This coming Wednesday, the long-awaited Human Rights Due Diligence Framework will be discussed at the open meeting of the Executive Board. The framework seeks to specify what international collaboration would or would not be acceptable. In short, each country is first examined to determine whether human rights have been violated. If so, then a committee of experts will determine whether the partner in that country was involved in said violation. If that is also the case, then the advice will be negative.
Promise
In the summer of 2024, the rectors of all the Dutch universities promised in Trouw that academic freedom would be leading when considering any partnerships. Little of that is reflected in the current document. Consider the following accompanying memo: ‘The UM Global Engagement Policy 2024-2030, adopted by the Executive Board on 22 April 2024, has announced that UM will develop a Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) Framework that can be used to assess whether there are indications that our institutional strategic partnerships are involved in serious human rights violations or international crimes.’ This terminology has been very carefully selected. There is a distinction in the discussion of academic freedom between those institutional strategic partnerships on the one hand, and individual activities on the other. The partnerships would be assessed according to the framework. That wasn’t the case for individual activities, which would be protected under academic freedom, as was promised at the time. However, it now appears that individual activities most definitely will be assessed. How remains unclear. At first glance, it seems these activities are only subject to a voluntary self-assessment, but further on in the document, it says that individual researchers must open a dialogue with the committee, and the committee is then permitted to assess the project using the entire procedure.
Bar should be high
And what does this assessment involve? How exactly will potential violation of human rights be determined, or possible involvement? Considering the severity of the accusation, one must assume that the bar is high. Objective, verifiable criteria such as a final conviction in an international court, for example. But according to the list of sources, the committee is allowed to base its decision on a host of other sources, such as academic publications and reports from NGOs such as the International Red Cross. And it is explicitly called a non-exhaustive list of sources, so nobody knows where it ends.
When evaluating whether a partner has violated human rights, the involvement of the army plays an important part. For example, is there military personnel present on campus? If that is the case, then this would indicate at least indirect involvement. By equating presence with involvement, the framework ignores the right to self-defence. Illustrative here is the recent judgement which said the Dutch government is allowed to provide military resources to Israel, as long as it has sufficiently verified that they will only be used for self-defence and not in a way that could result in the violation of international humanitarian law. In other words, direct involvement as the standard. The framework doesn’t make that distinction. In doing so, it denies the possibility of the right to self-defence, and that is a political opinion that is inappropriate for a university.
Stretching
Stretching the inclusion criteria and using flexible criteria to determine whether a country or partner has violated human rights gives the committee a disproportionate degree of freedom. And the consequences of that freedom can be seen at Tilburg. The Executive Board there is now having to deal with the report from a committee that chose to ignore academic freedom and simply advised cutting all ties with Israeli universities.
The framework still needs to be approved by the University Council. I sincerely hope that they will take academic freedom seriously. That they send the Executive Board back to the drawing board and ask for objective criteria, clear direct ties, and the explicit exemption of certain individual activities, including ERCs and Horizon2020. No shortcuts. So we don’t risk the university taking on a political position, or the Red Cross determining where you can do an internship, or a colleague from a different faculty deciding whether you can or can’t work on your European project.
Ewout Meijer, associate professor Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience