BBC Secretly RISKS Students' Lives

After a meeting with the BBC on April 9th, the LSE requested that a BBC Panorama documentary entitled “North Korea” not be aired after discovering that the footage to be shown was gathered by journalists posing as LSE students on a society trip.

Students from the Grimshaw club, an international relations society at the university, flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, for a weeks tourist trip on March 23rd of this year. Later on Saturday however, the committee issued a statement on their facebook page denying their association with the planning of the visit:

“We were surprised that LSE sent out an email about the North Korea trip before asking us to clarify our involvement in it. We would like at this time to clarify the Grimshaw Club’s role in this trip.We had no organisational responsibilities with this trip, and no Grimshaw resources or branding were used for this trip. An LSE alum told us about the trip and we advertised as it an opportunity to our mailing list and our Facebook page that may be of interest to our members; but we at no point had any organisational involvement with the trip. In other words, there was no institutional involvement on our part whatsoever and the trip participants were aware of that.”

The travelling students were not informed that there would be three BBC journalists accompanying them and gathering footage for the Panorama show, due to air this Monday, April 15th. Mr John Sweeney, Mr Alexander Niakaris and Ms Tomiko Sweeney posed as student tourists, while secretly recording the trip for the BBC for the controversial Panorama documentary.

An email sent to all staff and students at the LSE by the university’s director (which can be read in full here), states that the BBC had undergone a risk assessment and that the trip had been approved at the highest level. It was decided that the legitimate students on the trip were not to be told of the real reason for accompaniment of the 3 non-society members, for their own safety. There were concerns that had the journalists been uncovered during the trip, the students could be interrogated and even detained for having any knowledge or involvement with the plot. While this was done for the student’s safety, LSE have argued that the students had the right to assess this risk for themselves.

Mr John Sweeney led North Korean authorities to believe that he was a History P.h.d at LSE in order to gain access to the country under its strict visa checks. The email to staff and students clarifies, that while he had obtained a degree from the university several years ago, he no longer had any involvement there.

The BBC have refused to issue an apology for potentially tarnishing the reputation of the university. Staff at the London School of Economics are concerned that the programme will prohibit their future students from visiting North Korea for legitimate academic research purposes:

“…Academics work on aspects of many politically sensitive parts of the world, including by travel to those locations. It is vital that their integrity is taken for granted and their academic freedom preserved.”

On Saturday evening, the BBC informed the LSE that they would be airing the programme as planned.