The Council of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities expresses its profound concern regarding the initiation of legal proceedings in Poland against historians Prof. Barbara Engelking, a Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Prof. Jan Grabowski, a Member of the Royal Society of Canada, on account of their publication of research relating to the period of the Holocaust in Poland.

 

Any attempt to constrain academic discourse by extraneous means, such as political or legal pressures, is unacceptable. It threatens severely to impinge upon academic freedom in general and, specifically, upon efforts to probe the period of the Holocaust and to present a full, credible and balanced depiction of the terrible events of that period.