats, the military means of defence are dramatically inadequate and useless.

The military court in Brussels showed itself deaf to the attempt for dialogue on the new urgencies and boundaries for security, on peace and the defence that Olivier Dupuis desires to affirm with his rigorous testimony: he was sentenced to 24 months in prison against the public prosecutor's request for twelve months.

Olivier's position was evidently more dangerous that those of the other objectors and merited an exemplary punishment. "You are right" said the President of the Commission for Institutional affairs of the European Parliament, "hunger in the South of the world, the absence of rights in the Eastern countries, the egoism of those privileged enough to have liberty and well-being in the West, are the three huge problems of our epoch". "If, for example, an increasing number of young recruits began to have themselves put in prison because they refused an apparently national defence system, conceived in reality as auxiliary forces of a defence assured by an external imperial power, and thus a defence in appearance without meaning, but in reality humiliating for a free people; if they claimed a common European defence, managed by a democratic European power..."