Ahdaf Souief and Philip Alston, major figures in global human rights, endorse Divest Harvard
CAMBRIDGE, MA — This month, Divest Harvard was endorsed by Ahdaf Soueif, a prominent Egyptian novelist and cultural activist, and Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
Ahdaf Soueif made international headlines this week after resigning in protest from the Board of Trustees of the British Museum. In a July 15 statement in the London Review of Books, she cites the institution’s “immovability on issues of critical concern to… the young and less privileged” as the reason for her leaving. Chief among these issues is the museum’s relationship with the oil and gas company British Petroleum, which engages in high-profile sponsorships of public exhibitions. Soueif also addressed the museum’s silence on the issue of restitution of its looted African artifacts. As we continue to expose Harvard’s unsustainable and unethical investment practices, we have been deeply inspired by Soueif’s courage to protest the disparity between the principles and practices of another widely respected institution, the British Museum
Philip Alston is the author of a June 25 report for the United Nations that warns of climate change’s potentially devastating impact on human rights. In his report, Alston warns that “we risk a climate apartheid scenario in which the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.” He also reaffirms the idea that climate change is an issue of global justice, and we must not let wealthy institutions escape their responsibility to mitigate climate harms.
We applaud the efforts of Soueif and Alston to hold powerful institutions accountable. Their efforts — along with those of activists around the globe — can and will pressure our wealthiest institutions to change. Earlier this week, seventy-seven percent of voting faculty members of the University of California voted to divest the university system’s endowment portfolio from fossil fuels. The Regents of the University of California, the system’s governing body, now must decide whether or not to make the landslide vote official. We are glad to see almost 2500 UC faculty taking a stand on fossil fuel divestment, as 312 Harvard faculty have done so far.
“As long as our institutions of higher education continue to propagate business as usual, they remain complicit in the climate crisis,” Ilana Cohen of Divest Harvard told VICE news. “And complicity is culpability.”
Divest Harvard continues to call on Harvard to disclose, divest, and reinvest its nearly $40 billion endowment from holdings in the fossil fuel industry at the heart of the climate crisis. Harvard must take clear steps to end its complicity in the existential threat posed by climate change and the global injustices it produces. Soueif writes in her Divest Harvard endorsement: “The world is changing. Educational and cultural institutions have a clear responsibility to steer it in a direction that safeguards the future of the young people who are working so hard now to protect themselves and the coming generations.”
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