When UN Special Rapporteurs send an allegation letter to a university, international law is doing something unusual. On 14 October 2025, five mandate-holders addressed such a letter to Columbia University, raising concerns about protest policing, disciplinary sanctions, surveillance, and the treatment of non-citizen students and scholars in connection with Gaza-related expression and assembly (Ref. AL OTH 125/2025). The letter does not resolve disputed facts. Its importance lies elsewhere: it reflects a shift in how international human rights law responds to the privatisation of coercive governance. Rather than forcing universities into the straitjacket of state-action doctrine, it treats them as actors exercising delegated public power.

This move matters beyond Columbia. Across jurisdictions, universities increasingly regulate political contestation through security measures, disciplinary systems, and information-sharing with state authorities. These practices shape access to liberty, education, and even territorial presence. The Columbia letter shows how UN Special Procedures are beginning to address a long-standing accountability gap in international law: harm produced by institutions that are formally private, but functionally governmental.

Universities and the accountability gap

International human rights law remains structurally state-centric. Obligations attach to states; violations trigger state responsibility. This framework struggles when coercive power migrates outside the state, into spaces governed by private institutions that nevertheless perform public functions. Universities now sit squarely in this gap.

They control access to education, regulate speech and assembly, deploy security forces, and increasingly coordinate with police and immigration authorities. These are not merely managerial decisions. They condition the practical enjoyment of fundamental rights. International soft law is not completely silent; for example. UNESCO’s 1997 Recommendation on Higher-Education Teaching Personnel and the CESCR’s General Comment No. 13 both link academic freedom to institutional autonomy and public accountability. Yet these frameworks treat universities primarily as beneficiaries of protection, rather than as autonomous regulators whose security, disciplinary, and information-sharing powers shape rights in practice. At the same time, universities rarely fit comfortably within existing doctrines of attribution or positive obligations. The result is a regulatory blind spot: power without clear accountability.

The Columbia letter responds to this problem pragmatically. It does not attempt to transform universities into state organs, nor does it rely on a contested theory of indirect state responsibility. Instead, it treats the university as a governance node – i.e., an institution whose choices structure rights outcomes and therefore warrant direct human rights scrutiny.

What Special Procedures are doing differently

The letter was issued by five Special Rapporteurs acting under the UN Human Rights Council’s system of Special Procedures. These mandate-holders are independent experts appointed by the Council. Their communications procedure (urgent appeals and allegation letters) is formally non-binding and non-adjudicatory, but it is grounded in the institutional framework of the Human Rights Council, in particular General Assembly Resolution 60/251 establishing the Council and Human Rights Council Resolution 5/1, which sets out the mandate and working methods of the Special Procedures. This non-binding character does not make it legally insignificant.

Rather, communications operate as an accountability workaround. They allow international law to follow power rather than form. Instead of asking whether conduct can be attributed to the state, mandate-holders ask whether an actor exercises decisive influence over rights-relevant spaces. If it does, it becomes a legitimate addressee.

This explains why Special Procedures increasingly address companies, universities, and other non-state institutions such as technology platforms, private security providers, and international sporting bodies, where these actors exercise regulatory or disciplinary power affecting the enjoyment of fundamental rights. The Columbia letter fits squarely within this trend. It reflects an understanding that governance today often takes place through delegated authority and public–private cooperation, especially in domains such as security and migration control. In this sense, the letter does not expand international law’s formal reach but merely recalibrates its gaze.

From campus discipline to coercive governance

Universities have always disciplined students, but what distinguishes the present moment is how discipline operates. On many campuses, responses to protest now involve securitised measures, collaboration with law enforcement, and sanctions with cascading legal effects.

The Columbia letter alleges coordinated use of campus security, prolonged containment of protesters, arrests by city police, and severe disciplinary sanctions including long-term suspensions, expulsions, and degree revocations (p. 5). It further situates these actions within broader structural changes to disciplinary governance, including the centralisation of authority and the dismantling of participatory adjudicatory bodies (p. 6).

For international law, the precise facts matter less than the form of power exercised. When a university deploys security forces with arrest authority, controls access to education through punitive sanctions, and operates in close coordination with police, it no longer functions as a purely private association. It governs.

This is why Special Procedures treat such conduct as potentially engaging international human rights norms, as the modalities these universities are using begin to resemble public coercion without public-law constraints.

Rights engaged by delegated governance

Three clusters of rights become salient when universities exercise delegated coercive power.

First, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association, protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Human Rights Committee has made clear that restrictions on peaceful assemblies must be lawful, necessary, and proportionate, and that the possibility of hostile reactions does not justify blanket suppression (General Comment No. 37). When universities suppress protest through force or impose viewpoint-selective discipline, they risk replicating precisely the harms these standards seek to prevent.

Second, liberty and due process. Article 9 of the ICCPR prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, including detention imposed as punishment for the exercise of protected rights (General Comment No. 35). Where university actions foreseeably lead to detention through police referral, procedural design, or cooperation with enforcement authorities, the boundary between private discipline and public deprivation of liberty collapses.

Third, privacy, education, and non-discrimination. Surveillance of student activity, information-sharing with authorities, and opaque disciplinary processes can interfere with privacy and educational access. At the same time, universities bear obligations to protect students from discrimination and harassment, including antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. International law demands measures that are evidence-based, proportionate, and applied without discrimination.

The Columbia letter explicitly embraces this duality. It condemns antisemitism while warning against the use of overly broad definitions to suppress peaceful protest and legitimate political expression (p. 13).

Migration as the enforcement backend

The most consequential aspect of the Columbia letter concerns non-citizen students and scholars. For this group, university discipline can become existential. Suspension may jeopardise visa compliance. Criminal citations can trigger immigration scrutiny. Information-sharing can initiate detention or removal proceedings.

The letter alleges prolonged detention, transfers between facilities, and deportation proceedings initiated under rarely used foreign policy grounds (p. 10). Whether or not these allegations are ultimately substantiated, they illustrate a structural reality: migration law increasingly functions as the enforcement backend of campus discipline.

Once this occurs, the fiction of the university as a private actor becomes untenable. The institution participates in allocating liberty and territorial belonging, which are core sovereign functions. This explains why the letter invokes not only mandates on expression and education, but also the mandate on the human rights of migrants.

It also explains the reference to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. While universities are not corporations, the principles address the same problem: how to regulate private actors whose decisions produce public-law harms. The common thread here is functional power, not institutional form.

What this means for international law

The Columbia letter signals a broader recalibration in human rights accountability. Rather than attempting to shoehorn complex governance arrangements into traditional state responsibility frameworks, Special Procedures increasingly engage directly with institutions that exercise decisive influence over rights.

This approach doesn’t resolve doctrinal debates about attribution or obligation. It sidesteps them. It relies instead on publicity, dialogue, and normative pressure to discipline the exercise of power. In doing so, it acknowledges the simple fact that contemporary governance often operates through actors that international law was not originally designed to regulate.

Universities may be an early test case, but they are unlikely to be the last.

The deeper question raised by the Columbia letter is whether international human rights law is quietly retooling its accountability architecture to match the realities of privatised coercive governance. If so, the significance of this intervention extends far beyond the campus.