Persecuted researchers
The EU wants to protect academic freedoms
Academic freedoms are under threat in Europe too. We look at how the EU aims to put things right.
The ‘march for science’ in Rostock, Germany, in 2017. People demonstrated in 600 towns all over the world in support of research and in protest at so-called alternative facts. | Image: Bernd Wüstneck/DPA/Keystone
The European Parliament has set up a new watchdog to help protect freedom in science and scholarship. The ‘EP Forum for Academic Freedom’ is a permanent body designed to support initiatives to protect researchers from interference by states or other bodies. It is also intended to produce “a truly independent report on the state of play of academic freedom across Europe”, as Roberta Metsola, the European Parliament President, explained to Science Business.
According to this online platform, the Forum has been initiated by the German politician Christian Ehler, who gave a simple, straightforward reason: “The erosion of academic freedom in Europe is a mortal threat to our common European future”. The global Academic Freedom Index, produced by the universities of Gothenburg and Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2022, shows how academic freedom has declined significantly in 19 countries since 2011.
In Europe, it’s Hungary and Poland who are the chief offenders. Hungary attracted especially negative attention in 2017 when it ignored the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, specifically Article 13, ‘Freedom of the arts and sciences’, by introducing a law that forced the Central European University, founded by the billionaire George Soros, to move from Budapest to Vienna. The 2022 Annual Report of Scholars at Risk, an NGO that campaigns for persecuted researchers across the world, also mentions other incidents that have taken place in EU member states.
The EU’s Charter is not legally binding. On the website ‘Research Europe’, Kurt Deketelaere, the Secretary-General of the League of European Research Universities (LERU), has declared that it is “unfortunate [that] the European Commission mostly treats academic freedom as an educational matter, and consequently shies away from action when that freedom is in danger”. The EU is now trying to find another means of protecting it.
