Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at IIT

Human Rights and Scientific Freedom, submitted by the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility:

Whereas human rights and scientific freedom are closely linked, and both of them remain under attack and continue to deteriorate in many countries throughout the world, and

Whereas the AAAS Workshop on Scientific Cooperation and Human Rights in the Americas, meeting at the same time as the AAAS 1981 Annual Meeting in Toronto, with the participation of numerous scientists from Latin America and North America, has expressed deep concern about the deterioration of human rights and scientific freedom in a number of countries in Latin America, and in particular the continued detention of scientists, engineers, and medical professionals as well as many other political prisoners, in many cases without charge or trial and in conditions of great physical hardship and torture; the deterioration of the quality and availability of scientific education at all levels; and the dismissal of a large number of scientists from teaching and research posts, accompanied by a general decline of academic and scientific freedom, and

Whereas the lack of scientific freedom and the attack on human rights has become a chronic as well as a currently urgent problem, requiring the exploration of new initiatives as well as continued response to attacks on individuals as they occur,

Therefore be it resolved that AAAS, as a matter of high priority, extend and intensify its efforts to defend and advance both scientific freedom and basic human rights and to condemn attacks on them, and that it urge its affiliated societies and other organizations and individual scientists to become more actively involved in these matters.