Presentation by Sophie Cook, Executive Director, CCS, at the July 24 meeting of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition Meeting, in Washington DC. I am pleased to represent the Committee of Concerned Scientists on this panel titled “Human Rights and the Mobility of Scientists: Acting on Visa Restrictions.”
CCS is an independent, nonprofit organization of scientists, scholars, engineers and physicians dedicated to the protection and advancement of human rights and scientific freedom for colleagues all over the world. It actually had its origin in restrictions on the mobility of scientists in the Soviet Union.
In the early 1970s, Jews in the USSR started to apply for exit visas to emigrate to Israel. Many of them were physicists, mathematicians and other scientists. The Soviet government, with the logic of totalitarianism, denied them visas on the grounds that they were too valuable to let go, then fired them and prosecuted them for being unemployed. American scientists who could travel to Russia provided moral and material support to their colleagues and they formed the CCS. It was a two way traffic in a way that I recently discovered: some of the literary masterpieces such as Solzhenitzin’s works came out ot the USSR in the briefcases of these scientists which were not searched.
During that time, many American Jewish organizations lobbied for Russian Jews. I understand that AAAS was also very active. In the 1980s, at the meeting of President Reagan and President Gorbachev, Reagan persuaded Gorbachev to allow the Nobel winner physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner to leave their internal exile. Eventually, one and a half million Jews left the Soviet Union. Many scientists came to the US and I still receive contributions from them. I am sure they added considerably, like other refugees, to the richness of our scientific life.
Early on, CCS discovered that scientists around the world, outside of the USSR, were subject to persecution and they started to advocate on their behalf. The scope of the efforts of CCS was also extended to scholars and other professionals. This work has continued to this day.
We are a very small organization, focusing mostly on individuals. Only rarely do we take on general issues relating to the freedom of science and human rights. I am the only staff member and I work with a distinguished panel of scientists and scholars.
We function in cooperation with other science agencies and use letters, lobbying, press releases and personal contact with influential people, if possible, to achieve our mission. Where individuals for whom we advocated are released or allowed to travel, we usually don’t know whose efforts led to that good outcome and rarely take credit for it, simply rejoicing in anyone’s new found freedom.
Most of our cases involve advocacy for individuals in jail, held without charges or trumped up charges, often tortured, and occasionally put to death. So the ability to travel to conferences and get visas is only secondary in the concerns of these victims of oppression. But we do take the issue of mobility seriously and I just want to list a few cases from the past few years involving restrictions on travel that we protested. These restrictions are part of the continuum of the assault on scientific freedom by a number of governments.
We protested a few years ago the arrest of an Iranian scholar about to leave Teheran to attend a German Marshall fund meeting in Brussels. He was eventually released on bail but probably missed the meeting. We also protested a blanket Israeli ban on Palestinian students entering Israel for graduate study, including a chemistry graduate student, who was eventually allowed entry. Recently, Fulbright scholars from Gaza were denied exit permits by Israel but the State Department under President Bush persuaded Israel to reverse its policy before out letter went out. We also protested US denial of visas to Cuban and Iranian academics during the same period.
During my own tenure of a year and a half, I feel that we have been less successful in securing freedom to travel. We protested the denial of exit visas to Chinese physicians Gao Yaojie and Jian Yangyong, who received the Pagels prize awarded by the New York Academy of Sciences for their work on HIV/AIDS. More recent recipients of the same prize, the world famous brothers Alaei, Iranian doctors who worked in HIV/AIDS for 20 years, are now in jail, convicted of treason and sentenced to seven years in jail.
A Chinese scholar of Uighur descent, Tohti Tunyaz, who served an 11 year prison sentence for investigating Uighur history, was denied the right to leave China after his release. He is unable to continue his studies in Japan and rejoin his family there. One of the most prominent Chinese dissidents jailed recently was Liu Xiaobo, who circulated a petition called Charter 08, calling on the government to honor the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which includes the right to mobility, among others.
Besides being a universal human right, mobility is crucial to the progress of science. We recently protested a proposed boycott of Israeli scholars in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US, with a letter campaign to academic and scientific journals. My committee member Alexander Greer, who is present today, and another board member, Zafra Lehrman, had their letter protesting the boycott published by Chemical and Engineering News, the publication of the American Chemical Society, to the same effect on April 27, 2009.
I’d like to quote a paragraph of our letter that argues for the practical importance of the right of scientists to travel regardless of nationality or politics:
“The whole scholarly and scientific enterprise depends upon the ferment that generates new ideas and experiments. Scientific meetings and exchanges are the settings where science develops (including the opportunity for discussions of human rights and scientific freedom). Scientists and academics of the country singled out by the boycott are precluded from contributing to international collaborations, to professional publications, and to various areas of teaching and learning. It is not merely scholars and scientists who suffer but also their students, who lose access to mentors, meetings, and potential colleagues. Everyone loses, when political forces damp the vital process of scientific communication.”
My own personal view of why governments oppose scientific freedom and freedom to travel has less to do with ideology than with autocratic control.
In the case of the most brutal regimes, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Chad, scientists are the victims of thugs, members of the state intelligence services, who may or may not be under the government’s control. As one exile said, “it’s not what you do, it’s who you are” that gets you in trouble. Scientists and academics are often Western educated and pro-democracy but even if they don’t speak out for human rights, it is their status as secular leaders that threatens oppressive governments.
In the case of countries struggling with Islamic fundamentalism, there is a tension between the secular and religious orientation. That would explain a recent incident in which an official Turkish scientific publication withdrew an issue devoted to Darwin and evolution (we protested that move, as well as the firing of the editor.) In the case of the most obdurate oppressors, China and Iran, control of information and fear of foreign influence are the principal reasons. How else to explain the arrest of HIV AIDS doctors, who might disseminate the extent of the disease in their countries?
According to the most recent report of the Scholars at Risk, similar restrictions throughout the world are frequent and severe.
Probably the most important weapon in fighting restrictions on the mobility and safety of scientists around the world is the cooperation of human rights organizations. I am not yet clear on what exactly the coalition formed by AAAS will achieve and I hope it will not be a bureaucratic exercise when it comes to protecting individuals at risk. As was pointed out yesterday at the ceremony honoring Dr. Pierre Richard Claude, when it comes to human rights violations, you need to speak out fast, courageously and loud. This is not the area where certainty and scientific investigation of allegations is appropriate. Usually, where there is smoke, there is fire.
Secondly, advocating with our own government is essential. Human rights activism by the United States has waxed and waned since President Carter first made it part of our policy but it has never completely disappeared. Just recently, before President Obama’s visit to Cairo, the main charge against the Egyptian scholar Saad Enim Ibrahim, who had written an op-ed to the Washington Post criticizing Egypt’s human rights record, was dropped, after appeals by human rights groups to the State Department.
Having presented this cheerful picture, I will now deliver the two sentence commercial for CCS that our moderator, Brad Miller of the American Chemical Society, has kindly allowed me to include. Join us by opening our web site, concernedscientists.org, and click on becoming a member. There are no dues and no meetings to attend and we will not inundate you with information. We accept contributions, ideas and your voluntary activism, if you are so inclined. But join us in continuing the long CCS tradition of speaking out for science, for freedom, and to be the enduring voice of conscience.