Toward Transformative Accountability

EUROPE, 25 Aug 2025

Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service

Addressing Rentier Capitalist Capture and Restoring the Public Good in (Flemish) Higher Education

Introduction

16 Aug 2025 – The escalating global polycrisis—marked by profound ecological collapse, mass impoverishment, and institutional decay—demands urgent and uncompromising scrutiny of the systems underpinning these intertwined crises. Central among these systems is rentier capitalist capture, an insidious and criminal architecture that operates across political, economic, and academic institutions to perpetuate harm and normalize violence against both people and planet.

This essay traces the critical evidence and legal analyses diagnosing this phenomenon, exposes the complicity of key institutions, and points to a visionary project for transformative accountability: the Nuremberg Now initiative. In this milieu, the role and responsibility of higher education emerge as a foundational battleground, where academic complicity with harmful economic orthodoxies must be confronted and overturned.

Rentier Capitalist Capture: A Criminal Architecture

Rooted in decades of investigative research and interdisciplinary scholarship, rentier capitalist capture describes the systematic seizure of state and regulatory institutions by financial elites who extract wealth through rentier mechanisms. Far from benign or accidental, this capture systematically fuels ecocide and genocide—deepening poverty, destroying ecosystems, and perpetuating structural violence.

As demonstrated by critical legal analysis, empirical data, and mathematical modeling—including the P – P ≠ P – P + I paradox—this system is inherently unstable, fraudulent, and incompatible with human rights frameworks such as the UDHR, ICESCR, and ECHR. The apparatus of this capture relies on suppressing critical inquiry, encasing normalized harm within bureaucratic routines, and institutionalizing antisocial psychological dispositions while repressing prosocial values like empathy and solidarity.

Institutional Complicity and the Academic Crisis

The role of academic institutions is pivotal. As guardians of knowledge and society’s future through education and research, universities bear an undeniable duty to uphold human rights, foster sustainability, and challenge harmful orthodoxies. The Magna Charta Universitatum and international human rights law codify this obligation.

Yet, evidence from the Flemish higher education context reveals a grim reality: suppression of critical research exposing rentier capitalist harms, gatekeeping excluding transformative scholarship, and institutional failure to address structural injustices. These patterns amount to institutional complicity, violating legal and moral mandates and perpetuating a sociopathic system of rentier dominance.

Introducing the Formal Notice of Default to the Minister

To confront these failures directly and activate systemic accountability, I have authored a Formal Notice of Default to the Flemish Minister of Education. This letter serves as a legal and ethical summons, placing the Minister on notice for failure to act against structural violations rooted in the current academic and economic orthodoxy. It demands transparent investigation, immediate remedial action, and meaningful reform to restore academic integrity and fulfill constitutional and international obligations.

Formal notice of default for breach of constitutional, international, and statutory obligations – joint responsibility for structural human rights violations, ecocide, and institutional discrimination in Flemish higher education

Dear Minister Demir,

1. Introduction and formal notification

By means of this letter, I place you formally in default for failing to comply with your legal and human rights obligations as the ultimate responsible authority for Flemish higher education, specifically in relation to:

– The tolerance and continuation of a curriculum and academic policy grounded in neoclassical economic dogma which – according to internationally recognised science and UN reports – systematically contributes to mass poverty, social exclusion, ecological destruction, and breaches of fundamental rights.

– The active or passive shielding of public institutions (including KU Leuven) that systematically obstruct research which exposes these structural harms and offers concrete solutions.

– The failure to act against well‑documented cases of institutional discrimination, academic gatekeeping, and breaches of the right to truth within the higher education system.
You have been legally and factually on notice of the facts and their gravity through, inter alia:

– My UN‑recognised scientific research, endorsed by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights (2025).

– Multiple peer‑reviewed and under review publications (State Crime Journal, JOCRISE) showing clear causal links between the prevailing rentier‑capitalist policy model and foreseeable, large‑scale mortality and ecological damage.

– The Belgian Ecocide Law (2024), which criminalises institutional negligence causing serious, widespread, and long‑term environmental harm.

2. Your legal and human rights obligations

Under:

– Belgian Constitution: Art. 7bis (sustainable development, solidarity), Art. 23 (right to a life in dignity, including education and environmental protection)

– Flemish Higher Education Codex: duty to ensure quality and societal service in accordance with human rights and sustainability

– European Convention on Human Rights (Arts. 2, 3, 13, 14) – positive obligations to protect life, prohibit degrading treatment, provide effective remedies, and avoid discrimination

– ICESCR & ICCPR

– Belgian Ecocide Law (2024)

– Magna Charta Universitatum (2020)

…you have the positive duty to:

– Ensure that universities and colleges base curricula and research on the most up‑to‑date internationally recognised science regarding the polycrisis (climate, biodiversity, inequality, financial instability).

– Investigate, correct, or terminate harmful structures and practices once credible evidence exists of participation in or facilitation of ecocide and large‑scale rights violations.

3. Facts and omission

Despite formal notification:

– You have not initiated any independent investigation into these documented violations.

– You have issued no transparent public statement on this urgent matter.

– You have failed to use your governance and supervisory powers to end the ongoing systemic rights violations in Flemish higher education.

– This inaction, while being both competent and obliged to act, constitutes complicity by omission under national and international human rights law – and potentially violates the Belgian Ecocide Law (2024).

4. Formal notice

=> I hereby place you in default and require that, within 14 days of receipt of this letter, you:

– Commission an independent, public investigation into the structural breach of human rights and ecological obligations in Flemish higher education, with specific focus on academic gatekeeping, curriculum content, and conflicts of interest involving harmful economic sectors.

– Take immediate provisional measures to stop institutions from blocking UN‑recognised, peer‑reviewed research that offers crucial solutions to the escalating polycrisis.

– Issue a public statement explaining how you will fulfil your obligations under the Constitution, ECHR, ICESCR, and the Ecocide Law.

5. Reservation of rights

Should you fail to comply within the stated time limit, I will submit this notice and proof of your knowledge to:

– The European Court of Human Rights
– Relevant United Nations treaty bodies
– The competent Belgian judicial bodies under the Ecocide Law
– Parliamentary and public inquiry fora

All substantive and procedural rights are expressly reserved.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Priels

********************

Pathways Toward Transformative Accountability

Legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Now project innovate by applying international legal instruments—including the ECHR—to hold both state and institutional actors accountable for systemic harms. Combined with complementary civic mechanisms like people’s tribunals, such initiatives aim to dismantle the rentier architecture and restore a governance model rooted in justice and sustainability.

Moreover, curriculum reform is vital. Embedding social ecological economics and contemporary evidence-based models within higher education will empower future leaders to transcend the flawed dogmas currently perpetuating the polycrisis.

Conclusion

We face a choice of historic magnitude: continue to tolerate normalized systemic harm rooted in rentier capitalist capture that threatens the very foundations of life and democracy—or rise up as scholars, policymakers, and citizens to demand transformative accountability. The formal notice to the Minister and accompanying legal actions represent concrete steps toward reclaiming the university’s public mandate and forging sustainable futures.

Academic courage, legal innovation, and mass civic mobilization must unite to dismantle the architecture of rentier capitalist capture and kindle the collective spirit of empathy, solidarity, and justice essential for planetary wellbeing.

_____________________________________________

Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher, social-ecological activist, and founder of Free-B. He has published six peer-reviewed articles, authored a UN report, and initiated the first legal case against the global interest banking system for ecocide in Belgium. He is currently applying for a PhD by publication at KULeuven, focusing on the systemic links between financial architecture, ecocide, and global inequality.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Aug 2025.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Toward Transformative Accountability, is included. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

There are no comments so far.