Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
Aug 08, 2025
The EUROCRIM 2025 annual conference includes in its program sixteen scholars affiliated with complicit Israeli universities, at least seven of whom work at illegal Israeli settlement-based Ariel University. This is not the first time that ESC has included scholars working at Ariel University in the EUROCRIM program.
The scholars affiliated with illegal Israeli settlement-based Ariel University, as those who work in an illegal Israeli colonial settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), are knowingly participating in a war crime and crime against humanity and should therefore be held accountable for that.
Ariel University also boasts that it has 4,000 student soldiers “fighting on the frontlines,” including in Israel’s Gaza genocide, the crime of all crimes, its military occupation, a war crime, and its apartheid system, a crime against humanity. Ariel University is providing special scholarships for these genocide-implicated student soldiers.
In addition to the legal obligations not to facilitate such grave crimes, it is shockingly immoral for a conference that has among its topics “Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes” to welcome scholars and an institution participating in, justifying, and whitewashing the very same crimes.
The scholars’ affiliations are furthermore falsely listed as “Ariel University, Israel” in the EUROCRIM 2025 program, as in past years.
Ariel University is not located within Israel’s UN-recognized borders. Ariel University is located in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli colonial settlements constitute a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
ESC is in breach of the legal requirements arising from the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ found that Israel is violating the prohibition against apartheid and that its military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza is illegal and must be brought to an end. The ruling triggers the legal obligation not to recognize, aid or assist in maintaining Israel’s illegal military presence in the occupied Palestinian territory.
By allowing multiple scholars knowingly participating in a war crime and crimes against humanity, especially from an illegal institution that openly supports a genocide, to participate in at least 6 panels at its conference, ESC is normalizing these crimes. This is a biased and deeply complicit political decision, not an academic one.
In accordance with international law, UN Security Council resolutions, and the ICJ ruling and the legal requirements above, and as a duty to its members and conference participants, ESC must:
- Not recognize Ariel University, whether directly or indirectly, and exclude it from the conference and from all ESC activities and committees;
- Hold the scholars knowingly participating in a war crime and crimes against humanity accountable by excluding their participation from the conference;
- Acknowledge its failure in performing even superficial due diligence on participants from countries accused by authoritative international bodies of atrocity crimes, including Israel’s ongoing genocide;
- Remedy this failure by instituting a comprehensive ethical policy to ensure no complicity in grave crimes, wherever they should occur.
This is not about mere affiliation, but about these scholars knowingly participating in a war crime.
Furthermore, the EUROCRIM 2025 program includes a number of scholars from other complicit Israeli academic institutions, such as Bar Ilan University, which works closely with the Shin Bet, Israel’s notorious security services that has been condemned by the UN Committee Against Torture for its use of torture and other illegal violent interrogation tactics, and the University of Haifa, which hosts three Israeli military colleges comprising the Israeli Military Academic Complex and holds courses at the Israeli military base of Glilot, considered to be an extension of the university. The University of Haifa has also provided “tactical equipment” to the Israeli military carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
The ICJ earlier ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinian in Gaza. The ICJ ruling requires action “to prevent and to punish” the crime of genocide.
While we do not call to exclude scholars based on mere affiliation, in order to uphold basic ethical principles, ESC conference organizers should also:
- Ensure that conference programs include a concise and accurate description of the complicity of any institution listed in affiliations that has a record of persistent involvement in grave human rights violations (particularly war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide);
- Include a Land Acknowledgement statement, upholding the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which acknowledges Indigenous peoples’ inalienable rights to “the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (Article 26), acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the institution to which its authors are affiliated is located and/or on which the research was conducted;
- Perform due diligence on participants reasonably suspected of being or having been involved in serious violations of the fundamental human rights, in particular war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid), or genocide.
We appeal to the values of criminologists and the urgent need to take effective measures in the face of such grave crimes, including genocide, the crime of all crimes. While there is a tendency to focus on individual criminality within criminology, state criminality, which is far more lethal and affects masses, must not be given a pass.
We welcome the work of Criminologists for Palestine and their principled motion calling for ESC to end complicity in Israel’s crimes in order to make ESC a more ethical organization.
Should ESC fail to exclude from its EUROCRIM 2025 conference the Israeli scholars knowingly participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the illegal, genocide-supporting institution to which they are affiliated, we urge keynote speakers, panelists, presenters and participants to boycott the conference. We further call on Panteion University to withdraw as sponsor.
Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE)
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
PFUUPE represents 10,000 university faculty and staff members at 18 Palestinian universities.
PACBI is a founding member of the global, nonviolent, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, which enjoys a near consensus in Palestinian society.
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