Thank you for your message. On November 9, the Collège de France announced its decision to postpone the event entitled “Palestine and Europe: the burden of past and contemporary dynamics” due to “controversy” surrounding his clothes, according to administrators from the prestigious company.
On Wednesday, the Paris administrative court rejected the summary appeal filed against the conference’s cancellation. Hakim assessed that so far the event organizers had succeeded in holding it on the same dates, Thursday 13 and Friday 14 November, at the new location,” there has been no serious and clearly illegal attack on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and academic freedom, such as would justify a summary judge’s intervention within forty-eight hours..
But the judge acknowledged that the conference would take place under certain conditions “significantly reduced, especially in terms of room size, compared to the original plan” : it will be held at the headquarters of the Center for Research and Study of Arab Politics in Paris (Carep) which can only accommodate 35 people, while the Collège de France amphitheater has 460 seats.
The cancellation of the conference by the Collège de France sparked a wave of reaction from academic circles. “ “We are in the era of French McCarthyism”regretted, Wednesday, to Agence France-Presse (AFP) Salam Kawakibi, political science researcher and director of Carep, “scandalous” with cancellation a “a high-level scientific conference, with experts from all over the world, including Israel”.
Nearly 2,200 researchers, teachers and students signed a petition demanding the resignation of the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Philippe Baptiste, believing the decision to cancel the event “constitutes a serious attack on academic and scientific freedom”.
Julien11