Protest at murder of Giulio Regeni. Press Association/AP/Amr Nabil. All rights reserved.The call below was launched on 24 February by a number of academics based in the UK. It has been signed by over 200 university teachers from all over the world.
The undersigned are university teachers concerned over recent events that point to a serious reversal of gains in democracy and academic freedom achieved over the last decades in many countries.
Three cases have been most prominent in that regard since the beginning of 2016: the crackdown by Turkish authorities on the more than 1200 signatories in Turkey of the petition by “Academics for Peace” criticizing the anti-Kurdish war drive launched by the Turkish government; the crackdown by Indian authorities on students involved in a non-violent campus protest against the death penalty at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad University, and an attempt to shoot and kill a professor by groups affiliated to the ruling party; and the savage torture and assassination in Cairo of Italian research student Giulio Regeni.
