Reports claim that police officers and military have unleashed a full-scale operation in more than 20 public universities in Brazil as a result of the campaign and election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The measures, related for the most part to political advertising control, have been taken in institutions of higher education in several states and have triggered a reaction from the academic community and public interest organizations. On November 1, 2018 more than 1

On September 12, 2018 Endangered Scholars Worldwide transmitted a letter of appeal to the Iranian Government and the US Department of State regarding the ongoing detention, persecution, and conviction of XiYue Wang, a 37-year-old United States citizen of Chinese descent. Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison while researching Iran's Qajar dynasty for his Princeton University PhD and has been detained since August 2016 by the Islamic Republic of Iran on accusation of “archi

On September 5, 2017, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) is being rescinded. As numerous accounts indicate, the majority of DACA recipients are students who are enrolled in higher education institutions. As we have said in previous statements, ending DACA will drastically disrupt the lives of these students who willingly came forward to register with the federal government. As an organization committed to

On June 10, 2017, Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang signed a special order into effect that stripped French-Vietnamese mathematician and former political prisoner Pham Minh Hoang of his Vietnamese citizenship. In the official letter, the government informed Hoang, 62, of its decision to revoke his nationality, citing Articles 88 and 91 of the country’s Criminal Code, which prohibit “conducting propaganda against the state” and “fleeing abroad or defecting to stay overseas w

Fears grow for two Turkish academics whose health is deteriorating after more than 60 days on hunger strike, PEN International said today. Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça went on hunger strike on March 8, 2017 in the country's capital, Ankara, demanding that their jobs be reinstated. Gülmen and Özakça are two of the 4,811 academics and 40,000 teachers who were dismissed by emergency decree following the coup attempt of July 15, 2016. Under the state of emergency, those dismi

Malaysia’s police chief confirmed the arrest of a former vice chair of a Turkish university who Ankara accuses of links to the last year’s coup attempt. Malaysia’s police chief confirmed the arrest on Friday, Turkish media reported. "He was not involved in terror activities throughout his 12-year stay here before this. But when he began to get involved, we acted," Inspector-General Khalid Abu Bakar told reporters, as quoted by the Anadolu news agency. Bakar said the suspect,

On April 4, 2017, the Hungarian parliament voted in favor of a government plan to regulate foreign-based universities to the degree that might lead to the closure of Central European University (CEU). As we have previously reported, last week, Zoltán Balog, the Minister of Human Resources, submitted a bill to parliament based on claims of “irregularities” found in the operation of foreign-based universities. While it is not specifically named, it has been widely noted that th

Central European University (CEU) expresses its opposition to proposed amendments to Act CCIV of 2011 on National Higher Education, tabled in Hungarian Parliament today. After careful legal study, CEU has concluded that these amendments would make it impossible for the university to continue its operations as an institution of higher education in Budapest, CEU's home for 25 years. CEU is in full conformity with Hungarian law. The proposed legislation targets CEU directly and

Mehmet Fatih Traş, a research assistant at Çukurova University, committed suicide on Friday evening in his home after he was fired from his job. Traş was one of the signatories of a peace declaration that called on the government to halt operations by security forces in Southeastern Turkey, restore peace to the nation, and return to the negotiating table to restart shelved talks with the Kurds to find a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue. The Adana branch of the Education

Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a prominent Sudanese human rights defender, has been unlawfully detained for over two months. He is being held by the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) at Khartoum’s Kober Prison without charge or access to legal representation, 39 human rights groups and activists said. Ibrahim, who was arrested with his driver, Adam El-Sheikh Mukhtar, on December 7, 2016 at the University of Khartoum, has received three brief visits from family members,

Narges Bayani, a PhD student at NYU’s Institute for the Study Of The Ancient World, was among those detained at JFK. According to a Facebook post by Bayani’s sister, she was denied reentry to the country and had to wait two days to take a flight back to Iran despite having lived in the United States for the past eight years. NYU President Andrew Hamilton sent out an email regarding the executive order. In it he reassured students that NYU will “safeguard the rights, well-bein

A Long Island PhD student from Iran has been detained at JFK for the past 24 hours following President Trump’s executive order instituting extreme vetting, her friend told The Post. “She arrived yesterday, and she has been in detention for over 24 hours,” Mitra Vardei said, referencing her friend Vahideh Rasekhi. “We are hearing different news," Vardei continued. "She is going to be deported, then we hear there is a ban and she won’t be deported.” In addition to this flip-flo

Samira Asgari spent months planning her move from Switzerland to the United States. The 30-year-old Iranian woman had secured a post-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She’d won a prestigious award for her research in genomics that would even pay her salary at her new, American lab. “I was really happy, and it felt like everything was going right,” she said. Everything changed, however, when Asgari flew from Geneva to Frankfu

As the sixth month of the emergency rule ends in Turkey, the government does not seem willing to end its witch-hunt, which has resulted in the dismissal of more than 120,000 civil servants--including nearly 7000 academics--from their jobs and the closure of 15 of the 193 universities across the country. The war against academics in Turkey began long before the coup attempt. On January 10, 2016, a group of scholars calling themselves Academics for Peace signed an open letter c