The Philosophical Background and the Adventures of Religious Studies: The Case of Greece

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Published: Jun 30, 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/cjp.32617
Keywords:
religious studies philosophy of education philosophy of religion conscience exemption personal data
Fereniki Panagopoulou-Koutnatzi
Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7109-7311
Georgios Arabatzis
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Abstract

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 In this sense, the Religious Studies course in Greece is seen as outdated, and an increasing number of students are seeking to be exempt from it.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.

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Author Biography
Fereniki Panagopoulou-Koutnatzi, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece

Fereniki Panagopoulou is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at Panteion University. She has been a Legal Auditor at the Hellenic Data Protection Authority for 8 years. She has studied Law at the School of Law of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (LL.B. and LL.M.), Law and Public Health at the Harvard University (Μ.P.H.) and Constitutional Law and Bioethics at the School of Law of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (PhD, Title: “The self-determination of the patient”).

She has taught Constitutional Law, Data Protection Law, Bioethics, Medical Ethics and New Technologies and Law at the Universities of Panteion, Athens, Βerlin, Piraeus, Peloponnese, Macedonia and Berlin. She has published seven books on public law, edited and co-edited five collective volumes on Bioethics and one collective volume on public law. She has published numerous papers on constitutional law, Bioethics, data protection and new technologies.

She is the Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Delegation to the UNESCO Bioethics Chair, Coordinator of the publication of the “Administrative Law” legal journal, General Secretary and Treasurer of the Hellenic Society of Administrative Studies, General Secretary of the Hellenic Data Protection and Privacy Association.

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