Offered ON PREMISE and ONLINE (for those who cannot travel to Greece).

The Academy of European Public Law has been at the forefront of European public law teaching for over twenty years.
As the educational flagship of the European Public Law Organization (EPLO), the Academy enjoys a reputation as the primary destination for scholarship in public law within Europe’s dynamic setting.

The 2023 Curriculum

This summer’s study session will take place from August 28 to September 16, 2023.

INTENSIVE MODULES COURSE

First session Week I Dates: 28 August – 1 September, 2023

•  General Course I, morning sessions  10.00-13.00

Professor Vasilka Sancin, Department of International Law, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Thematic “Current Challenges of Human Rights Law”

• Special Course, afternoon sessions  14.00-17.00
  • Thematic (Tuesday & Wednesday): Business and Human Rights – Associate Professor Anikó Szalai, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, University of Szeged, Hungary.
  • Workshop  (Thursday) Business and Human Rights : Dr. Taygeti Michalakea

Second session Week II Dates: 04-08 September, 2023

• General Course II, morning sessions 10.00-13.00

Professor Yutaka Arai, Law Professor, Brussels School of International Studies, Kent University 

Thematic: “Fundamental Rights and Technology”  

• Special Course, afternoon sessions 14.00-17.00
  • Thematic (Tuesday & Wednesday): “Anti-Corruption Strategies” – Professor Maria De Benedetto, Department of Political Science, Roma Tre University, Italy.
  • Workshop (Thursday) “Anti-Corruption Strategies”  - Mr. Constantine Palicarsky, Regional Adviser (Anti-corruption) and Head of Programme Office in Serbia, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

Third session Week III Dates: 11-14 September, 2023
Includes one Field Trip, a Day-off for preparation of Thesis, meet-up-with-the-experts’ sessions and the participation to the EGPL Reunion. 

• Thematic: “Sustainability, human rights and the state” – Professor Nilay Arat, Faculty of Law Department of Administrative Law, Kadir Has University, Turkiye
• Guest Lecture  Thematic: “Le principe d’égal accès aux fonctions publique en Europe (étude comparée)”- Professeur Pascale Gonod, Université Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne), Ecole de droit de la Sorbonne
• EGPL REUNION September 15 – 16: Participation in the Annual Reunion of the European Group of Public Law is required for the in-situ/on-premise participants.

SHORT SUMMARY on courses

Special Course I: Human Rights and Business

Course convenor: Associate Professor Anikó Szalai, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, University of Szeged, Hungary.

Course description 

Businesses have an elementary role in realizing some human rights, especially in the sphere of economic and social rights. At the same time business enterprises can contribute to large scale violations of human rights. Corruption, support of dictatorships, participation in armed conflicts, large-scale degradation of the environment have all been linked to the activities of businesses, often to multinational companies. The lack of proper legislation and execution leaves masses of people without basic human rights and social security. The course focuses on the development of the international legal, especially human rights background of regulation of business activities, on the possibilities and constraints of protection through international law, as well as domestic law. Through examination of the case-law theory is combined with the practical approach of the topic.

General Course II:“Fundamental Rights and Technology”  

Course Convenor:  Prof. Yutaka Arai-Takahashi, University of Kent (Canterbury & Brussels)

Course description

In this course, we will explore varying ways in which technological innovations are shaping the conceptual framing and policy planning of human rights. Trite as it may seem, technological advancement entails both advantages and disadvantages in relation to the protection of human rights. Those upsides and downsides ought to be critically analysed not least in relation to some emerging features that characterise the contemporary practice of human rights law. These features include: (1) the growing role of non-State actors in exerting regulatory control over technological innovations; and (2) diverse areas in which human rights may be seen as the useful conceptual devices to enhance individual persons or peoples’ varying social, economic, political interests.

This course will address a plethora of cross-cutting themes and issues in an interactive and participative manner. These encompass: data protection, surveillance, and access to information in the light of interaction between the freedom of expression and the right to privacy; AI and algorithmic control wielded by the national authorities or private actors over expression rights; impact of medical and scientific progress on reproductive health within the wider conceptual parameters of the right to privacy; technological implications for euthanasia and assisted suicide against the background of the problematized boundaries of the right to life; technological implications for human rights approaches to issues of health and environment, including installations liable to unleash dangerous forces (such as nuclear power stations), climate change, and biodiversity; varying issues relating to free speech rights online (fake news, hate speeches and blasphemy). This course will also cover issues of how both human rights law and international humanitarian law (IHL) can meet challenges posed by cyberwarfare and drones during warfare or in occupied territory.

This course will also propose some sessions in which overarching philosophical questions are critically examined. Above all, it should be investigated if the greater involvement of non-state actors in harnessing technological developments in horizontal context should be seen in a positive or negative light. On one hand, it may be argued that a multitude of non-State actors involved in new knowledge-transmission and access to information may be seen as empowering the historically and socio-economically marginalised population and hence contributing to democratization. Yet on the other hand, there is no overlooking the risk that the de facto delegation of regulatory power to multinational private actors may exacerbate the inherent power imbalance to the detriment of economic, social and cultural rights of the vulnerable ‘subalterns’ in the Global South (often in the intersection of race, gender, class and other discriminatory ‘badges’).

Special Course II : Anti-Corruption Strategies

Course convenor: Professor Maria De Benedetto, Department of Political Science, Roma Tre University, Italy.

Course description 

The course aims to reverse current ideas on corruption and its prevention. While sanctions and controls have long been considered the best guard against corrupt practice, there is evidence showing that in some cases sanctions paradoxically increase corruption and that controls may provide opportunities for corrupt transactions. On the other hand, better regulation and responsive enforcement, not sanctions, may offer the most effective response to corruption.

The central idea of the course is that administrative corruption, like other kinds of illicit behavior, presupposes both the existence and the ineffectiveness of rules, and it follows that a regulatory perspective may therefore help in preventing both corruption and infringements. Adopting an administrative law perspective, the course will focus on compliance and enforcement as drivers of regulatory effectiveness, because when rules are effective there is very limited space for infringements and administrative corruption.

At the end of the course students will learn about the fundamental insights of regulatory anticorruption and will be critically introduced to an innovative model for tackling corrupt practices.