At some point between now and 2027, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers is expected to adopt a European Student Rights Charter.
The drafting group, co-led by the Council and the European Students’ Union (ESU), was given formal mandate by the Council’s Steering Committee for Education (CDEDU) in March 2025, and held its launching meeting at the Council of Europe’s Paris office on 3–4 July 2025. Broad stakeholder consultation is running alongside the drafting through to final adoption.
If it lands as intended, the Charter will be the first pan-European soft-law instrument to consolidate student rights into a single, coherent framework covering 46 member states – which is to say well beyond the EU27, taking in states across the Western Balkans, the Caucasus, the Nordics, Türkiye, Switzerland and the UK, among others.
It’s being drafted at a moment when most of those rights are going the wrong way. The European Parliament’s Academic Freedom Monitor 2025 records declines in 25 of 27 EU member states over the past decade, with 15 of those declining in the past year alone.
ESU’s own Student Protest Monitoring database tracked 25 student protests across 13 states in September to mid-November 2025 – with police violence logged in seven, arbitrary arrests in four, and zero agreements reached with institutions or governments.
Whichever direction the European student movement looks, the rights side of the ledger has been eroding faster than it’s been codifying.
Whether the Charter lands as intended is – as these things always are – a live question. And the drafting work between now and 2027 is where the politics actually happens.
How we got here
The genesis goes back to the Council of Europe’s Standing Conference of Ministers of Education in Strasbourg in September 2023, where ministers expressed support for developing an instrument on student rights in collaboration with ESU.
The CDEDU mandate followed in March 2025. Co-design with the student movement is explicitly in the terms of reference – which, for a Council of Europe drafting process, is unusual and worth paying attention to.
The baseline text ESU brings into the process is its own Students’ Rights Charter, adopted in its current form in May 2024, though earlier versions go back to at least 2008.
The document frames itself as a shared student-led baseline for rights, participation, mobility and quality across the European Higher Education Area, and is explicitly intended as both an advocacy tool for national unions and a reference for institutions and public authorities.
The Charter organises itself around five connected pillars – social dimension, academic freedom and institutional autonomy, internationalisation and mobility, quality education, and student participation and representation in higher education governance. ESU represents around 20 million students through 43 National Unions of Students from 40 countries. Add in the Council of Europe’s wider membership, and the potential reach is considerable.
Responsibilities enter stage left
Presented to the ESU Board in Vienna was an updated framework – and the headline development is that the Council of Europe version will introduce, for the first time at European level, a framework of student responsibilities alongside rights.
That is a shift from the ESU Charter as it currently stands, in which responsibilities barely feature beyond aspirational framing around democratic culture.
Those responsibilities, as set out in the Council of Europe’s Vienna announcement, cluster into four areas – supporting academic integrity and respectful engagement, protecting diversity and freedom of expression, strengthening representative student structures, and safeguarding academic freedom and freedom of assembly.
The ESU Board’s response is to be clear that responsibilities are not restrictive and cannot be used as conditions for accessing rights, and the Vienna update frames them as intended to reinforce trust, accountability and democratic participation rather than to constrain it.
That framing is doing considerable work – and the reason it matters this much is that the rights the Charter is trying to codify are not abstract principles. They are being tested, in real time, by the current state of European student politics.
ESU’s Student Protest Monitoring database, launched in September 2025 as a deliberate exercise in mapping the scale, causes and risks of current student mobilisation across the European Higher Education Area, tells the story in numbers.
In its first reporting window, ESU tracked 25 distinct protests across 13 countries from Armenia to Türkiye, 15 of them nationwide. Police violence was logged in seven cases, arbitrary arrests in four, intimidation and harassment in others.
Across all 25 protests, ESU recorded zero cases of agreement reached with institutions or governments. In the second window, from mid-November 2025 to mid-January 2026, 13 more protests across 12 countries – with police violence in six, arbitrary arrests in three, mobility restrictions in three, and injuries in four.
The most visible single case is Serbia, where a student movement that began with the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse in November 2024 has grown into the largest mass protest movement in the country’s modern history.
A Belgrade demonstration in March 2025 drew somewhere between 275,000 and 325,000 people. More than 900 people have been detained in connection with the protests.
State-aligned media have characterised student protesters in the language of terrorism. University rectors have been pressured to discipline students. In August 2025, UN human rights experts publicly called on Serbian authorities to end the crackdown; in October 2025, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on polarisation and increased repression in Serbia. ESU has made repeated statements of solidarity, and has itself been the target of coordinated attacks from Serbian state media.
And this is not just a Balkans story. Across 2024, pro-Palestine encampments at European universities – University of Amsterdam, Sorbonne, Sciences Po, Free University of Berlin, Vienna, Lausanne, Copenhagen, Helsinki – were met with riot police, bulldozers, tear gas and mass arrests, with institutional disciplinary proceedings running in parallel.
The European Parliament’s Academic Freedom Monitor identified the institutional response to student action on the Gaza-Israel conflict as one of the most significant drivers of academic freedom decline across France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece and Spain over the past year.
This is the live context in which the responsibilities framework is being drafted. The question is not abstract. It is – what kind of soft-law instrument do you produce when the rights you are codifying – peaceful assembly, freedom of expression, protection from arbitrary discipline – are being violated by state and institutional actors across a substantial minority of the states the Charter is supposed to cover?
A text that treats responsibilities as mutually reinforcing expressions of democratic participation is one kind of instrument. A text in which responsibilities can be read as preconditions, sticks, or reasons to carve out exceptions is quite another – and in the current climate, the latter reading has plenty of real-world precedent to lean on.
Institutional codes of conduct have already been weaponised against protesting students across the European Higher Education Area over the past two years. A Council of Europe recommendation that inadvertently provides a rhetorical framework to legitimise that practice is not a merely hypothetical risk.
The ESU framing around responsibilities is doing exactly the work it needs to do. Whether it survives the drafting process intact, and lands in specific clauses rather than just preambular scaffolding, is what actually matters.
What the Charter actually says
The current draft is an ambitious package. The social dimension pillar holds that everyone has the right to access, progress through and complete free, quality higher education, and that all students have the right to conduct their studies with sufficient public financial support in the form of a grant.
All students have the right to affordable, quality and suitable housing, to affordable, nutritious and sustainable food in consideration of dietary requirements, and to free access to good-quality living necessities including technical equipment. All students have the right to free and timely healthcare and psychological counselling, to free issuance of study certificates and documents, and to access to free and, where possible, sustainable transport, regardless of age.
The academic freedom pillar holds that students have the right to partake autonomously and meaningfully as full and equal members in higher education governing structures – and, in a move sharpened in the 2024 version, that students should make up at least an equal amount compared to academic, administrative and technical staff in all decision-making and relevant administrative bodies.
On internationalisation, the right to partake in a physical mobility period is framed as applying regardless of disability, socio-economic background or academic situation – with full funding of all related costs of study, living and travel, and with costless, non-bureaucratic and timely recognition of learning outcomes obtained abroad, including from non-formal and informal learning.
On quality, all students have the right to free subscription and unconditional access to quality digital instruments including software, hardware and AI tools. There’s a whole new strand of text on AI and data literacy, critical human oversight of algorithmic decision-making, and discrimination-free deployment of AI in education.
Reading it as a collected package against a European Higher Education Area in which housing is in crisis in most capitals, mental health waiting lists are lengthening, Erasmus+ grants frequently don’t cover actual mobility costs in expensive destinations, and member states have variously introduced tuition fees for non-EU students or allowed maintenance support to erode in real terms, it’s clear that some sections are more aspirational than others.
The representation question
The Charter’s fifth pillar is where it gets particularly interesting – and where the variation in national practice is most visible.
The Charter asserts that students have the right to organise autonomously, that student unions have the right to political independence and financial autonomy, and that all organisations representing students have the right to be recognised, financially supported and provided with dedicated spaces by their higher education institutions. The right to form a students’ union is framed as applying at both institutional and sub-institutional level – which is a pointed assertion in systems where sub-institutional representation is often squeezed or deprioritised.
That conception cuts in different directions depending on the national model. In systems where student unions are anchored in statutory frameworks with state recognition – the German AStA model, the various Nordic students’ unions, Spain’s University Student Statute, Romania’s Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities – the Charter’s framing largely reinforces existing architecture, though with some new pressure around genuinely political independence and financial autonomy.
In countries where student representation is weaker or more fragmented, the Charter becomes a lever for reform. In systems where student unions operate inside charity or association regimes with institutional oversight duties or opt-out provisions, the Charter’s vision of SU political independence looks rather different from the current settlement.
This isn’t just an ESU aspiration – student and staff participation in governance is already one of the fundamental values agreed by EHEA ministers at Tirana in 2024 and is now being monitored across member states via the Bologna Follow-Up Group’s NewFAV2 project (coordinated by UEFISCDI, Malta’s MFHEA and ESU, with the EUA as associated partner), a partnership standard that countries like the UK, where institutional governing bodies typically contain one or two student members alongside a dozen or more staff and lay governors, will find very difficult to meet.
ESU has been explicit that part of the Charter’s purpose is to support national unions in advocacy, and to connect unions that have national charters with those that don’t. A task force on operationalising and mainstreaming ESU’s own Charter is already in place.
Whether national governments treat SU political independence as a right to be protected or as a constraint on institutional governance is an issue that will vary considerably across the 46.
The implementation question
Whatever the final Council of Europe text says, it won’t have the force of binding law. Council of Europe soft-law instruments work by creating standards against which state practice can be measured, supported by monitoring mechanisms that draw attention to where states are falling short.
The European Social Charter, the various Bologna commitments, the Lisbon Recognition Convention – these sit in the same family of instruments. ESU itself, in its EU lobby register filing, candidly describes the forthcoming Charter as a soft power tool – which is an accurate description of what it’s likely to be.
The track record is mixed. Some Council of Europe recommendations become reference points that meaningfully shape national debate and, over time, legislative change. Others sit in archives, quoted in annual reports and rarely acted upon. The difference usually comes down to whether national actors – governments, civil society, student movements, institutions – take up the text and use it.
The worked example here is worth reflecting on. Romania’s Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities, adopted in 2012 after sustained campaigning by the National Alliance of Student Organisations in Romania (ANOSR), is cited by both ESU and the Council of Europe as the positive national precedent the European Charter is learning from.
Nine years after adoption, ANOSR’s own national implementation report found that 19 per cent of state universities had not adopted or publicly displayed their own institutional code as legally required. Of the rights guaranteed at national level, only 2.54 per cent appeared in every state university’s own institutional code. Of the student obligations guaranteed at national level, 25 per cent were universally adopted. Institutions, in other words, picked up the sticks comprehensively and left most of the carrots on the ground.
It gets worse. In December 2024, the Romanian government introduced Emergency Ordinance 156/2024, restricting previously-guaranteed student transport discounts to routes between a student’s home and their university city, and eliminating free travel for orphaned students and those from the child protection system. The measure was introduced without consultation with student representatives, in direct breach of the participatory governance commitments Romania had signed up to under the Bologna Process. ESU passed a resolution in solidarity with ANOSR in June 2025.
The point is not that the Romanian Code was a bad idea. It was a real achievement and remains a genuine reference text. The point is that even in the country most often cited as the implementation model, institutional uptake has been uneven to the point of satirical, and the rights that were codified can be rolled back overnight by ordinance when political priorities shift. What that suggests for a soft-law recommendation sitting above 46 different national systems is worth thinking about honestly.
For ESU and its members, the Charter is still useful advocacy currency whatever governments do. A published Council of Europe text sets a comparative standard against which to benchmark institutional practice, national legislation and the gap between political rhetoric and actual provision. The more precise and ambitious the final text, the more useful it is in national advocacy. The more hedged and aspirational, the less. Which is why the drafting matters.
Between now and 2027
The drafting work between now and final adoption is where most of the politics will actually happen. For ESU’s members, that implies work on several fronts at once. Some of it is internal – making sure national unions have positions on specific text, that those positions are coordinated, and that the membership knows what’s being argued for. Some of it is external – working national governments, parliaments, ministries and institutions to build support for the ambitious version of the text. And some of it is defensive – making sure the responsibilities framework doesn’t end up as a drafting compromise that allows conditions to slip in through the back door.
None of this will be settled at the level of principle. It will be settled in specific clauses, specific wordings and specific footnotes. Which is exactly the kind of work the European student movement has been doing for years, and is reasonably good at.
But 20 million students, 46 member states, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consolidate what student rights mean in Europe – being drafted at the moment when those rights are most actively under pressure – that’s worth paying attention to. And arguing about, where arguing ends up being called for.
