To safeguard the purpose of good law‑making, provisions of the Constitution (including Article 74), the Rules of Procedure of Parliament (including Articles 85, 87, 88 and 101) and Law 4622/2019 (Articles 57–64) regulate issues related to the legislative drafting and law‑making process and set out rules that must be followed when drafting, submitting and adopting a bill or amendment.
These rules are further analysed in the Legislative Drafting Methodology Handbook, which notes (pp. 18–19) that the title of a bill, and subsequently of a law, is particularly important for the accessibility of the law and must ‘summarise the full subject matter of the legislative act so that recipients can immediately understand whether and to what extent the bill concerns them.’
At the same time, the reference to ‘other provisions’, which is common practice when a bill contains provisions unrelated to its main regulatory subject, must be avoided because it creates vagueness and ambiguity and therefore runs counter to the principles of effectiveness and accessibility as principles of good law‑making.
In 2025, 97 legislative acts were adopted (Laws 5168/2025 to 5264/2025). Of these:
A closer examination of 47 of these laws showed that 38 laws included in their titles phrases such as:
with no further clarification of the subject matter regulated by those provisions.
Similar issues appear in earlier stages of the legislative process:
Even when the titles of laws do not include these phrases, it is not uncommon for a chapter or section within the law to bear the title “other provisions” without this being reflected in the general title. This occurred in six laws in 2025 (Laws 5215/2025, 5223/2025, 5243/2025, 5246/2025, 5253/2025 and 5261/2025) and in thirteen bills that contained a chapter titled “other provisions” without this being stated in the bill’s title.
The Scientific Service of Parliament has also highlighted this “mismatch” between title and content in several of its reports (see, among others, the following reports: 1 (p 16), 2 (p14), 3 (p 18))
The dataset on which these findings are based is available here.
Under the rule of law, the Government and Parliament must follow and apply the rules established to guarantee and promote practices of good and transparent law‑making.
In Greece, however, the failure to adhere to the principles and rules of good law‑making appears to be a long‑standing and systemic problem.
The particularly frequent (and historically recurring) inclusion of phrases such as “and other provisions” in the titles of laws inevitably raises serious concerns as to whether the rules of good law‑making are being substantively followed during the legislative drafting and law‑making process. This is because including such phrases in the title of a law – signalling, among other things, the possible presence of provisions unrelated to the main subject of the law or to each other – is a practice that runs counter to the principles of good law‑making.
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