Do you have to be able to say everything on Twitter and Facebook? Is Instagram morally obliged to remove photos from attacks? Should we allow the terrorist group to recruit new members on the internet?

From Incident to Precedent

On 10 June 2021, Merinda Stewart defended her thesis 'Freedom of Overflight: A Study of Coastal State Jurisdiction in International Airspace'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. P.M.J. Mendes de Leon en Prof. J.J. Rijpma.

Stam defended his dissertation ‘Freedom of speech and the suppression of discrimination in the Netherlands: a constitutional-developmental approach’ on 12 November 2025. The doctoral research was supervised by Afshan Ellian and Bastiaan Rijpkema

On 30 November, Florian Theissen defended the thesis 'Sincerely believing in freedom: a reconstruction and comparison of the interpretation of the freedom of religion and belief on the Canadian Supreme Court, the South African Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights'. The doctoral…

DNA carries various forms of information. Out of these forms of information the most well-known is classical genetic information.

Press freedom in Indonesia is still under pressure, despite the demise of Soeharto’s regime in 1998

De ophef rond het geplande optreden van Kanye West in Arnhem groeit, maar juridisch gezien kan de burgemeester dat niet zomaar tegenhouden. Volgens Adriaan Wierenga, noodrechtspecialist bij de afdeling Staats- en bestuursrecht en tevens werkzaam aan de RUG, botsen zulke ingrepen al snel met fundamentele…

Recently Cambridge University Press published dr. Jan Osters monograph “Media Freedom as a Fundamental Right”.

The gripping story of a collective passion for freedom that shook the world.

On 12 November Ingrid Leijten was a guest on Dutch NOS NPO Radio 1 programme Met het Oog op Morgen. She was asked to speak about the right to freedom of expression.

What does academic freedom mean? And how do we give shape to it in Leiden? The Academic Freedom Core Team considered these questions and presented its final report on 17 June.

As of 1 May 2025 Dr. Vasiliki Kosta has been appointed member of the standing Committee for Freedom of Scientific Practice (Commissie voor Vrijheid van Wetenschapsbeoefening - CVW) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

President Putin will be officially opening the Netherlands–Russia Year on 8 April in Amsterdam. Leiden Slavist Sjeng Scheijen was responsible for putting together the cultural programme. How much freedom did he have in doing so? ‘The Dutch photography project on the demolition of Sochi districts was…

The Europa Institute has invited Dorjana Bojanovska from Macedonia to visit Leiden Law School to conduct her master thesis research from 6 March - 31 March 2017. Dorjana is a student at the Comparative Constitutional Law program at the Legal Studies Department of the Central European University. The…

In ‘Dimensions of Free Speech’, Devrim Kabasakal Badamchi (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) offers a new theoretical framework for free speech by critically analysing the major justifications for free speech. Kabasakal Badamchi argues for a justification: namely the double-grounded…

This thesis focuses on the concepts of freedo and fixity as two central topics of my artistic research. I present, analyze. and contextualize four of my works which have explicit links to fleedom and fixify and which demonstrate the dynamic interrelationship between the two.

The Press Freedom Monitor is set to be presented during this year’s World Press Freedom Day celebrations on 3 May. To mark this occasion, the interactive media museum Beeld & Geluid in The Hague will publish a three-part podcast series.

In the light of the fragility of current liberal democracies, this dissertation aims to contribute to rethinking political order by reconstructing Hegel’s account in the Philosophy of Right.

On 22 November 2018, Els De Busser spoke at a panel during the conference

On 5 May we celebrate freedom, a basic human right that should not be taken for granted. We asked international students and staff what it means to them.

On the 31 March 2022 Mr. Taufiq Hanafi successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This study is an attempt to reconstruct the muted violent past by breaking the monopoly of the Turkish state over the memory of the Armenian genocide.

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

On 3 May, World Press Freedom Day was held and the Dutch 2022 'Persvrijheidsmonitor' was presented. The safety of journalists in 2022 was the most important theme in the area of press freedom in the Netherlands. Tarlach McGonagle, Professor of Medial Law & Information Society in Leiden, and Otto Volgenant,…

Authorities in Denmark and Sweden are examining whether it is possible to ban Quran burning following recent incidents. These have caused tension in many Islamic countries as well as in the countries where they occurred.

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century.

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

On 11 October, the roundtable entitled ‘Academic Freedom – Theoretical Perspectives’ took place at Leiden University's Academy Building. This event was organised as part of the Vidi research project entitled 'The EU fundamental right to 'freedom of the art and sciences': exploring the limits on the…

On this page you will find more information about the selected projects of the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) Fund for 2026.

How do borderland dwellers living along militarised frontiers negotiate regimes of state security and their geopolitical location in everyday life? What might 'freedom' mean to those who do not resist captivity engendered by borders? Focusing on the predicaments of a double-minority, Radhika Gupta examines…

How do you recount historic events if you are not allowed to talk about them? For his dissertation, Taufiq Hanafi tried to find out how a period of mass murder – despite heavy censorship – found a place in Indonesian literature. PhD defence 31 March.

Professor Jan Willem Erisman is happy with the freedom at our University. But frameworks are needed, he believes. That is why he makes a proposal for such a framework from the perspective of his own profession. In fact, he makes a proposal for a wonderful ambition for Leiden University.

The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) aims to demonstrate its relevance to society by means of high-quality research, excellent education and various outreach activities. A few highlights:

Baroque flautist Jed Wentz followed two years of dancing classes in order to develop the right feeling for the gestures required for the Baroque French opera genre ‘tragédie en musique’. In his dissertation, the links between gesture affect and rhythmic freedom in the performance of the tragédie en…

NETHATE is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) project seeking to investigate the roots, societal impact and mitigation strategies of hate in offline and online foras.

Without academic freedom, we might not have antibiotics, nor a deep understanding of human behaviour. Literary criticism, climate models, and ecological restoration would be severely limited; just like ethical reflection on artificial intelligence, justice, trauma, parenting, faith and hope. All these…

Online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) have become part and parcel of everyday media use. Journalists incorporate posts from politicians into newspaper reports, scientists share their insights in short posts or videos, and the judiciary uses social media to explain their…

Academic freedom is essential for good scientific practice, but there are limits: scientists and scholars from all domains must always seek a proper balance between academic freedom and independence on the one hand, and social responsibility on the other hand.