Mobility Phase: European Parliament, DG for Parliamentary Research Services, Directorate for Impact Assessment and Foresight, Scientific Foresight Unit, Brussels
Academic Freedom amid the Rule of Law Crises: Article 13 CFR and the Scope of EU Intervention
Olga Ceran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is a team member of the NWO Vidi project “The EU Fundamental Right to ‘Freedom of the Arts and Sciences’: Exploring the Limits on the Commercialisation of Academia” led by Dr Vasiliki Kosta. Her current research focuses on comparative constitutional law as a building block for establishing the content of Art. 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (‘freedom of the arts and sciences’). Olga holds a PhD in Law and an LLM in Comparative, European and International Laws from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) as well as a Master's degree in law from the University of Wrocław (Poland). Before joining Leiden University, she worked for the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2018-2020, she was a Managing Editor of the European Journal of Legal Studies and she remains a member of its Editorial Board. Olga’s broader research interests include comparative law, EU fundamental rights, and methodological approaches to EU law and Europeanisation. She is particularly interested in effects produced by EU law and policy in areas remaining (primarily) outside of EU competence, such as higher education or family law.
Academic Freedom amid the Rule of Law Crises: Article 13 CFR and the Scope of EU Intervention
Article 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights reads: ‘The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint. Academic freedom shall be respected’. The provision has not been extensively analyzed in the literature, perhaps because academic freedom was long taken for granted. However, research indicates that the overall state of academic freedom in the EU is declining, with systemic issues accompanying the broader rule of law crises. Against this background, academic freedom questions are increasingly raised as a matter of EU law, with commentators suggesting that protection of the rule of law and academic freedom should be complementary. Yet, despite the increasing interest of EU policy-makers, there is no uniform understanding of academic freedom as a fundamental right nor a clear vision how the EU could protect it. Therefore, the project analyzes the possibility to utilize the existing rule of law instruments for safeguarding of academic freedom and explores potential “ways forward” to ensure its protection within the flagship EU instruments in the area of research and higher education. In that, the project aims at investigating different avenues for a complementary protection of academic freedom on the EU level.
