The present study explores the pressing matter of mandatory vaccination in Europe from an ethical–constitutional perspective. To start with, it considers the bases of the concerns that have been raised to date, as well as those of the documented opposition. This is followed by an analysis of the applicable European legal framework and a discussion on mandatory vaccination in the workplace, education and the leisure industry, before outlining the conclusions reached. The position taken by this paper is that as long as certain conditions are met, mandatory vaccination does not violate fundamental rights. On the contrary, provided that the principle of proportionality is satisfied, mandatory vaccination as a form of medical intervention constitutes a manifestation of the obligation on the part of the state to protect the fundamental rights to life and health.

Artificial intelligence has evolved enormously over the last two decades, becoming mainstream in different scientific domains including education, where so far, it is mainly utilized to enhance administrative and intelligent tutoring systems services and academic support. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-based chatbot, developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022, has rapidly gained attention from the entire international community for its impressive performance in generating comprehensive, systematic, and informative human-like responses to user input through natural language processing. Inevitably, it has also rapidly posed several challenges, opportunities, and potential issues and concerns raised regarding its use across various scientific disciplines. This paper aims to discuss the legal and ethical implications arising from this new technology, identify potential use cases, and enrich our understanding of Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, and its capabilities in education.

The infinite and constantly developing options of medically assisted reproduction (MAR) reasonably raise the issue of its permitted range. Proponents of human rights fight for the strengthening of the reproductive right, the access to it by even more people, such as single parents, same-sex couples, elderly women, HIV carriers etc. Still concerning, however, is the fact that the defenders of human rights often forget the rights of the fetus or the child, which cannot be expressed with the same intensity. In the framework of the present study, we investigate the true interests of the child in MAR, in relation to the reproductive right in the light of some borderline cases.

The teaching of Religious Studies in Greece has always been the subject of intense debate and controversy. The case law of the Council of State mandates a denominational course, allowing exemption only on the grounds of religious conscience. The Supreme Administrative Court even considered the introduction of a compulsory Religious Studies course for all students to be unconstitutional. In this sense, the Religious Studies course in Greece is seen as outdated, and an increasing number of students are seeking to be exempt from it. In a recent case, the Council of State, in an attempt to depart from its previous case law on the exemption, essentially referred the decision on the matter in question to the Greek Data Protection Authority, which was requested to give its opinion on the status of the currently applicable exemption. In the context of this contribution, we argue that: a) The Council of State erred in its approach of shifting the burden of this decision to the Data Protection Authority. b) These issues should not be decided by the courts or independent authorities but by the democratically legitimized legislature. c) Religious knowledge is an indispensable element of education and, as such, the Religious Studies course should have an encyclopedic, rather than a narrowly developed denominational character and remain compulsory for all pupils.