Il valore precettivo dei diritti sociali fondamentali previsti dal titolo IV della Carta

Il dibattito giuridico, politico ed economico in tema di protezione dei diritti sociali nel contesto del processo di integrazione europea risale alle origini stesse di tale processo. A circa dieci anni dall’attribuzione alla Carta dei diritti fondamentali dell’UE dello stesso valore giuridico dei Trattati, sembra possibile tracciare un primo bilancio in termini di aspettative inverate ed aspettative non soddisfatte quanto alla giustiziabilità dei diritti sociali fondamentali contenuti nel Titolo IV direttamente o indirettamente al rapporto di impiego (articoli da 27 a 34). A questo fine, la tesi ha adottato una struttura tripartita capace di coniugare una metodologia di analisi pratica, in relazione alla giurisprudenza della Corte di giustizia UE post Lisbona (Capitolo III), con un’analisi dal carattere maggiormente teorico-ricostruttivo (Capitoli I e II). La ricerca cerca di dimostrare come tanto i più interessanti sviluppi quanto i limiti registratisi nella giurisprudenza della CGUE (rispettivamente, l’efficacia diretta, anche orizzontale, di alcuni di essi negli ordinamenti nazionali, e la determinazione del loro ambito di applicazione e delle modalità di interazione con il diritto secondario e primario) possano essere meglio compresi tenendo in debito conto il percorso ed il significato di ciascuno di tali diritti nel contesto del processo di integrazione europea. In breve, si sostiene che la “costituzionalizzazione” dei diritti sociali in esame abbia certamente un “valore aggiunto” che, tuttavia, riflette la natura sui generis e le finalità dell’Unione, il sistema di riparto di competenze tra Stati membri e Unione, ed il significato ultimo del sistema UE di tutela dei diritti fondamentali. Ciò non toglie che questi caratteri, con il tempo, possano infine mutare.

The European legal approach to Open Science and research data

This dissertation proposes an analysis of the governance of the European scientific research, focusing on the emergence of the Open Science paradigm: a new way of doing science, oriented towards the openness of every phase of the scientific research process, able to take full advantage of the digital ICTs. The emergence of this paradigm is relatively recent, but in the last years it has become increasingly relevant. The European institutions expressed a clear intention to embrace the Open Science paradigm (eg., think about the European Open Science Cloud, EOSC; or the establishment of the Horizon Europe programme). This dissertation provides a conceptual framework for the multiple interventions of the European institutions in the field of Open Science, addressing the major legal challenges of its implementation. The study investigates the notion of Open Science, proposing a definition that takes into account all its dimensions related to the human and fundamental rights framework in which Open Science is grounded. The inquiry addresses the legal challenges related to the openness of research data, in light of the European Open Data framework and the impact of the GDPR on the context of Open Science. The last part of the study is devoted to the infrastructural dimension of the Open Science paradigm, exploring the e-infrastructures. The focus is on a specific type of computational infrastructure: the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility. The adoption of HPC for research is analysed from the European perspective, investigating the EuroHPC project, and the local perspective, proposing the case study of the HPC facility of the University of Luxembourg, the ULHPC. This dissertation intends to underline the relevance of the legal coordination approach, between all actors and phases of the process, in order to develop and implement the Open Science paradigm, adhering to the underlying human and fundamental rights.

Big data in health IoE in emergency situations: between the right to privacy and digital health innovation

The chapters of the thesis focus on a limited variety of selected themes in EU privacy and data protection law. Chapter 1 sets out the general introduction on the research topic. Chapter 2 touches upon the methodology used in the research. Chapter 3 conceptualises the basic notions from a legal standpoint. Chapter 4 examines the current regulatory regime applicable to digital health technologies, healthcare emergencies, privacy, and data protection. Chapter 5 provides case studies on the application deployed in the Covid-19 scenario, from the perspective of privacy and data protection. Chapter 6 addresses the post-Covid European regulatory initiatives on the subject matter, and its potential effects on privacy and data protection. Chapter 7 is the outcome of a six-month internship with a company in Italy and focuses on the protection of fundamental rights through common standardisation and certification, demonstrating that such standards can serve as supporting tools to guarantee the right to privacy and data protection in digital health technologies. The thesis concludes with the observation that finding and transposing European privacy and data protection standards into scenarios, such as public healthcare emergencies where digital health technologies are deployed, requires rapid coordination between the European Data Protection Authorities and the Member States guarantee that individual privacy and data protection rights are ensured.

Big data and AI applications for health and research. Co-regulation mechanisms as a prosed solution for data protection law issues

Big data and AI are paving the way to promising scenarios in clinical practice and research. However, the use of such technologies might clash with GDPR requirements. Today, two forces are driving the EU policies in this domain. The first is the necessity to protect individuals’ safety and fundamental rights. The second is to incentivize the deployment of innovative technologies. The first objective is pursued by legislative acts such as the GDPR or the AIA, the second is supported by the new data strategy recently launched by the European Commission. Against this background, the thesis analyses the issue of GDPR compliance when big data and AI systems are implemented in the health domain. The thesis focuses on the use of co-regulatory tools for compliance with the GDPR. This work argues that there are two level of co-regulation in the EU legal system. The first, more general, is the approach pursued by the EU legislator when shaping legislative measures that deal with fast-evolving technologies. The GDPR can be deemed a co-regulatory solution since it mainly introduces general requirements, which implementation shall then be interpretated by the addressee of the law following a risk-based approach. This approach, although useful is costly and sometimes burdensome for organisations. The second co-regulatory level is represented by specific co-regulatory tools, such as code of conduct and certification mechanisms. These tools are meant to guide and support the interpretation effort of the addressee of the law. The thesis argues that the lack of co-regulatory tools which are supposed to implement data protection law in specific situations could be an obstacle to the deployment of innovative solutions in complex scenario such as the health ecosystem. The thesis advances hypothesis on theoretical level about the reasons of such a lack of co-regulatory solutions.

Labour, LGBT* rights, and Europe. Discourses in Italy and Serbia

At the time of writing, all three elements that are evoked in the title – emancipation and social inclusion of sexual minorities, labour and labour activism, and the idea and substance of “Europe” – are being invested by deep, long-term, and – to varied degrees – radical processes of social transformation. The meaning of words like “equality”, “rights”, “inclusion”, and even “democracy” is as precarious and uncertain as are the lives of those European citizens who are marginalised by intersecting conditions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class – in a constellation of precarities that is both unifying and fragmented (fragmenting). Conflicts are played, in hidden or explicit ways, over material processes of redistribution as well as discursive practices that revolve around these words. Against this backdrop, and roughly ten years after the European Union provided an input for institutional commitment to the protection of LGBT* workers' rights with the Council Directive 2000/78/EC, the dissertation contrasts discourses on workplace equality for LGBT* persons produced by a plurality of actors, seeking to identify values, semantics, and agendas framing and informing organisations’ views and showing how each actor has incorporated LGBT* rights into its own discourse, each time in a way that is functional to the construction and/or confirmation of its organisational identity: transnational union networks, by presenting LGBT* rights as a natural, neutral commitment within the framework of universal human rights protection; left-wing organisations, by collocating activism for LGBT* rights within a wider project of social emancipation that is for all the marginalised, yet is not neutral, but attached to specific values and opposed to specific political adversaries (the right-wing, the nationalists); business networks, by acknowledging diversity as a path to better performance and profits, thus encouraging inclusion and non-discrimination of “deserving” LGBT* workers.

New perspectives on A.I. in sentencing. Human decision-making between risk assessment tools and protection of humans rights.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate a field that until a few years ago was foreign to and distant from the penal system. The purpose of this undertaking is to account for the role that technology could plays in the Italian Criminal Law system. More specifically, this thesis attempts to scrutinize a very intricate phase of adjudication. After deciding on the type of an individual's liability, a judge must decide on the severity of the penalty. This type of decision implies a prognostic assessment that looks to the future. It is precisely in this field and in prognostic assessments that, as has already been anticipated in the United, instruments and processes are inserted in the pre-trial but also in the decision-making phase. In this contribution, we attempt to describe the current state of this field, trying, as a matter of method, to select the most relevant or most used tools. Using comparative and qualitative methods, the uses of some of these instruments in the supranational legal system are analyzed. Focusing attention on the Italian system, an attempt was made to investigate the nature of the element of an individual's ‘social dangerousness’ (pericolosità sociale) and capacity to commit offences, types of assessments that are fundamental in our system because they are part of various types of decisions, including the choice of the best sanctioning treatment. It was decided to turn our attention to this latter field because it is believed that the judge does not always have the time, the means and the ability to assess all the elements of a subject and identify the best 'individualizing' treatment in order to fully realize the function of Article 27, paragraph 3 of the Constitution.