Re-arrest of academic sparks international outcry

More than 5,000 academics have signed a petition calling for the release of jailed Colombian academic Miguel Ángel Beltrán, whose detention has been labelled an attack on scholarly freedom, writes Jack Grove for Times Higher Education.

The petition – presented to the Colombian Embassy in London on 19 November – calls on the South American state’s supreme court to make a swift decision on whether it will prosecute the dissident sociologist from the National University of Colombia.

Beltrán has now spent more than three months in Bogotá’s notorious La Picota maximum security prison since he was arrested in July. The reinstated charges of “rebellion” relate to the same evidence – emails said to have been discovered on a computer in the jungle base of guerrilla commander Raúl Reyes – that was used to detain Beltrán for two years until June 2011 when all criminal charges against him were dropped.
Full report on the Times Higher Education site