Panteion University and the Athens municipality have withdrawn support from the EUROCRIM 2025 conference.
The Academic Senate of Panteion University, the local conference organizer, has voted to withdraw sponsorship from the EUROCRIM 2025 conference over its role in whitewashing Israel’s war crimes, the crime against humanity of apartheid and its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. The decision is grounded in the university’s “long history of supporting human rights, fighting racism and fascism and cultivating academic ethics.”
The decision follows calls from the Panteion University Union of Students and Union of Post Grad Students and the Nationwide Union of Research and Higher Education Workers for the university to withdraw its sponsorship from the conference.
The municipality of Athens has also withdrawn as an “Official Supporter” of the conference following appeals from BDS Greece.
The conference, set to start on Sept 3 in Athens, includes at least seven scholars from illegal Israeli settlement-based Ariel University, and not for the first time. These scholars are knowingly participating in a war crime and the crime against humanity of apartheid. ESC is in breach of the legal obligation triggered by the ICJ ruling on the illegality of Israel’s military occupation to not recognize or aid this crime.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) are calling on ESC to hold these scholars accountable by excluding their participation from the conference.
ESC must also perform due diligence on the numerous scholars from other complicit Israeli universities. To ensure the conference upholds basic ethical principles, it should also include land and complicity acknowledgements in their sessions.
The Greek government has legal and ethical obligations to deny entry to those who are found to be knowingly participating in war crimes or crimes against humanity, or involved in or inciting to atrocity crimes.
The American College of Greece - Deree should refuse to host the Conference on its premises.
It gets worse. ESC is also undemocratically blocking a vote on a motion regularly submitted by Criminologists for Palestine pledging no complicity in Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians.
More than 300 criminologists, many of whom are ESC members, have signed a petition demanding that ESC allow the vote, that it exclude scholars from illegal Israeli settlement-based Ariel University, and that it establish a policy of due diligence.
Criminologists for Palestine are planning activities every day during the conference, centering Palestinian rights, Israel’s crimes, and the complicity and undemocratic actions of ESC.
If ESC wants to remain the European Society of Criminology and not Criminality, it would do well to heed the demands of its membership to support the calls from Palestinians.