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Wednesday, 10 May 2017

Honorary distinction for the Director of the EPLO

The EPLO Director Professor Spyridon Flogaitis has been admitted as an Honorary Fellow at the Governing body of Wolfson College in Cambridge, UK on May 10, 2017.

Prof. Flogaitis was welcomed and introduced by the President of Wolfson College Sir Richard J. Evans, historian and world known author of eighteen books, including his three-volume “The Third Reich Trilogy”, with these words:

“This College elects to Honorary Fellowships distinguished people who have a close connection to Wolfson, either as alumni or as friends and supporters, and no-one has been a closer or more loyal friend and supporter of Wolfson than Professor Spyridon Flogaitis, whom I am delighted to present to you as an Honorary Fellow tonight. We offer all our newly elected Honorary Fellows the opportunity to be admitted in person, and this is the first occasion on which this has happened: I hope that in future there will be many more.

Professor Flogaitis first came to Wolfson as an academic visitor in 1982. He struck up a close relationship with Sir David Williams and returned here on many occasions as his career in public law developed. He has degrees in law and, I’m delighted to say, history, from the University of Athens and from the Sorbonne. He has been Professor of Public Law at Athens University, he founded and for many years directed the European Public Law Organization, he set up four academic journals, two of them in the new field of environment, energy and law, and he is the author of many books, above all on administrative law.

His international work includes the Vice-Presidency of the Appeals Board of the European Space Agency, and the Presidency of the Administrative Tribunal of the United Nations. He has the unusual distinction, for a foreigner, of being a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in France and a Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He is a judge of the Greek Council of State and has served in caretaker governments three times, as Minister of the Interior in 2007 and again in 2009 and as Alternate Minister for European Affairs in 2015, a time when the job cannot, to put it mildly, have been an easy one.

Spyridon Flogaitis has always been a great friend of Wolfson College, and I have heard him on several occasions, not least in addressing distinguished audiences of public figures in Greece, telling the world about our unique character with great warmth and eloquence. It is with great pleasure that I am pleased on behalf of us all to admit him as an Honorary Fellow of the College”.

tags: S. Flogaitis, Wolfson College, Honorary Distinction