On February 6th, 2025, Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur of the UN for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, gave a talk at Copenhagen University about her two last reports, Anatomy of a Genocide, from March 2024, and Genocide as a colonial erasure, from October 2024. As she was talking in a university which has ties with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), we asked her about what academic boycott.
She answered that “The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion has concluded that the occupation that Israel maintains […] is illegal, and this obliges everyone, member states, united nations, and private institutions including universities, not to engage, not to assist in any possible way, the unlawfulness that Israel maintains by oppressing the Palestinian people.[…] Having ties with, it doesn’t matter which university, it might be Tel Aviv, or the Hebrew University, might lead to complicity with the crimes that they endorse. […] So, this is the time to turn the page and do something good that will go down in history as a principled action, so yes, I think it is about time to cut ties with Israeli Universities.”
This is a very strong backing of Academic Boycott by officials from the United Nations. Recently, also the Ministry of Higher Education, Christina Egelund, declared that collaborations with an entity even partially located on illegally occupied land, such as the HUJI, should be terminated. We communicated those statements to KU’s rector in the press, hoping to push him to terminate this collaboration with the HUJI, as he tried to push back an hypothetical reevaluation of this collaboration to an indefinite future time.
We are asking to terminate all collaborations between Danish Universities and Israeli Universities complicit in the crime of Apartheid.