Draft law to end legal anarchy
The government yesterday promised to slash through Greece’s Gordian knot of often confusing, contradictory or unenforceable laws with a new bill on «rationalizing legislation.» Following a session of the Inner Cabinet on the matter, Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos admitted that, despite several ill-fated attempts to bring order to the tangled mess, the country’s regulatory system remains «labyrinthine, contradictory, as well as hard to understand and to implement.» «The existence of a large number of laws, decrees and regulations in general that are not always of a good standard has been repeatedly pointed out as a problem and criticized,» Pavlopoulos said. «The need to boost the competitiveness of our national economy dictates that immediate, additional measures be taken.» Under a draft bill the government proposes to table in Parliament by the beginning of October, all laws must be submitted to scrutiny regarding their necessity as well as their economic and social implications. «The implications of every law must be analyzed in advance; all new procedures will be simplified; regulations will be codified; European Union law will be implemented within the proper deadlines and citizens will acquire easier access to the regulatory framework,» Pavlopoulos said. He singled out for criticism the existence of a large number of highly detailed legal and regulatory provisions, and the longstanding practice of including in draft legislation provisions that have nothing to do with the main corpus of the bill. The minister also promised to table next week a presidential decree that will drastically cut the number of official signatures required by members of the public in their dealings with the civil service.
