MOHA Research Center organized the 5th EUROPA Moot Court Competition, that took place for a fifth consecutive year at the Imaret of Kavala and the Roman forum of Philippi.
The competition brought together law students and academics from International Universities, as well as legal practitioners and judges from Greece, Belgium and the EU Institutions. The aim of the competition was to further the study and application of EU law and to assist young scholars in developing their skills in oral argument.
Topic
For the 2018 edition of the Moot Court Competition, privacy was chosen as a general topic and an imaginary case was created, inspired by the hacking of Podesta’s email account and the release of his emails on the Wikileaks website. The idea was to test the new General Data Protection Regulation that will come into force in May 2018. The case had two limbs: one dealing more with issues that would be of concern to a company like Google (the territorial scope of the right to erasure in relation to individuals who seek to delist information from Internet search engines in order to prevent the public of a non an EU State from having access to the data in question) and one dealing with the notion of data processing “in the public interest” (essentially the possibility to use the right to erasure/right to be forgotten as a gagging instrument against entities such as Wikileaks).
The following Universities took part: University of Liège (Belgium), University Paris-Dauphine (France), University “Jean Moulin” Lyon 3 (France), University Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), IE University (Spain), Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria), Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Qatar) and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece).
In the competition, among others, the First Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, Mr. Melchior Wathelet, and the former President of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Mr. Vasilios Skouris, judged and graded the participants.
The preliminary rounds and the semi-finals took place at Imaret of Kavala and the House of Mohammed Ali, on Saturday 31st of March, 2018, at 10.00 – 17.15.
The Small and Grand Final took place at the Roman Forum of Philippi, on Sunday 1st of April, 2018, at 10.00 – 12.10.
Round Table
The EUROPA Moot Court Competition came along with a presentation, on Monday 2nd of April 2018, at 10:30 until 12.30 and there was presented the Genaral Data Protection Regulation by Luís Neto Galvão (partner at SRS Advogados) followed by discussion.
