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Verschlagwortet: EU Values

EU Values and the EU’s Rule of Law Action: What Place for Academic Freedom?

By Olga Ceran. Academic freedom, enshrined in Article 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR), has not been discussed extensively in the EU legal literature. What brought it into the spotlight of EU law was the democratic backsliding in Hungary. The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the so-called Lex CEU case, concerning the amendment to the Hungarian Higher Education Act, was the first judicial pronouncement on academic freedom in EU law. These developments confirm in practice what has already been pointed out in the literature: rule of law, democracy, and academic freedom are intertwined. Nevertheless, what this means for EU action remains underexplored. While the EU’s toolbox for the protection of democracy and the rule of law has grown in recent years and has been widely discussed, academic freedom is not explicitly a part thereof and there is no specific instrument for its protection.