The growing politicization of value-loaded issues onto the European agenda has raised fresh theoretical and empirical challenges. From the 1990s onwards, morality politics has become increasingly salient at all levels of EU governance. It encompasses life and death matters putting at stake the normative definition of the person (abortion, contraception, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia), including commodification of the human body, gender, sexual orientation, and ways of life (family). At the theoretical level, two main questions emerge. A first question is to know whether these issues have been routinized as ‘business as usual’ for the EU, or whether they maintain a specificity related to the values they invest – in which case these causes turn into objects claiming unconditional commitment and preventing any compromise. A second question relates to which values come to the fore, how, to serve which purposes and at the initiative of which actors. Ethical issues indeed offer new opportunities for diverse political, social, and religious actors to advocate their worldviews. One of these values is “human dignity”. An objective of the session is to trace its origins, the various interpretations and uses of the concept, the institutional discourses and counter-discourses it creates, and its political and policy effects regarding the existence of a European community of values. The European governance of values includes EU institutions as a nexus, in overlap and in interaction with national actors and arenas, as well as with other supranational bodies such as the Council of Europe.