Good lawmaking is a constitutional objective linked to the rule of law. In order to ensure the purpose of good lawmaking, provisions of the Constitution, the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament and Law No. 4622/2019 regulate issues relating to the legislative process and set certain rules to be followed when drafting, filing and voting on a bill or an amendment. Based on these general rules and Article 59(5) of Law No. 4622/2019, the Manual of Legislative Methodology was drafted in 2020, which analyses and specifies the rules to be followed in the legislative process. As stated in the aforementioned Manual (see, inter alia, pp. 18-19, 47), the title of a bill (and subsequently of a law) is particularly important for the accessibility of the law and must succinctly convey the full scope of the legislation so that the addressees can immediately understand whether and to what extent the bill concerns them. At the same time, references to “other provisions”, which is common practice when the bill contains provisions unrelated to its main regulatory subject matter, should be avoided because it creates ambiguity and is therefore contrary to the principles of efficiency and accessibility as principles of good lawmaking.
Within 2022, 131 laws were passed (Laws 4877/2022 to 5007/2022). 52 of these were transposing international agreements and regulations into national law, leaving 79 pieces of new national legislation. The titles of 58 of these laws contained some phrase such as “and other provisions/regulations…”, “other urgent provisions/regulations…” “and related provisions”. You can see here the laws passed in 2022, their titles, the link to the Parliament’s website for each of them, and whether or not they contained in their titles any of the above phrases. The frequent reference to these phrases in the titles of laws can only raise serious concerns as to whether the rules of good lawmaking are actually being followed in the legislative process. This is because the existence of phrases such as ‘urgent/other provisions/regulations’ in the title of a law (despite the express provision in the Manual of Legislative Methodology that they should not be used) may also indicate either that the legislative texts in question contain provisions that deviate from the main subject matter of the law or that irrelevant amendments were tabled and adopted in the context of the bills in question.
In this way, however, the requirements of Article 74 of the Constitution and Article 85 of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, as analysed and specified in p. 18, 19, 24, 77 of the Manual of Legislative Methodology (which requires that bills should not contain unrelated provisions), Articles 87, 88 and 101 of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, as analysed and specified on pp. 4, 18, 63, 70-71, 77-78 of the Manual of Legislative Methodology (which defines the specific conditions under which an amendment may be introduced for voting and the content it must have) and Article 58 of Law 4622/2019 (which defines the principles of good lawmaking) are disregarded or even violated.
In a state governed by the rule of law, the government and the Parliament must produce laws by applying both the Constitution and the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, as well as the other 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 and systematic problem.
As can be seen from the titles of the laws passed in 2022, the reference to ‘other provisions’ is a particularly frequent phenomenon, despite the fact that this practice has been identified as a cause of ambiguity and as contrary to the principles of efficiency and accessibility as principles of good lawmaking. The use of such phrases raises concerns as to whether the rules of good lawmaking are followed in substance during the lawmaking process.
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