Dijkgraaf (D66) emphasized on Monday that the Netherlands must better protect its knowledge against outside interference. ‘There are parties in the world that don’t want us so well, or that we like to showcase the successes,’ he said. ‘If we want to keep exporting knowledge, we have to make sure we have that knowledge.’
For the time being, scientists are not yet obliged to report if they enter into collaboration with foreign colleagues or institutes. But this may change in the future, as work is also underway on a legally binding ‘assessment framework’: a list of ‘risk areas‘, whereby every foreign academic who wants access to such a field is first tested.
The AIVD security service warned last summer that countries such as Russia and China are very interested in Dutch knowledge. The Netherlands, with its ‘open economy and open attitude to sharing knowledge’, is ‘vulnerable’, said director-general Erik Akerboom at a briefing in the House of Representatives. ‘If you look at the top sectors in the Netherlands, you know approximately what is happening on the order list state of the Chinese security services.’ Some Dutch ‘top sectors’ are flood risk management, energy and high-tech.
Foreign influence
The risk of foreign influence is also not imaginary. Recently, a human rights institute at the Vrije Universiteit was discredited that ran almost exclusively on money from China. The researchers at this institute were remarkably positive about China. Human rights professor Tom Zwart, for example, said on Chinese state television that he believes China is best wishes with human rights.
His fellow professor Peter Peverelli wrote sympathetically on LinkedIn about the situation in Xinjiang, a region where a million Uyghurs are in re-education camps: ‘Beautiful people, breathtaking nature and good food. And no forced labour, no genocide, or whatever lies the western media come up with.”
The VU has now stopped the Chinese funding of the human rights center, but the example shows that not everyone in the scientific world is equally aware of evil intentions from abroad.
That is not a new problem by the way. The most famous example is that of Abdul Qadir Khan. This Pakistani nuclear physicist worked at Urenco in the 1970s on enriching uranium and passed on the knowledge he acquired there to his homeland. Partly because of this, Pakistan was able to develop an atomic bomb. Khan died of corona last fall, after which the president of Pakistan once again underlined that ‘this grateful country is grateful for its services’ will never forget‘.
suppression
Scientists can’t just knock on the door of the new advice desk if they fear espionage or influence, but also if they suspect that science is being used elsewhere to oppress people. An example of this recently came out. A Chinese researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam had participated in several studies in which the DNA of Uyghurs was linked to physical characteristics. Two scientific journals withdrew those articles because there was insufficient evidence that the Uyghurs had given up their DNA voluntarily.
The new advice desk is established at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, but also makes use of the knowledge that the AIVD has in-house.