Israel’s war crimes in Gaza have led to on-campus protests, that questioned the universities’ potential role in enabling or contesting these crimes. While in the US and the UK, such protests focused mostly on universities’ investments, in continental Europe the emphasis was largely on collaborations with Israeli partners – whether academic, government or business. For those universities (for example in Flanders) who already had a policy in place that screened collaborations for human rights risks, the Gaza crisis proved to be a ‘stress test’ for that policy, sometimes leading to adjustments. For other universities across Europe, the crisis gave rise to new initiatives to start screening collaborations.

Early initiatives that envisaged the introduction of a screening procedure include the National University of Ireland and its Member Institutions (2013) and the Free University Berlin (2020). Meanwhile, Trinity College Dublin and the University College Cork have taken action. Most Belgian (Antwerp, Free University Brussels, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Ghent, Hasselt, KULeuven, UCLouvain, Liège Université) and Dutch universities (University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, University of Groningen, Universiteit Leiden, Maastricht University, Radboud University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Tilburg University,  have meanwhile adopted a human rights policy and/or set up a human rights screening mechanism. Eindhoven University of Technology, Utrecht University and University of Twente have expressed the intention to set up such a Committee. At the University of Lausanne, the Research Ethics Committee was tasked with an ad hoc assessment of agreements with an Israeli university. In future, the Committee has been proposed to undertake in-depth assessments of draft agreements. The University of Ljubljana has set up a screening procedure for project applications in which partners are involved that are from countries involved in human rights violations or aggression. The University of Helsinki has made a risk assessment tool (RISK-I tool) for funding applications mandatory. North-West University (South Africa) adopted a policy and set up a monitoring mechanism for internal human rights compliance in 2023. An overview of screening initiatives at Italian universities is given by Carlo Mazzoleni.

In a series of blogposts, we discuss this fascinating new development in human rights self-regulation.