UvA will not pull out of ongoing research collaborations with Israel for now

Securing such a grant is no easy feat and highly exceptional, according to the UvA. The university says it does not want to terminate the ten projects prematurely, mainly because UvA researchers have invested an enormous amount of research and an important part of their careers in them. All of that would be lost.

Israeli researchers also have access to the fund through the association agreement with the EU. Four collaborations linking Israel and the UvA already existed before 7 October 2023. Six more were added after the start of the conflict in Gaza. The activist group Amsterdam Encampment is demanding that the UvA end all ten collaborations with Israeli institutions. Such a termination would be a major undertaking, Folia analysed.

How a Horizon collaboration comes about

Researchers from all countries
In order to collaborate within a Horizon programme, researchers from different countries must first find each other through their networks, according to the programme’s website. Only with a joint proposal can they secure a Horizon grant from the European Commission. They design a research plan, decide how to divide the research tasks and determine who needs which budget. Together they form what is called a “consortium”, a research group. This planning process can take up to a year and a half and is kept strictly confidential to prevent their research ideas from being stolen.

Grant from the EU
The consortium then approaches the European Commission as a whole to apply for a Horizon grant. The European Commission attaches very strict conditions to awarding the grant, as large sums of money are involved. The consortium signs a “Grant Agreement” with the Commission as a single entity. This can be seen in the model “Grant Agreement”, which the parties adopt and complete with specific details. Folia obtained such a standard agreement from the European Commission.

Agreements between scientists
The arrangements concerning the responsibilities of the research partners are then laid down among themselves in a “Consortium Agreement”. According to the programme’s manual, the various researchers are included under the flag of their institution. The UvA therefore signs the agreement on behalf of its researcher(s). An institution – usually a university, but sometimes a company – is ultimately responsible for the contract, not an individual researcher. This raises the question of who should be held accountable for entering into such a contract: the researcher who initiates the project or the UvA, which signs the agreement?

Terminating a research collaboration
If the UvA later wishes to withdraw from the collaboration, the university must withdraw from two contracts: the Consortium Agreement and the Grant Agreement.

Redistribution
The UvA can withdraw from the Consortium Agreement by redistributing the tasks of the UvA researchers among the other consortium members. However, the other consortium members must agree to this. If, at that stage, it is still actually possible to redistribute tasks – which in an advanced stage will often not be the case – the consortium must present a redistribution plan to the European Commission. This follows from the Commission’s standard contract.

The European Commission can then allow the UvA to also withdraw from the Grant Agreement. The Commission has, for example, already given a ruling on the request of Ghent University, which wanted to sever ties with Israel within Horizon. However, in that ruling the Commission did not allow parties to withdraw from a Grant Agreement without legal consequences – redistribution plan or not – solely on the grounds that another consortium member is from Israel, a spokesperson for the European Commission said.

The spokesperson added that, regarding specific Israeli institutions such as Technion or Bar-Ilan, the European Commission has not yet issued any ruling.

Breach of contract

The UvA could also unilaterally announce to the other consortium members that it is withdrawing from the Consortium Agreement. That would, however, mean that the project would suffer: important tasks and research results would suddenly be missing, often essential for the final conclusion.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told Folia that the Commission would not legally oblige the UvA to remain in the project, but according to the Grant Agreement it would demand “full compensation for damages”. The entire grant project would suffer harm, as the entire research might then collapse. Vital knowledge and results could indeed be missing.

Financial consequences

Repayment of funds
With a redistribution plan, the UvA would bear no liability for damages, since the UvA’s research results could still be included. But if the UvA were to withdraw unilaterally from the Consortium Agreement, it is likely the university would have to repay its own grant. This money has already been largely invested in the research or researchers. However, as the UvA’s part of the research would produce nothing – or less – due to the withdrawal, the disbursed grant would have to be repaid to the consortium or the European Commission.

Returning 6,4 million euros

The largest grant for the UvA alone in a research collaboration with an Israeli institution (network company Mellanox Technologies) is in “Deep Programmability and Secure Distributed Intelligence”: €693,000. This appears from the European Commission’s website. Adding up all the individual grants within the ten collaborations (see box) gives a total of €6.4 million. The UvA would then have to cover this amount from its own funds instead of drawing it from the fund.

Liable for all funds

The European Commission, however, does not allow the UvA to withdraw from the Grant Agreement without compensation. This means the UvA could be held liable for the entire damage the project would suffer. The project might not be able to continue without UvA researchers. That amount could even reach the full grant awarded to the project, as the consortium’s entire research could be disrupted. In that case, the grant would have been wasted, while the money has already been invested. The UvA would then have to bear the cost.

Paying 82 million euros.

In the project “Mobility Justice for All: Framing Safer, Healthier and Happier Streets”, in which the controversial Israeli Technion University participates, the grant awarded to the consortium is the highest: €10.2 million. The total potential damage (see box) could rise to as much as €82 million. “This financial damage is significant, and we are living in a time of unprecedented budget cuts,” a UvA spokesperson said.

Disadvantages of termination

Disruption of researchers’ work
The main reason for not terminating the collaborations, according to the UvA, is not the money, a spokesperson says. The university places the greatest weight on the fact that the work of its own researchers – often PhD candidates – would be prematurely cut short. The UvA spokesperson said: “You are destroying years of research work. And you are causing significant damage to a career.” A new research project within the same fund would again cost the researcher years of run-up period – without funding, the UvA emphasises.

Unreliable
The UvA also says that a side effect of unilateral contract termination could be consequences for future collaborations. “You become an unreliable partner if you do not honour your commitments. If you withdraw from a collaboration before completion, it may be that the involved research institutions no longer wish to cooperate with you in the future. There is also a chance that the European Commission will no longer award grants to the UvA in the future if we now terminate contracts without agreement,” the UvA spokesperson said.

No termination

For the time being, the UvA will therefore not withdraw from the ten projects. However, in June, the UvA committed not to enter into new collaborations with Israel. This was partly so that researchers would not end up in a Horizon agreement, from which it is very difficult to withdraw.

In July, the European Commission submitted a proposal to the member states to suspend Israeli companies from the Horizon programme. Israeli academic institutions would not be affected by this suspension.

The activist group Amsterdam Encampment has already announced that it will not stop until the UvA takes all possible steps to withdraw from the collaborations. “The path to the European Court is still open, for example,” a spokesperson said this summer. “The UvA may not be able to terminate all ties tomorrow, but it can do more than nothing.”