The University of Bern withdraws its premises from an Amnesty International debate on Gaza

A round table on human rights in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories, organised by Amnesty International and due to take place on 30 June 2025 at the University of Bern, was called off after the institution revoked its authorisation to use the premises. The two speakers were Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International and formerly UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, and Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The event had sold out.

The university announced the withdrawal on Friday 27 June, confirming information first published by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It explained that its initial green light had been conditional on the discussion being respectful, balanced and grounded in scholarship, and that a later review had concluded these conditions were not met; in particular that balance could not be assured. Amnesty rejected the reasoning. Its spokesperson Beat Gerber pointed out that Albanese is an independent expert who speaks plainly about the occupied territories, and said the institution had reversed course under public pressure, adding that open discussion of Israel's violations of international law appeared impossible at the university at present. The panel was relocated at short notice to another venue in Bern, where Albanese addressed an audience of roughly four hundred on the Monday evening.

In the run-up to her visit, Albanese, who has received repeated death threats, was the target of hostile coverage in Swiss media, including the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Jüdische Allgemeine. The NGO UN Watch, which had published material against her days earlier, publicly claimed credit for the outcome: its executive director Hillel Neuer praised the university for refusing to give a platform to what he characterised as support for terrorism, citing among other things Albanese's 2022 video appearance at a Hamas-linked conference.

Criticism of the university was immediate. Amnesty International Switzerland argued that as a public-law institution under cantonal supervision, the university is bound to respect freedom of expression even when renting rooms to third parties. Its legal adviser Anita Goh said the withdrawal harmed not only the two experts' right to speak but also the Bernese academic community's right to hear and debate their analysis, and warned that excluding a Human Rights Council mandate-holder and the head of the world's largest human rights organisation sets a worrying precedent for pluralism in universities. 

On 21 July, the academic freedom committees of BRISMES and the Italian association SeSaMO wrote to Rector Virginia Richter and the Executive Board demanding a public apology, a new date for the event, full transparency about who took the decision and on what grounds, published criteria for hosting public events, protection of staff and students from political pressure, and an end to the instrumentalisation of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.