Nearly 5,000 staff, students and honorary degree recipients from Belgian universities have called on the country’s higher education institutions to end all collaborations with Israeli institutions and companies implicated in violations of international law.
The open letter, titled “No honour in complicity: an open letter to our universities,” was published by Belgian Universities for Palestine and addressed to university rectors. It calls for Belgian universities to terminate existing partnerships, impose a moratorium on new collaborations, press Belgian and European authorities to comply with international law and provide structural support for Palestinian higher education.
According to the signatories’ page, the campaign had gathered more than 4,700 signatures by 2 June, including more than 1,100 professors, 1,800 researchers, 1,500 students and 450 administrative staff. The list also includes UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Palestinian-American legal scholar Noura Erakat, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard, climate activist Greta Thunberg, writer John M Coetzee and actor Stephen Fry.
The letter follows the decision by the University of Antwerp, Ghent University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel to jointly award an honorary doctorate to Albanese on 2 April. On the same day, the University of Antwerp also awarded an honorary doctorate to Erakat.
