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Students request European support for Belarusian academia

Universities and EU should create ‘decentralised’ funding schemes for persecuted scholars in Belarus, groups say

Two Belarusian students’ associations and the European Students’ Union have called on the European Commission and university leaders across Europe to do more to help students and researchers who are protesting against the widely discredited Belarusian presidential election.

In open letters addressed to the Commission and the European University Association, dated 11 September, the student groups called for scholarships and “decentralised funding schemes” to be set up for students and researchers in Belarus who experience political persecution.

They also called for academic cooperation with, and funding for, Belarusian authorities to be suspended, and for condemnation of the authorities’ disrespect of academic freedom.

“Years of cooperation in the area of higher education are being wasted if students and academics are persecuted, harassed and detained inside of their universities by the help of the higher education leadership,” the student groups said.

The ESU, the Belarusian Students’ Association and the Brotherhood of Organizers of Student Self-Governance said that Belarus could only complete the reforms handed to it by the Bologna Process—a Eurasian standard-setting club for higher education—“by putting an end to [Belarusian president Alexander] Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime”.

Those reforms, laid out in 2015 as conditions of Belarus joining the Bologna Process, include ensuring institutional autonomy and independent student unions. Independent reports suggest that little or no progress towards the targets has been made.