%20%20Ends%20Cooperation%20With%20Russia.jpg) |
| The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Ends Cooperation With Russia and Belarus |
Moscow - The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), will terminate all cooperation with Russia and Belarus in 2024. The termination of this cooperation is in response to Russia's continued aggression against Ukraine.
The decision was made at the 208th meeting of the CERN Council, held on Thursday 16 June 2022, following the previous suspension of all new cooperation with Russia.
CERN announced this suspension of cooperation in March at the insistence of Ukrainian physicists. CERN or cooperating countries may terminate the agreement with written termination notice submitted at least six months prior to the renewal date.
Quoted from Space.com, these agreements cover a period of five years and are usually "quietly" renewed before expiring. CERN was founded after World War II to bring nations and people together to pursue science peacefully. Member states recall that the organization's core values have always been based on cross-border scientific collaboration as a promoter of peace, and emphasize that aggression of one state against another is contrary to these values.
The CERN agreement with the Russian Federation expires in December 2024, and cooperation with the Republic of Belarus ends in June of the same year. The two countries' agreement with CERN is due to expire in the middle of the third science research of the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to begin in July and last about four years.
CERN said it would continue to monitor the situation and was ready to take further decisions regarding developments in Ukraine. The organization will also review its cooperation with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), a Moscow-based international research alliance, founded in the Soviet response to CERN in the 1950s.
For the most part, JINR is made up of former Eastern Bloc countries and countries that were part of the Soviet Union before its disintegration in 1991.
The organization focuses on particle research and nuclear physics including research on neutrinos and superheavy elements. "CERN's current cooperation agreement with JINR will expire in 2025," CERN said in a statement.
CERN, which famously discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 using the Large Hadron Collider, has a system of International Cooperation Agreements with countries that are not members of the organization.