ABSTRACT
Long defended by the world’s leading human rights advocacy organizations and championed by Scholars at Risk, 1 academic freedom has regularly been framed as a matter of human rights by scholars in recent years. 2 Yet, within a broad and burgeoning academic literature on the subject, there has been relatively little focused scholarly analysis of academic freedom from the perspective of international human rights law and the approaches of UN human rights bodies. This arguably reflects the relatively limited attention historically paid by the UN human rights system, including the UN charter- and treaty-based bodies, to academic freedom as such as a thematic human rights issue despite the recognition of academic freedom as a prerequisite for the right to education by UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (“CESR”) in 1999. 3 This chapter takes stock of the attitudes and approaches of these UN human rights bodies toward considering academic freedom as such as an issue of international human rights law over recent years. It begins by identifying and unpacking factors informing a certain hesitancy toward understanding and addressing challenges to academic freedom as concerns of international human rights law, before identifying how this has given way to a more direct and receptive engagement with cases of specific threats to academic freedom as such and the phenomena, especially since 2015. The chapter suggests that academic freedom is moving from being a side-lined issue toward becoming a more mainstream one as a result of emerging concerns from UN human rights bodies and mechanisms. This trend, which is reflected in various ways through the outputs of UN human rights bodies and their development of international soft law norms in recent years, is likely to continue and should be welcomed because it strengthens the possibilities for more effective advocacy of academic freedom both through the UN system and before domestic policymakers.
