History
The Committee was formed in 1972 in Washington and New York as an ad hoc group of scientists and scholars concerned about violations of academic freedom and persecution of scientists around the world. (Sometimes the creation of the Committee is dated to 1973.)
Most of the activities of the Committee in 1970s and 1980s were aimed to help refuseniks and dissident scholars in the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries.
The Committee lobbied both the Soviet and western governments on behalf of these oppressed scholars, provided moral and financial support to them and organized conferences and meetings of refuseniks, including in the Soviet Union itself. Sometimes the Concerned Scientists Committee is credited with having coned the actual term "refusenik". The Committee played an active role in helping such Soviet dissidents as Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky, Yuri Orlov, Benjamin Levich, and others.
Subsequently CCS expanded its activities to pursue human rights and academic freedom issues in other countries. For example, CCS lobbied both the Chinese and the U.S. governments on behalf of the Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who supported dissident students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After his immigration to the U.S., Fang Lizhi served on the CCS himself. In 2001 the CCS lobbied the Russian government and the Russian President Vladimir Putin in support of a Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin, who was accused by the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB) of treason and espionage.
Read more about this topic: Committee Of Concerned Scientists
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)