The Director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Monique
Canto-Sperber, first banned a talk by Stéphane Hessel and then
refused to allow the Colléctif Palestine ENS to hold a meeting
on campus; a denial of the rights of freedom of expression and freedom
of assembly. Hessel is 93, a former ENS student, member of the Resistance,
survivor of Buchenwald, one of the authors of the UN Declaration of
Human Rights and of the recent best-selling Indignez-vous!/Time for
Outrage, in which he (among other things) criticizes Israel’s treatment
of Palestinians. ENS is one of Europe’s leading academic institutions:
the home of many distinguished thinkers from Pasteur to Beckett, Sartre
and Bordieu.
Read the petition
Read
the report in the Guardian