REPORTS
The unjustified shortening of the legislative public consultation period by the Ministry of Environment and Energy
According to Article 61, paragraphs 2, 3 & 4 of law 4622/2019, (Government Gazette A ‘133 / 07.08.2019), public consultation on legislative bills is to be conducted through the website opengov.gr and should last for two weeks, which only exceptionally can be shortened to one week for sufficiently substantiated reasons, which should be mentioned in the public consultation report. This report is prepared at the end of the consultation period and presents the comments and suggestions of those who participated in the consultation and documents whether or not they were incorporated into the final provisions. The report forms part of the final Regulatory Impact Analysis, which is also posted on the public consultation website.
However, in this case the Ministry of Finance did not comply with the legal provisions for public consultation and good legislative practices, failing to state in the regulatory impact analysis accompanying the bill during consultation, as well as the analysis accompanying the bill’s introduction to parliament for voting, any reason for the shortened public consultation process. Furthermore, many of the comments received during the consultation process commented that this limited consultation time for such an important bill is not sufficient. In response, pages 88 and 111 of the regulatory impact analysis state that the comments referring to a change in the deadline for the consultation period have been addressed and that a reasonable extension was given. According, however, to the opengov.gr website, it does not appear that an extension was given to the consultation period, which in any case, as mentioned above, was less than 14 days.
Good legislation is a constitutional objective and is linked to the principle of the rule of law.
Law 4622/2019 (articles 57 et seq.) includes rules related to the law-making process and good law-making, which are also set out in the Legislative Methodology Manual. The public consultation period lasts 2 weeks and any shortening of the said consultation period should only take place in absolutely exceptional cases and for sufficiently substantiated reasons.
In this particular case, however, the Ministry of Environment and Energy determined that the consultation period for this bill would only be 12 days, without giving any justification or reason why.
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