The UK higher education sector is increasingly vulnerable to transnational repression, Lord Alton of Liverpool warned in the House of Lords last week, citing “threats to universities, students and academics”.
Speaking during a 26 February Motion to Take Note debate on the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ report Transnational repression in the UK, he said a recent discussion with academics from Bristol and Oxford had reinforced the committee’s view that transnational repression is “profoundly on the rise in the UK”. He also noted that MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum and National Cyber Security Centre CEO Richard Horne had raised similar concerns at a security briefing for more than 70 vice-chancellors, warning of foreign interference including attempts to shape or censor research and teaching.
In that light, Lord Alton urged peers to read the evidence of “the shameful mistreatment of Sheffield Hallam’s Professor Laura Murphy”.
The controversy dates back to 2022, when China’s foreign ministry denounced the university’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), which is home to Murphy’s research team, as part of the “disreputable vanguard of anti-China rhetoric” over its work on forced labour in Xinjiang. Hallam’s websites were later blocked in China – a move the university privately acknowledged had “undoubtedly had a negative impact on recruitment”. So much so, in fact, that in a July 2024 internal email, a senior administrator admitted that “attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the [HKC] research are now untenable bedfellows”.
Two months earlier, state security officers visited the university’s Beijing office, where an employee was questioned about the HKC. According to an internal summary of the meeting, “the tone was threatening and [the] message to cease the research activity was made clear”.
By September 2024, the university had informed China’s National Security Service it would not publish a planned report on Uyghur forced labour in critical-minerals supply chain. Five months later, administrators instructed Murphy that she could not continue with the work, and her research group’s Forced Labour Lab website was taken down.
What had been allowed to happen in Murphy’s case was, Lord Alton said, “an affront to British sovereignty, to academic freedom and to free speech”, adding that it amounted to “transnational repression driven by overreliance on Chinese money”.
CAF casework suggests that universities may face similar patterns of intimidation beyond the China-linked examples raised in the Lords, including cases not connected to overseas funding.
Last month, CAF wrote to the University of Cambridge following concerns raised by Roshaan Khattak, an exiled British-Pakistani documentary filmmaker and former postgraduate student, after he reported repeated death threats connected to his academic work on alleged state involvement in enforced disappearances and related alleged abuses in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The messages contained personal details, including his passport number, and detailed knowledge of his whereabouts. Multiple advocacy organisations say threats of this kind are consistent with a wider pattern of intimidation of critics in exile linked to Pakistani state actors, including the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
On the information currently available to CAF, it is unclear what response, if any, was made by the University to Khattak’s repeated notifications. In particular, CAF has not been provided with evidence of acknowledgement, triage or escalation under relevant procedures, or any assessment of steps that might be taken during the period of enrolment.
Cases like this illustrate the practical relevance of the preventative and remedial measures highlighted by Lord Alton. During the debate he pressed the Government to introduce a “direct reporting route on foreign interference”, to implement the Office for Students free speech complaints scheme provided for by Section 8 of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, and to strengthen transparency around overseas funding under Section 9.
You can read more about Roshaan’s case here. CAF Research Manager Freddie Attenborough has also written about Professor Murphy’s case here.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.