KEY FINDINGS - THE EXPOSE THAT NOTTINGHAM UNI WISHES YOU NEVER READ

8/6/2019 KEY FINDINGS - THE EXPOSE THAT NOTTINGHAM UNI WISHES YOU NEVER READ

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The Registrar should have consulted first with senior academic staff andwith experts in the field of terrorism. The fact that no risk assessmenttook place is clear both from the Registrar s statement to the police andfrom a letter the then Vice-Chancellor sent to the then Universities Minister, Bill Rammell. Subsequently, however, and with its

responsibilities in mind, the university came to publicly state that thedecision to involve the police had been taken as a collective decisionand after a risk assessment had be en conducted. This was not true; itwas the decision of one man the Registrar.

2. The police came to make their arrests on the basis of informationsupplied to them by the Registrar and by a professor in the School of Modern Languages. Both of these two had cursory sight of the threedocuments. The Registrar had said that the Al Qaeda Training Manual (AQTM) had no valid re ason whatsoever to exist, and the professor hadcalled it an illegal document. Neither man carried out even a Google

search to investigate any of the three documents. Taking these two men- given their seniority - to be experts, the police made their arrests.

3. No one in senior management ever read the AQTM.

4. The university came to say that, in the whole affair, no judgement wasmade by us. But it was a university judgement that led to the arrests ,not a police one . Indeed, the day after Sabirs arrest , the universityprepared an exclusion letter for him. A judgement had clearly beenpassed on him.

5. Neither Sabir nor Yezza was contacted by the university during the sixdays of their incarceration. They received no support.

6. The university had said that Sabir had been arrested for impeding policeinquiries. This was not true. Sabir had no idea that there was a policeinquiry going on.

7. The university had said that there were no armed police on campusduring the arrests. This was not true.

8. The university had said that the two men had been in possession of

terrorist literature. This was no t true. And, anyway, even if they hadpossessed terrorist literature it is not a crime in the UK to do so.

9. The university was clearly limiting academic freedom by declaring abook - the AQTM - to be off limits to students at Nottingham University.(It was on reading lists at the University of Oxford).


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10. The former Vice-Chancellor had written a letter to the Times Higher Education Supplement saying that an article written in relation to thearrests by three junior lecturers from the university had containedelements that were entirely false. Th e Vice-Chancellor, in doing so,defamed these three academics.

11. It was pointed out to the university hierarchy that the AQTM wasavailable from Amazon, The university then came out with thestatement that the version on Amazon was less complete than the oneSabir had downloaded. This was not true. The US DoJ version was one of the most benign available anywhere. The Amazon version was actuallylonger and more complete.

12. The type of information above was passed on by the university to boththe department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) - which coversuniversities - and to the Home Office. Both government departments

came to accept the universitys line. Mr Rammell, indeed, was then torefer to the situation at Nottingham as one where there had beenextremist literature on campus. In fact, there had been a librarybook on campus.

13. The former Vice-Chancellor had told Mr Rammell that students had beenencouraged by junior lecturers to access terrorist materials. This wasnot true.

14. In briefings later to be made in these two government departments thefollowing, for instance, was stated:

It is important to note that the Training Manual found WAS NOT the version you can purchase on Amazon.

This was simply not true or it was true insofar as the version onAmazon was actually longer and had more information, not less. This isan example of the truth not being told about this case of theNottingham Two at the highest levels of government.

15. Mr Rammell thought that the university had acted correctly andresponsibly despite the fact that it had followed none of the

guidelines of his own department.

16. The Home Office distributed literature which claimed that the case of the Nottingham Two was a major Islamist plot! This has had follow-onconsequences. For one, Sabir is now clearly being subject to what canonly be classed as harassment by police.


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17. The universitys Management Board, in later portal messages, made aseries of untrue statements that attempted to deflect blame from thehierarchy down towards both Sabir and Yezza, and to more junior staff in the university.

18. The BIS likewise blamed the junior lecturers. The actual truth beingtold by these junior lecturers came to be described by the BIS as, quote,distortions by individual academics.

19. The university came to specifically apportion blame to junior lecturerswithin the School of Politics. They were deemed to be in need of morecontrol. The university then employ ed Research Ethics Committees tocheck lecturers reading lists. But Research Ethics Committees can onlyever deal with research involving human participants they cannot beused as mechanisms to police what literature students should berecommended.

20. The university said it would put in place protocols to ensure that nothinglike the Nottingham Two situation would ever happen again.Committees and working parties were set up. But nothing ever came of these. No new protocols or new procedures ever appeared. There is, atNottingham, just as little protection today for students and for theirlecturers as there was in May 2008.

21. The Registrar and the Head of Security put words into the mouths of lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They made out thatthe CPS had reluctantly decided not to prose cute Sabir and Yezza. The

CPS had said no such thing. The Registrar and the Head of Security alsoquoted the CPS as saying that the two men could not possess the AQTMin the future. The CPS had said no such thing.

22. The Registrar also said that he had been told by the police that theversion of the AQTM that Sabir had downloaded was the mostdangerous version. This was not true. No police officer had told himthis.

23. A booklet, written by two university academics and produced with helpfrom senior university management, was published that defamed both

Sabir and Yezza. They were said to have engaged in activity fallingwithin the [Terrorism Act 2000]. They did no such thing. In theproduction of this booklet, Yezzas personal details were handed over byuniversity staff to the two authors.

24. After his release from custody and when he returned to his studies, theuniversity could not employ its exclusion letter on Sabir. But it was clearthat he became subject to a degree of harassment by management. In a


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meeting, for instance, he had with the Registrar and the Head of Security in July 2008, Sabir was told by the Registrar that he had used anillegal document (the AQTM). Moreover, the Registrar said he had beentold it was illegal by the police. This was n ot true. No police officerhad said the AQTM was illegal. In threatening Sabir by using such

language the Registrar had misrepre se nted the police. This is anoffence. After an internal u niversity investigation into the Registrar sbehaviour it was found that he had done nothing wrong, and had merelyacted, quote, in good faith. He had, apparently, been told it wasillegal by another, unnamed, reliable source.

25. Sabir went on to take his PhD in the School of Politics. He could only doso after some controversy over the marking of his MA dissertation. Hismark was dropped by 13% by external examiners who were working withthe wrong marking criteria. With such a drop in mark he could notoriginally take up the PhD offer. This was despite the fact that another

student, with MA marks less than his, had been accepted onto a PhDcourse in the School of Politics. However, a bureaucratic error had beenmade and the School was then forced to take Sabir as a PhD student.This was, though, to the considerable irritation of the Head of School.Sabir eventually left Nottingham to begin another PhD at StrathclydeUniversity. When he had heard that Sabir had left, his Head of theSchool was, quote, delighted and said it was good news. Sabir was alocal student educated at a Nottingham comprehensive school.

26. The University of Nottingham, in its treatment of these two men and of those academics who came to their support, ignored the guidelines of

UNESCO, of the ECHR, of the UK government, of the Economic and SocialResearch Council, and those of several other bodies as well. There areeven instances where the university broke the law.

There should be a statutory public inquiry into what happened at theUniversity of Nottingham in regard to its treatment of Sabir, Yezza and anumber of its staff. Students and academics in this country should neveragain have to face such behaviour.

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KEY FINDINGS - THE EXPOSE THAT NOTTINGHAM UNI WISHES YOU NEVER READ