For information,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! Guy
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Apologies if you have already received this email
Dear colleague,
You may or may not know that the IEEE Board of Directors has, for the last two years, drastically restricted its services to IEEE members from countries that are embargoed by the US government. The acceptance of government interference in the running of our Institute by the present IEEE leadership has angered many members, and there have been a flurry of individual protests. However, it appears that many if not most of the members are still unaware that the IEEE has been discriminating against some of our fellow members on the basis of their nationality or country of residence.
The issue has been discussed last week at the annual IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. A number of us have decided that it was time to organize an IEEE-wide reaction in order to express to the IEEE Board of Dirrectors the depth of our concern and our strong opposition to the use of discrimination on the basis of nationality or country of residence in an international scientific organization.
As a former Vice-President for Membership Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society, in charge of internationalization, I am particularly sensitive to this issue which threatens the future of the IEEE as an international institute. Many IEEE members present at the IEEE CDC have pressed me to take an initiative, and have helped me initiate it. Thus, we have decided to start a petition action against the decision of the IEEE Board of Directors to discriminate against IEEE members from countries that are embargoed by the US government. With the help of a few IEEE colleagues, we have written a text that we are now proposing for signature to as many IEEE members as we can reach.
May I thus ask you to go to the petition website:
http://www.csam.ucl.ac.be/IEEE_Petition.pl
and to sign the petition if you agree with it. On that website and the IEEE pages to which it links, you will find full information about the embargo.
Even though the petition was started at the initiative of a few members from the Control Systems Society, it is important that it now be disseminated to all Societies and Regions.
I would therefore very much appreciate if you could pass this email on to IEEE colleagues from other societies. If you know colleagues from other societies than CSS who have access to databases of IEEE members, please send me their names and email addresses or ask them to get in touch with me. If you send the text yourself to colleagues who are willing to forward it to large numbers of IEEE members, please let me know so that I can coordinate the distribution. If the snowballing effect works well, we should quickly have thousands of signatures.
Yours sincerely,
Michel Gevers IEEE Fellow, Former Vice-President, and Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society,
-- ***************************************************************** * Michel GEVERS * * Center for Systems Engineering and Applied Mechanics (CESAME) * * Batiment Euler, Avenue G. Lemaitre, 4, * * 1348 LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE, Belgium. * * Tel (direct): +32 10 47 25 90 * * Tel (sec): +32 10 47 20 55 * * Mobile : +32 476 289540 * * Fax: +32 10 47 21 80 * * Email: gevers@csam.ucl.ac.be * * URL: http://www.auto.ucl.ac.be/%7Egevers/ * *****************************************************************