STUDENTS and young workers from across the world attending the international conference against war demanded their universities and governments end their complicity in the further development of Europe’s war machine and US imperialism.

Jonathan Beullens of the German Socialist Democratic Student Association told activists in London on Saturday that learning and research institutions in his country had, until recently, been protected from military influence since the end of the second world war.

But the “civil clause,” which prohibits universities from participating in war-related research, is at risk of being scrapped as Germany moves towards rearming its military, he explained.

Following a fringe event at the International Anti-war Conference on Saturday, Mr Buellens told the Star: “People in power are no longer interested in universities having these civil clauses any more.”

His group, he explained, is “fighting for the defence of these clauses and to expand them further to all [public] institutions in Germany.”

He also called for the re-establishment of scientific collaboration between European researchers and their Russian counterparts, which ended when Ukraine was invaded in 2022.

Nero, from the Philippines-based militant youth organisation Anakbayan, called on activists to join in a protest in London on July 4 in front of the US embassy against joint British-US mining extraction in his south-east Asian country.

He told the Morning Star this project would “take 4,000 hectares of Filipino land” to secure critical minerals used to produce semiconductors that are “used in military technology and bombs which are flown all over the world for the US-led wars of aggression.”