Constitutional Law / Droit constitutionnel
Greece / Grèce
Andreas I. Pottakis
PhD in Law (Oxon), Attorney at Law, Deputy Director of the Academy of European Public Law
Concluding the 2007 chronicle on Greece, the present author noted that “the recognition of the equivalence of degrees awarded by private educational institutions that have established partnerships with other EU HEI, with those awarded by Greek Universities, may eventually come as a result of the jurisprudence of European Courts and not by an initiative that commands the consent of the enhanced majority of people’s representatives in Parliament, as a revision of Art. 16 of the Hellenic Constitution entails”. After a failed attempt to revise the constitutional provision on higher education, and in anticipation of judicial ruling from both the ECJ and national administrative courts, the Greek Government put forward a new piece of legislation, in yet another attempt to somehow regulate the system of higher education in Greece in such a way as to comply with relevant EC law, while at the same time not infringe the relevant provisos of the Constitution of the Hellenic Republic. Given that in Greece the success of a piece of legislation is judged not only and/or predominantly with respect to its clarity, the quality of its formulation, or the extent to which it comprehensively tackles the issue under consideration, but more importantly its degree of implementation, its applicability and enforceability, only time will tell if this new legislative initiative will eventually have the same fate as several others in the past, that of disparagement and eventual inapplicability.
