Scholars at Risk – Advocacy Seminar (SoSe21)

Human Rights Advocacy for wrongfully imprisoned and threatened scholars worldwide

The SAR Advocacy Seminar - for the first time at the RUB- allows RUB students and doctoral researchers from across the disciplines to jointly engage in international human rights advocacy for imprisoned and otherwise threatened scholars, thereby promoting academic freedom worldwide.

The role of researchers and scientists is to ask critical questions, to investigate them according to scientific standards and research ethics/integrity and to engage in open debates -also over controversial issues- based on those scientific  findings.

However, Academic Freedom and Free Speech are currently contested and under threat in Europe and around the world. In certain contexts and situations, this leads to critical questions becoming dangerous questions, or even questions that are too dangerous to ask.

Because of this, scholars that still dare to ask 'dangerous questions' are facing a variety of threats and consequences: Some rather subtle, such as not being published or invited to a conference; others more serious, including open or self-censorship, harassment and loss of position. Among the most serious and devastating consequences, though, are imprisonment, kidnapping, torture and death.



Semester: SoSe 2024