Iran’s parliament has approved a bill that would restrict all forms of academic collaboration with international universities.
The legislation places academics in danger of imprisonment for up to 30 years for contact with foreign higher education institutions. If done without state approval, co-authorship and joint research would also be considered crimes.
Iranian scholars have warned that the law risks damaging scientific cooperation and accelerating the emigration of skilled Iranian people.
This proposed bill is not yet law or in force. It is still under review, and some of its articles have been returned to committee stages because of ambiguities.
According to one Iranian scholar, Negar Partow, a senior fellow at Indiana University Bloomington, one of the most troubling aspects of the bill is that it concentrates decision-making power in the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence and the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
