What contributes to academic freedom violations is also that they are essential elements for the regimes to maintain their power and in addition to this issue, interstate and civil wars as well as internal disorders and external intervention can damage educational structures and institutions.
[2] Regarding the Middle East and Northern Africa, the AFM registers cases in: Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine (OPT), Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia.
This association has created a Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF), which aims to remove any obstacle regarding the exchange of knowledge and any restrictions on academicians coming also from governments.
[7][8][9] Several reform initiatives have been taken throughout Turkey's history which aim at restructuring governance of higher education and thus affecting academic freedom.
[7] Those attacks on academic freedom were aimed at confining professors from being involved in partisan politics resulting in several cases of suspensions of academicians and denial of promotions.
[7] The 1960 coup was seen as a promise for reversal of the DP's encroachment over university autonomy, as it recruited academicians in government offices, selected to write the constitution and other vital roles.
The petition condemns the Turkish state's security operations in southeast Turkey which devastated the Kurdish population and to resume the peace process.
In response, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unleashed a harsh campaign vilifying the academics in at least five speeches – terming them vile, equal to terrorists, base and dark – and demanding sanctions against them.
They were detained and then jailed by a court a day after Erdoğan called for the crime of terrorism to be widened to include expression which he judges “serves the aims of terrorists,” and which would target professions such as journalists, politicians and activists.
[18] On July 26, 2019, Turkey's Constitutional Court delivered its landmark verdict which ruled that the penalization of Academics for Peace on charge of “propagandizing for a terrorist organization” has violated their freedom of expression.
Since the start of the 1990s, academics in Egypt have faced several forms of repression and endured many violations such as judicial convictions, public condemnation, and physical violence from both private individuals and groups, mainly the Islamists, and government officials.
[24] All aspects of university life including the classroom, student activities, research, campus demonstrations were affected by government and private repression.
She was doing a doctoral research on a scholarship at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, that started in October 2015, when she was ordered to return to Egypt following a recommendation of the Ministry of Higher education in December 2015.
[28] She was not given any reason for her arrest by the Egyptian officials but she, reportedly, overheard police officers claiming “she had improper friends.”[28] On another instance, scholar and journalist Ismail Alexandrani was detained, in November 2015, upon his return Egypt from a workshop in Germany.
[31] One of the most widely covered stories in relation to the situation of academic freedom in Egypt was the case of the Italian PhD candidate Giulio Regeni, a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Giulio Regeni was first found dead, in the outskirts of Cairo, a week after he was declared missing on January 25, 2016, which coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian uprising, and his body demonstrated clear signs of torture and severe beating.
"[32] In the 1990s, Israeli academia was characterized by open-mindedness and pluralist vision of debated issues such as revisionist history on 1948 war that was finding its way into the academic society.
In 2007, 670 students from Gaza were prevented from achieving higher education in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Germany, Britain and United States, by being denied the exit permits.
[36][37] In June 2008, the organization again stated how discrimination by Israeli authorities prevented many Palestinian students from the Gaza Strip to travel abroad or to the West Bank to get a better education.
[37][36][41] Regarding the chances to travel abroad, in 2008, grants allocated for the Palestinians chosen to study in the United States were redirected because there was no way those students would be allowed by Israel to leave Gaza.
You take a universal concept -- everyone has the right to their opinion and everyone has the right to be part of a democracy -- only with one condition: that the universality does not include critique on Zionism and that the democracy would always ensure Jewish majority whatever the demographic and geographical realities are.”[43] During the years that followed the 1979 Iranian revolution, hundreds of academicians and students were killed as a consequence of a highly violent campaign that aimed to repress academic freedom, silence dissent, and enforce uniformity of thought.
[44] The freedoms of speech, association, and peaceful assembly of thousands of students and faculty members were breached through various methods of brutality, torture and detention.
The reasons behind the arrests and torture ranged from “participating in illegal gatherings”, “propaganda against the system”, to “insulting the supreme leader or government officials.”[44] Other tens of thousands of students and faculty members were forced out of their education and careers and into exile.
Furthermore, a large number of students and academics were barred from universities, following a policy of “starring” that punished those who do not conform to the state's political and social views.
The government of President Ahmadinejad also introduced a quota system to limit the number of women in universities and measures to prevent them from enrolling in a list of courses considered more appropriate for men.
[45] A firm iron grip was retained over academic institutions by the Iranian authorities to the degree of allowing intelligence bodies and state security to supervise disciplinary proceedings in universities.
[45] The next president who assumed office in 2013, Hassan Rouhani—considered by many as a ‘reformist’-, made some steps to permit the return of several banned academics and students to campuses.
[45] Nonetheless, the situation of academic freedom remained critical with hundreds of students still imprisoned and others newly arrested since the election of President Rouhani.
[47] As examples of psychological abuse, the professor revealed that one day, during questioning, Iranian officials played a song from her husband's funeral that took place two years before, after they had found a clip of it on her iPad.
In another instance, they displayed a picture of “her mother standing at her father's graveside.”[47] Professor Ahmad Reza Jalali is an Iranian-Swedish doctor, lecturer and researcher in disaster medicine.