‘UvA board must condemn human rights violations by Huawei’
The Central Student Council and Central Works Council of the UvA is critical of the collaboration that the artificial intelligence departments of the UvA and the VU have embarked on with Chinese telecom company Huawei.
The student council has called for the board of the UvA to ‘openly recognise and condemn the human rights violations committed directly or indirectly by Huawei’, says Nina Hol, the law student who chairs the Central Student Council.
‘It’s strange that nobody has anything to say about this collaboration,’ says Hol. ‘All the more so because Huawei has been shown to use artificial intelligence to suppress people.’ She would like in the future for there to be ‘a university-wide ethics committee’ to review such contracts.
The Central Works Council (COR), which represents employees of the UvA, has been critical about the collaboration, calling it ‘ethically debatable’. It advocates that such an ethics committee ‘would publicly speak out in advance about such a collaboration’after which the issue should be discussed between the board, works council and the student council. The COR has stated further that it is not sure whether there are enough guarantees against the malicious use of any results deriving from the collaboration.
