Uppsala Declaration of Conscientious Objection

Faculty and staff in Swedish higher education and research declare their conscientious objection to collaborate with Israeli institutions complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law.

We the undersigned, faculty and staff working in Swedish higher education and research, are horrified by Israel’s rampant destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Along with the unprecedented killing, maiming, and starving of Gaza’s besieged population, and the incessant attacks on health care professionals, humanitarian workers, UN staff, and emergency personnel, the systematic destruction of food and medicine supplies, agriculture, water and energy infrastructure has turned Gaza into a graveyard for both people and international law. The unlawful Israeli blockade of all humanitarian aid since March 2 is deliberately designed to punish, harm and destroy the civilian population of Gaza, nearly half of which is children.

As the death toll continues to rise, Israel’s actions in Gaza have been declared a genocide by the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People (A/79/363, IX), by senior UN human rights experts and numerous human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Israel is currently being investigated for the crime of genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, and Israeli leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the crime of extermination. In July 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal, amounts to annexation and violates the prohibition against apartheid. As UN human rights experts have clarified, in order for UN member states to meet their obligations as triggered by the ICJ ruling, they must “[c]ancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

As the genocide unfolds, we note Israel’s relentless killing of students, teachers, researchers, journalists, and cultural workers, and its systematic destruction of schools, universities, libraries, archives, heritage sites, and cultural institutions, which effectively have obliterated the entire sector of education and research in Gaza. Following Karma Nabulsi, UN experts already in April 2024 labelled Israel’s actions in Gaza a “scholasticide” (Desai 2024, Shlaim 2025). By systematically destroying education as well as Gaza’s material and immaterial cultural heritage, including the cemeteries, Israel is not only destroying the Palestinian people in the present; it is also destroying its past and future.

On the other side of the barrier encircling Gaza, Israeli universities have long been major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism, apartheid, and now genocide. They have played an active role in developing weapon systems and military doctrines used to maintain the illegal occupation of Palestine, justifying unlawful colonisation and annexation of occupied lands, rationalising ethnic cleansing and extra-judicial killings of indigenous Palestinians, and participating in other explicit violations of human rights and international law; they have also been systematically discriminating against “non-Jewish” students and staff (Wind 2024). Israeli higher education institutions are thus complicit in what the ICJ has recognised as the criminal occupation of Palestine, a country that Sweden, along with a majority of the world’s nations, has recognised as a sovereign state.

Given the complicity of Israeli universities in the denial of Palestinian rights, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) already in 2004 called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to build non-violent pressure on Israel to comply with international law. In line with the internationally-accepted definition of freedom of expression as adopted by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UNESCR), PACBI’s guidelines set out how the boycott should be applied to institutions and not individuals. The guidelines called for:

  • Refusing any form of academic and cultural cooperation with Israeli institutions;
  • Advocating a comprehensive boycott of complicit Israeli institutions;
  • Promoting divestment from Israel by international academic institutions;
  • Working toward institutional condemnation of Israeli policies;
  • Supporting Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts.

In 2011, the University of Johannesburg became the first international institution to disassociate itself from the Israeli regime, ending an agreement with Ben Gurion University over its complicity in human rights violations, including the theft of Palestinian water. The striking symbolism of initiating academic collaborations with Israel during apartheid rule and ending them during democracy cannot be lost on anyone.

Since Israel unleashed its genocidal war on Gaza, and largely due to effective pressure campaigns organised locally by students and staff, more universities around the world have followed the lead of South Africa, including five Norwegian universities that cut ties with complicit institutions in 2024.

Swedish academic institutions have, on the contrary, insisted at maintaining collaborations with Israeli institutions complicit in violations of international law, and have even promoted new partnerships with such institutions. As scientists and scholars, we can no longer accept to participate in such collaborations. Asserting our moral right to conscientiously object to participate in acts that fundamentally contradict our principles of academic integrity, including our belief in the equal rights and dignity of all human beings, we have decided to individually heed the call from our Palestinian colleagues and break ties with Israeli universities and institutions complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law. We declare that we will henceforth abide by the following principles:

  1. We will not contribute to any collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions, and we will not publicise, promote, or encourage such collaborations;
  2. We will not contribute to any exchanges of students and/or staff with complicit Israeli institutions, and we will not publicise, promote, or encourage such exchanges;
  3. We will not participate in any activities organised and/or hosted by complicit Israeli institutions, whether they organise and/or host them alone or in collaboration with other institutions, and we will not publicise, promote or encourage participation in such activities.

In line with the PACBI Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel, we are committed to boycotting complicity, not identity. This means that while we do not call for a generalised boycott of Israeli researchers on the basis of their identity, we conscientiously object to collaborating with Israeli institutions complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law. Indeed, because Israeli academic leadership is complicit in such crimes, dissident academics in Israel have called upon the international community to exert greater pressure. The undersigned are committed to international law and human rights and, as such, we urge our colleagues in Sweden and elsewhere to collaborate with principled international partners who recognise the rulings of international courts and bodies, including UN Resolution 194 (III), which guarantees the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

This declaration was drafted in Uppsala by faculty and staff at Uppsala University. While we have named it after our university in honour of its stated mission to make knowledge and education work “for a better world”, we encourage faculty and staff at any Swedish institution of higher education and research to sign it.

The final text of this declaration was confirmed in Uppsala on May 8, 2025.

* * *

You can learn more about the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on the website of the international BDS movement.

You can learn more about Swedish universities’ involvement with complicit Israeli institutions in the Boycott Report issued by Workers and Students in Swedish Academia for Palestine (WASSAP).

You can contact the drafters of the Uppsala Declaration at uppsaladeclaration@protonmail.com (Swedish or English).

* * *

You can sign the Uppsala Declaration here.

Alternatively, you can email us with 1) your name (given name/s followed by family name/s), 2) your academic position (Professor, Professor Emerita/Emeritus, Visiting Professor for gästprofessor, Senior Lecturer or Associate Professor for universitetslektor, Associate Senior Lecturer or Assistant Lecturer for biträdande universitetslektor, Lecturer for universitetsadjunkt, Researcher or Research Fellow for forskare, Postdoctoral Fellow for postdoktor, PhD Candidate or PhD Student for doktorand; any other position as stated on the website of your institution), 3) the name of your university department or centre (in English, as stated on the web site of your institution), 4) the name of your university or academic institution (in English, as stated on the web site of the institution).

Examples:

“Anna Larsson, PhD Candidate, Department of Nursing, Umeå University”
“Anna Larsson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Education, Uppsala University”
“Anna Larsson, Professor Emerita, Division of Clinical Microbiology, Karolinska Institutet”

Please send your details to uppsaladeclaration@protonmail.com using your institutional email address (we need you to send the email from your institutional address in order to verify your identity). Make sure to state your intent to sign the declaration (in Swedish or in English). There is no need to include any other information in the email. Should you wish to contact us for any other purpose, we encourage you to write to us using a private email address.