Α. Articles 57 et seq. of Law 4622/2019 contain provisions on the legislative procedure and good lawmaking. According to Article 61 of Law 4622/2019, public consultation should be achieved by publishing the bill in order to ensure that all interested parties may be informed about upcoming planned legislation and given the opportunity to participate in a timely manner. Consultation on draft legislation should last for two (2) weeks, which may be shortened to one (1) week or extended for one (1) more week, for duly justified reasons, which shall be set out in the report on the public consultation. The Ministry concerned should prepare this report, which shall be included in the final Regulatory Impact Assessment, shall accompany the regulation when it is submitted to Parliament, shall be posted on the public consultation website and shall be sent by e-mail to the e-mail addresses from which any comments were received.
We also note that in the Manual of Legislative Methodology (pp. 13-14 and 68), good lawmaking is said to require adherence to principles that derive from the democratic principle itself. An open and transparent process of drafting and evaluating the implementation of legislation is thus required, through accessibility and the possibility of submitting proposals. Consultation is not just a necessary formality, but an essential stage in the legislative process, which must be treated with particular attention and a positive attitude in order to improve the draft law. The Manual also specifies that the consultation period may be shortened to one (1) week or extended for a further one (1) week only in very exceptional cases and for duly justified reasons. …The purpose of the legislative consultation is to ascertain whether the public has a sufficient and accurate understanding of the basic provisions, as well as to gather any comments that may lead to improvements in the proposed provisions. In any case, the legislative committee must be prepared to amend the bill on the basis of comments or observations submitted during the consultation. A consultation report that merely records the comments made, without substantive engagement with them, is therefore not consistent with these principles.
According to Vouliwatch’s research, 48 laws were passed in 2024, the provisions of which had previously been subject to public consultation through the posting of the corresponding draft law on opengov.gr. Of these 48 draft laws, 20 (41.67%) were open for consultation for less than the prescribed 14 days (2 weeks). Despite the provisions of Article 61(3), in all cases where the deadline was brought forward, the regulatory impact analysis accompanying the draft law at the time of its submission to the Parliament does not seem to contain any reference to why the consultation was shortened. In two cases we found a general reference to the issue of the shortened consultation period, but this was in the Minister’s introductory message on opengov.gr (see 1, 2) and not in the regulatory impact analysis. Also in these two cases, the reasons invoked seem to relate to a priori foreseeable issues (compliance with already known deadlines/timeframes), which prevents one from being able to say that they could be characterised as “absolutely exceptional cases”.
Furthermore, despite the provisions of Article 61(4), only in 7 (out of 48) cases was the report on the public consultation posted on the opengov.gr website. We also note that in the personal experience of Vouliwatch, every time that we have submitted a comment during a public consultation, we have not received an email with the public consultation report.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that:
The data on which all the above figures are based can be found here.
Good lawmaking is a constitutional goal linked to the principle of the rule of law.
Chapter C of Part C of Law 4622/2019 (Articles 57 et seq.) includes rules related to the legislative process and good lawmaking, which are also specified in the Manual of Legislative Methodology. These sources also lay out the rules/principles to be followed in the public consultation process.
However, as Vouliwatch’s research shows, the above provisions are often bypassed, which raises serious concerns. This is because it does not appear to be exceptional that consultation deadlines are unduly shortened, that draft laws containing more articles than the corresponding draft submitted for public consultation are introduced for adoption (with the result that provisions are introduced for adoption which do not appear to have passed through the public consultation stage) or that the competent institutions generally fail to comply with their obligations under the consultation procedure.
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