News
20.12.2006
The stringent situation of the Belarus higher education system
The European Humanities University (EHU) hosted the conference “Higher Education in Belarus: Challenges of Internationalization” on the 11th and 12th of December in Vilnius. Among the key speakers were Per Nyborg, former head of the Bologna Follow-Up Secretariat and Christoph Ehmman, Secretary General of EUF-CE. The conference didn’t went unnoticed in Belarus as the Government expressively forbidden all members of the Belarusian universities to take part in this conference and two Professors who had already applied were put into prison the day before the start of the conference.
More reports of despotism came from two students from Witebsk who, prior to their enrollment in the EHU, were persecuted in the state universities because of their active participation in human rights campaigns. Prof. Anatoly Mikhailov, rector of the EHU and one of the founders of Campus Europae, announced that the EU established a helpline of about 4.5 million euros to provide help for repressed students, and the Lithuanian Government has set up an identical fund that will assist the EHU in its development purposes.
Furthermore the EHU features extensively in a BBC article about foreign assistance to Belarus dissidents that can be found here.