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The academic freedom program aims to monitor, expose, and mobilize concerted action to challenge threats to academic freedom worldwide, and to foster greater scholarly and media attention to the critical role played by institutions of higher education in the promotion of human rights and the development and preservation of civil society. The program brings together the expertise of Human Rights Watch staff and the committed efforts of the academic leaders and prominent scholars who form the Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee (formerly the Committee for International Academic Freedom, established in 1991). Educators, researchers and students are frequent targets of state-sponsored violence and repression. In the most notorious cases, governments bent on imposing a monolithic state ideology have disproportionately targeted teachers and educated individuals for imprisonment, torture and murder. More commonly, governments use intimidation, physical abuse and imprisonment to silence campus-based critics and dissidents, and censor teaching, research and publication on important subjects. Many governments also continue to deny equal access to educational institutions to women and members of disfavored minority groups. Academic freedom work at Human Rights Watch is based on the recognition that such violations have received too little attention in the international human rights community. The academic freedom program seeks to address this deficiency through casework on behalf of embattled academics, collaborative efforts with other human rights organizations and concerned professional associations, thematic research and reports, and publication of an annual overview of violations in the Human Rights Watch World Report. |
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