Fight Against Police-like Surveillance of International Students in the UK

To:  Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex

With the supposed aim of strengthening its borders and protecting them from illegal immigration and employment flows, Britain introduced a series of new rules and technologies including the point based system for international students in 2008. Under this system, international students are named in the 4th tier, coming after the highly skilled, skilled and low skilled workers in the list. According to the requirements of this system, just like employers, all educational institutions including universities are required to register with the UK Border Agency to become a licensed institution to fulfil their tasks. According to these new rules universities are expected to monitor international students on whether they enrol in their courses and attend their classes, while reporting this information back to the UK Border Agency (UKBA).
We, as students at the University of Essex, have strong concerns regarding the above mentioned new system which will have direct effects on students, academic and administrative staff and our university as well.

- Although it has been recently declared by the University Registrar that any steps taken to comply with UKBA rules will be applied to all University of Essex students, we are concerned that the application of these rules will trigger discriminatory consequences that will impact on international students by imposing differential treatment between EU and non-EU students.

- We want the University of Essex to make an official statement that as a university they find this system illegitimate and unacceptable on the grounds of human rights and civil liberties even if the university has already signalled that it will comply with the system. We want their assurance that any kind of discriminatory outcome under this system will be strictly avoided in favour of all students.

- We want the University of Essex to disseminate information to all of its students and staff about the new system and to make it clear how they are going to implement these new rules without infringing anybody’s rights and what the requirements will be for its students and academic staff. Since we have some concerns regarding the monitoring of attendance of research students, we want the university to clarify how these new rules will be effective for PhD students.

- As for the academic staff, we expect that the new arrangements will create mistrust in the relationship between students and their supervisors.

- We, as students of this university do believe that the University of Essex owes its long standing reputation and uniqueness in the UK academic world to its being UK’s most internationally diverse campus university, with its 40% international student population. Therefore, we ask the University of Essex to take action against these measures with the collaboration of other universities which might want to take an official stand against this new system and guarantee the free enjoyment of civil liberties and freedom of education to all its students while they pursue their studies under the name of this university.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The Fight Against Police-like Surveillance of International Students in the UK Petition to Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex was created by The University of Essex student and staff community and written by Simona Szakacs (seszak@essex.ac.uk).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.