Skirting legal hurdles to private universities

The Ministry of Education will use a 2020 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union to allow private universities despite Article 16 of the Constitution expressly stating that tertiary education establishments must be public.

The legislative provisions allowing private universities will be part of a broader education reform bill that will be tabled in Parliament before the end of the year, ministry officials said.

The European Court case was a narrow one: it concerned a Hungarian university reform law narrowly tailored to force Central European University, founded by Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros in 1991, to relocate. The court found the Hungarian bill incompatible with European legislation.

The court seized the opportunity to lay down some general principles regarding academic freedom. It said that any national legislation on university education must respect academic freedom, freedom of access to education and business freedom.

A constitutional law professor told Kathimerini that, in effect, the decision allows any European university to open campuses in other EU countries. For universities outside the EU, such as UK and US ones, EU member-states are obliged to accept their operations based on the agreement which founded the World Trade Organization in 1994.

The University of Nicosia is expected to be among the first to establish a campus in Greece.