Francesca Minerva

STATEMENT: CAF is deeply concerned by the Home Office’s decision to cancel the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) of Andreas Malm, the climate academic and associate professor of human ecology at Lund University in Sweden, preventing him from travelling to Britain for a series of speaking engagements next week. Malm had been due to speak at a conference organised by Tribune magazine, alongside a co-founder of the proscribed organisation Palestine Action. According to The Guardian, “They were expected to discuss the impact of the ban, including its effect on the author Sally Rooney”, who has withdrawn her books from sale in the UK over her support for the group. Malm was also due to attend an academic conference and take part in a BBC interview. The apparent legal basis is paragraph ETA 5.3 of the UK’s Immigration Rules, which requires the cancellation of a travel authorisation where an individual’s conduct, character, associations or other circumstances are judged to make their presence in the UK “not conducive to the public good”. Unlike a criminal sanction, the power does not require proof that a person has committed an offence, or that the speech they intend to deliver would itself be unlawful. No doubt many people will find Malm’s views controversial. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he has defended sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure as a form of climate activism. He has also described Hamas’s attacks of 7 October 2023 as an “act of liberation”. Such statements are clearly open to vigorous criticism. But the key word there is “criticism”, not “cancellation”. Context matters to Malm’s case. In Lord Carlile v Secretary of State for the Home Department (2014), the Supreme Court considered the exclusion of an Iranian opposition figure invited to meet parliamentarians at Westminster — and although the challenge failed, the Court recognised that the identity of the audience and the nature of the venue mattered when assessing interference with freedom of expression, including the right to receive information and ideas. Nowhere is this more acute than at an academic conference, whose very purpose is to expose arguments and evidence to critical scrutiny. The @tribunemagazine event, too, organised by one of Britain’s oldest socialist publications, would have provided an opportunity for participants to discuss and scrutinise the consequences of the Government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action, particularly while the legality of that decision remains before the courts. Perhaps the Home Office has reasons for cancelling Malm’s ETA that have not been made public. But that is part of the problem. When draconian immigration powers are used to prevent an internationally renowned academic from participating in lawful public debate, the Government should be prepared to do more than invoke the “public good” by way of explanation. The issue at stake here goes beyond the politics of left and right. In a liberal democracy, the state should be exceptionally reluctant to substitute executive exclusion for argument and debate in settings whose purpose is to explore controversial claims. A petition has been organised calling on the Prime Minister and Home Secretary to reconsider the decision. You can sign it here: openletter.earth/defend-acad…