Political pressure to strip researcher Harry Pettit of his European research grant

In July 2025, Harry Pettit was awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council for a project on money as infrastructure, examining the contest over the means by which money circulates in an increasingly cashless world. The award is worth 1.5 million euros and was scheduled to begin in August 2026.

Since then, the researcher has faced a campaign aimed at discrediting him professionally and obstructing his work. The criticism centres on his anti-Zionist positions and his commentary on the Middle East, expressed on a personal X account. Pettit previously taught at Radboud University in Nijmegen. His posts on Israel and the war in Gaza, described by Dutch media as radical, and including praise for the late Iranian Supreme Leader,  led the Free University of Brussels to withdraw the post he was due to take up, leaving him without a host institution. Because an ERC grant follows the individual rather than the employer, he would in principle be able to carry the funding elsewhere.

In March 2026, Dutch members of the European Parliament from the right-wing VVD, BBB and SGP parties publicly demanded that the ERC take the grant back, as reported by De Telegraaf. The European Commission confirmed it was looking into the allegations and into what they might mean for the funding, a spokesperson noting that a grant can be revoked for professional misconduct and that the question was whether that threshold applied here. The ERC indicated the grant agreement had not yet been signed, most likely because Pettit has no institution to host the research.

The Committee on Academic Freedom of BRISMES wrote to ERC President Maria Leptin, Vice-President Torsten Persson, and senior officials of the ERC Executive Agency to object. The letter stresses that the statements at issue were never the subject of any disciplinary procedure, were never found to breach any university rule, and were never found unlawful. It invokes Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the long-standing Strasbourg case law holding that protected expression includes ideas that shock or disturb, alongside Article 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which explicitly guarantees academic freedom. They also warn that a funding body seen to bend to political demands would normalise outside interference in academic evaluation, weaken institutional independence, and chill scholars' willingness to enter public debate on sensitive subjects. The letter asks the ERC to defend the integrity of the peer-review process that produced the award, to state that lawful political speech cannot justify revoking a grant, and to confirm that Pettit will keep his.