–Dr Joanna Demopoulou, PhD in International Relations, former Executive in Residence at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)
On 30 June 2026, the Constitutional Revision Committee of the Greek Parliament began debating a government proposal to amend Article 86 of the Constitution, the provision that governs the criminal liability of ministers. Under the proposal, the investigative stages of a case against a minister would pass to a prosecutor of the Court of Appeal and a senior judicial body, and Parliament would lose its current power to conduct a preliminary examination of its own. The final step would stay as it is. A decision to prosecute would still require a parliamentary vote.
Most commentators have read this as a half-measure, with judicial process at the front end and political control at the back. There is something to that reading, though it stops short. The question worth asking is not really whether Greece has reformed enough. It is what would count as enough in the first place, and by what standard anyone could say so.
The best available answer to that question comes from the Venice Commission, in its account of why ministers are handled differently from ordinary defendants. On closer reading, that account justifies rather less than people tend to assume. It gives a reason for letting political judgment enter the process, but nothing in it requires that judgment to take the form of an exclusive parliamentary power to stop a prosecution before it begins.
Two reports, two logics
The account is not a Greek invention. It comes from the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which produced two documents bearing on the matter within three years of each other, neither of which refers to the other.
The first, from 2010, is its report on the independence of the prosecution service. There the Commission took a firm line: a decision to prosecute or not to prosecute in an individual case should never be answerable to Parliament. Once the legislature can reach into a specific case, the Commission reasoned, the door opens to populist pressure and partisan calculation in a domain that is meant to apply to everyone alike.
The second, from 2013, is its report on the relationship between political and criminal ministerial responsibility. Here the starting point shifts noticeably. A criminal case against a serving or former minister, the Commission observed, is bound to carry political repercussions, and it took the view that handling such a case calls for a measure of political expertise and discretion. Working from that premise, it placed parliamentary gatekeeping models, in which the legislature can block a prosecution altogether, on the same footing as judicial ones, and declined to prefer either.
Placed side by side, the two reports do not contradict each other. They answer different questions, and the 2013 report gives a reason for moving away from the 2010 position. On ministers, then, the Commission is not simply silent; it offers a rationale.
What the rationale actually supports
The real difficulty is narrower than a contradiction, and more interesting for being so. Paragraph 88 of the 2013 report supports the idea that political judgment should sit somewhere in the process of holding a minister criminally to account. What it does not support, on its own terms, is the particular institutional shape that judgment has assumed in Greece and in many comparable systems: a parliamentary power, held exclusively, to keep a prosecution from ever starting.
Those are separate claims, and the distance between them is where the argument lives. To say that political repercussions call for political awareness is not yet to say that the awareness has to run through a veto exercisable by a bare majority of the governing coalition. One could imagine a non-binding parliamentary opinion, or a mixed committee in which political representation is limited, or a judicial body obliged to consult political actors while remaining free to decide against them. Each of these would carry the political expertise the Commission is after. The veto is the one option among them that hands an elected majority the power to shut down a criminal case against one of its own ministers, and it is the arrangement Greece and a number of comparable systems have settled on.
Nowhere does the 2013 report ask whether its own rationale actually demands that design, or whether some lighter arrangement would serve it just as well. A justification does not carry an institutional form inside it; the form has to be argued for separately. Between accepting that political judgment belongs in the process and settling on a parliamentary veto, there is a further constitutional step that still has to be taken, and defended. The Greek literature on Article 86 is a case in point. It runs from Chrysogonos’s long-running critique of parliamentary control through to the more recent proposals of Kopsidi and Vlachos and Giannakoula’s comparative treatment of the Greek regime. Over more than a century, this literature has worked through the provision’s history and its record of abuse, and returned repeatedly to its uneasy fit with equality before the law. The one question it has largely left alone is this one.
The obvious objection
Someone might answer that the parliamentary veto is simply the institutional expression of the political expertise that paragraph 88 has in view. On this account the point was never political input into a judicial process. It was political control over whether the process runs at all, on the premise that only an elected body can properly weigh consequences that are political in the first place.
That reply does not actually follow from paragraph 88, and taken seriously it proves too much. Suppose that the aim really is to have someone politically accountable exercise judgment about the case. A veto would achieve that, but so would a duty to give reasons, or a power confined to sending the case back for further investigation rather than closing it for good. What a simple-majority veto adds is different in kind. It allows the governing coalition to decide, in a case concerning its own minister, whether a court ever hears the matter. The Commission’s stated rationale, the call for political expertise and discretion in a politically charged case, gives no reason why the political actor has to be the very body whose fortunes ride on the result. What that produces is no longer judgment about the case so much as institutional self-protection.
Greece as the test case, not the subject
This is what makes the Greek reform worth close attention, and worth treating as an illustration rather than as the thing itself. Moving the investigative stage toward the judiciary sits comfortably with the logic the Commission applied to ordinary prosecutors in 2010. Leaving the decisive, case-ending power in Parliament’s hands sits comfortably with what the Commission was willing to tolerate for ministers in 2013. Yet it also reaches past anything paragraph 88, read carefully, will actually support.
To put it plainly: on the investigative stage the reform can be defended by the Commission’s own standards, while on the question of who gets to halt the case it is merely presumed defensible, with no argument offered. This summer’s parliamentary debate, together with the rival models other parties have tabled, some keeping a slimmed-down parliamentary role and one dropping it in favour of a judicial council, amounts to a live experiment in precisely the design question the Commission’s reports leave unanswered, even where the debate rarely frames it in those terms.
Why this is not just a Greek question
None of this rests on anything peculiar to Greek constitutional culture. Any European state that gives its legislature a hand in the criminal accountability of ministers is leaning, whether it admits it or not, on the same step the Commission took in 2013: political consequences warrant political involvement. The question is seldom addressed directly: how much involvement that warrants, and whether a full veto is the most proportionate way of providing it rather than simply the most familiar.
A convincing account would have to go one of two ways. It could try to show that a parliamentary veto is the sole institutional form able to supply the political expertise and discretion the Commission wants, which would mean explaining why the weaker forms fall short. Or it could accept that a weaker form would do the job, which would mean conceding that the present architecture, in Greece as elsewhere, reaches more widely than the justification that is meant to hold it up.
Either approach is a more useful exercise than asking whether the 2026 reform goes far enough. The question is not whether political judgment has a place in holding a minister to account. It is whether the justification given for it can actually account for the institution built on top of it. By the Venice Commission’s own lights, that argument has yet to be made, whether in Strasbourg, in Athens, or anywhere between them.
Suggested citation: Joanna Demopoulou, How Much Political Judgment Does Ministerial Accountability Require? Greece’s Article 86 Reform and an Unexplained Gap in the Venice Commission’s Standards, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jul. 24, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/how-much-political-judgment-does-ministerial-accountability-require-greeces-article-86-reform-and-an-unexplained-gap-in-the-venice-commissions-standards/