In order to ensure good lawmaking, provisions of the Constitution, the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament and Law 4622/2019 regulate various issues relating to the legislative procedure and set certain rules to be followed during the drafting, submission and voting of a bill or amendment. How, when and with what content ministerial amendments may be submitted, discussed and voted on is regulated, inter alia, by Article 74(5) of the Constitution and Articles 87, 88 and 101(5) of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament.
In this context, amendments:
(a) must relate to the main subject matter of the bill or legislative proposal; and
(b) be tabled at least three days before the relevant parliamentary debate is due to begin.
(More information on issues of good lawmaking in general and on issues of tabling and voting on amendments in particular can be found, inter alia, in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
As Vouliwatch’s research shows, the filing of late and/or irrelevant amendments was again a very frequent phenomenon for 2024.
We note here that for the purposes of this analysis:
i) “overdue” amendments are considered to be those that were tabled either on the same day or on the day before the law was passed or the parliamentary debate occurred and
(ii) amendments containing provisions that were not directly related to the main subject matter of the law are considered ‘irrelevant’. In particular, in order for an amendment to be considered irrelevant, it must: (a) have been tabled by a different ministry than the ministry responsible for the law, or if it was tabled by the ministry responsible for the law, contain provisions regulating issues that were not directly related to the subject matter (or at least one of the subjects) regulated by the corresponding bill that was put to public consultation; and (b) its provisions must have been eventually included in a part or section of the adopted law, which bears a title containing phrases such as ‘other/other provisions’, ‘other/other urgent provisions’, ‘provisions/regulations within the competence of the Ministry’, ‘more specific provisions’, etc.
See more on the methodology followed to conduct the survey here.
Within 2024, 76 ministerial amendments were tabled, containing a total of 325 articles. It is striking that one or more amendments were tabled in the majority of the laws examined in this survey (46 out of 48).
Despite the provisions of the Constitution and the Rules of Procedure of Parliament that we refer to above, of the 76 amendments tabled:
The data on which these figures are based can also be found here.
In a state governed by the rule of law, the Government and the Parliament must follow and apply the rules that have been established to guarantee and promote good and transparent lawmaking practices.
In Greece, however, the violation of the rules of good lawmaking seems to be a long-standing, systemic problem.
The continued acceptance of “irrelevant” and/or “overdue” amendments raises serious concerns about the extent to which the principles and rules of good lawmaking are observed in practice.
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