Letter to Prof. Dr. Günther Dissertori, Rector of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) regarding security checks on applications from students from certain countries

(English translation from original in Italian)

Mr. Rector,

In a context of increasing geopolitical tensions, Switzerland - and with it its universities - has a duty to remain faithful to the principle of neutrality and multilateral cooperation. Scientific cooperation should therefore continue to play its role in keeping the channels of dialogue open even when this is politically difficult. Moreover, this is the very essence of academic freedom!

In this sense, we learned with concern that your university applies a strict and discriminatory security protocol, which effectively limits the possibilities of cooperation with researchers and students from several countries. These are mostly sovereign states, which have regular diplomatic relations with our country, which are members of the UN and which we are not aware of having acted in any way against our country's scientific community. The list indeed includes countries that are not affected by sanctions decided by the UN, but rather by the US government or by supranational entities that we luckily do not adhere to, such as the European Union. We are astonished that the ETH not only stands as a judge of the economic and political systems of third countries but even agrees to submit to extraterritorial laws of other governments, such as embargoes and unilateral sanctions imposed by the US to strangle emerging countries.

You only hinder Cuban, Venezuelan, Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Bieorussian, etc. scientists. but you do not bother at all to continue the cooperation with the universities of the Zionist regime that are directly or indirectly linked to the Israeli Defence Forces that are carrying out genocide and that are at the origin of an ongoing escalation that could bring the world to the brink of a global war, which the ETH does not seem to want to avoid: we are not aware that the ETH has in the past shown such diligence towards the risks of espionage from NATO countries, nor have you suspended collaboration with US academics when their government, without a UN mandate and in disregard of international law, was bombing a long list of sovereign countries, destroying their universities and schools, and going so far as to invent blatantly false evidence.

We therefore urge you to protect Swiss neutrality and the academic freedom of your university while avoiding a policy of double standards.

Yours sincerely

Communist Party (Switzerland)

Bellinzona, 13.01.2025