On June 16, two unnamed students were killed by the Lesotho Mounted Police Service during a protest against the recent reduction of student grants at the National University of Lesotho. Student activists alleged that the Lesotho police fired fatal shots into the group of protestors without warning and wounded numerous others. The demonstration was organized by students after the National Manpower Development Secretariat cut students' monthly stipends by more than 50 percent.

As the Pride Month has been acknowledged and celebrated worldwide, the Turkish government, among many other authoritarian regimes, has been taking legal and sometimes violent physical action to prevent peaceful LGBTQI gatherings. Higher education institutions are among the primary battlefields for autocratic governments to tame and intimidate opposition and to reinforce a monolithic understanding of individual rights and freedoms. Some of detained METU students after their r

Following the unexplained disappearance of two Pakistani university students, Doda Ellahi and Ghamshad Baloch, on June 7, a group that had gathered outside of Sindh Assembly in Pakistan for a sit-in to protest their disappearance was attacked by Karachi police officers who were accused of using excessive force. According to The Print, 28 protestors were arrested and later released on June 13. Organizers who witnessed the arrests accused police of “manhandling” men, women, and

Photo credit: KIKA In May 2022, Scholars at Risk (SAR) and the Indonesian Caucus for Academic Freedom (KIKA) submitted a report on the status of human right and academic freedom in Indonesia to the United Nations Periodic Review, in preparation of the next annual United Nations Human Rights Council review meeting in November. The joint report has highlighted “a pattern of repression targeting outspoken scholars and students”[1] in addition to institutional and legal pressures

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine heads into its fifth month, Russian academics who have protested Russia’s perpetration of war continue to be punished by the state’s government and higher education administrators in the forms of reprisals, firings, fines, and arrests. While the numbers of those punished are estimated to be at least in the dozens, Amnesty International’s Acting Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Bruce Millar, suggests that it is “impossible to kno