“It is the first time, after many years, that court material is transferred to lawyers in an effort to relieve the courts and create conditions to speed up the pace of the administration of justice”, said the president of the DSA, Dimitris Vervesos, welcoming the passing of the bill.
And notaries
Now, thousands of cases are transferred outside the courts and are solved only by lawyers and some of them by notaries. Following the regulation of consensual divorces removed from the courts and now settled by notaries, the Ministry of Justice entrusted lawyers with registrations and consensual cancellations of mortgages, the formation of unions, other than civil ones, the issuance of wills, affidavits and inheritance payments, with the last two categories also resolved by notaries.
It is worth noting that only in the Court of First Instance of Athens, 12,000 mortgage cancellations and 7,190 affidavits in the Magistrate’s Court were tried last year. In total, for the aforementioned proceedings, in the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Athens and the Athens Magistrate’s Court, for the years 2022 and 2023, the number of petitions amounted to 46,193 and 41,607, respectively.
1 Mortgages: The first class of cases for which a court is no longer required is registrations and consensual discharges of mortgages. “Almost all real estate in Greece has been purchased with a pre-mortgage note. In the Magistrates’ Courts of the whole country, special boards had been formed and the burden was too great. Real estate sales were delayed due to mortgages and now both citizens and lawyers, who were acting on behalf of their clients, will be facilitated”, he notes to “ET”. of Sunday the lawyer Ilias Sideris.
2 Constitution of unions: The facilitation for the second category regarding the establishment of unions is huge, with Mr. Sideris explaining that “my experience with unions was so bad, that I did not take on union affairs because of the bureaucracy. A judge’s decision (order) is required for each initiation or change of statute. Now, the process is faster.”
3 Legacies: “Respite” for the Magistrates’ Courts and now for the Courts of First Instance, after the abolition of the former, is the inclusion of the process of issuing probates in the case law. As judicial circles explain, “issuing the relevant certificates was a burden for the Magistrates’ Courts and their issuance by lawyers will facilitate the process of acceptance of inheritance as a whole, since citizens will be burdened with small expenses, but the time they will gain is significant”.
4 Affidavits: An important chapter in the “decongestion” of the overburdened courts are the affidavits that had been granted in the midst of Covid and to the lawyers, who coped with great consistency. “The volume of affidavits has increased geometrically since the Code of Civil Procedure from 2015 abolished the oral procedure in regular cases. All affidavits in the past were done either at notaries or at Magistrates’ Courts. This change will significantly relieve the system”, notes a source of the Court of First Instance.
5 Inheritance allowances: The new law also provides a solution to inheritance payments, which are now the responsibility of lawyers. “It is a process that, as I have observed as a lawyer, notaries … resented, since it was a process with a lot of work, without proper remuneration. “Accordingly, the citizens were suffering even for ten months to a year, to be able to make an acceptance, since the documents they had to collect were quite a lot from different agencies,” says Mr. Sideris.
All five categories selected concern procedures that are at the border between administrative and judicial functions, while the acts issued by the lawyer can be judicially reviewed after an appeal and therefore do not require the judge’s authentic diagnosis.
New conditions
“The provisions serve society and citizens in critical issues that have troubled them over time. A court seal may have been necessary in the past, but now, with modernization and digitization, some practices are obsolete. The new conditions will give impetus to the purchase and sale of real estate, at least as far as the time horizon for completing a purchase and sale”, concludes Mr. Sideris.
The passing of the bill was welcomed in his statement by the president of the Plenary Session of the country’s Bar Associations, Dimitris Vervesos, speaking of one of the most important pieces of legislation both for the acceleration of the Judiciary and for the Bar, which in a difficult financial era the possibility of increasing the income of lawyers is given.
In fact, those who join the relevant lists and are trained by attending seminars will be paid 120 euros in the case of processing a file, 160 euros in the case of issuing a deed of registration or elimination of a mortgage pre-notification and 200 euros in the case of issuing a deed ordering the granting of a certificate of inheritance.
NEW FRAMEWORK FROM AUTUMN
The institution of mediation “breathed”.
The institution of mediation is moving in the same direction of reducing the volume of cases handled by the courts and speeding up the delivery of Justice, which, according to the Minister of Justice, Giorgos Floridis, is entering a new era from the autumn. As he revealed, at an event for the “Day of Mediation”, organized by the Organization for the Promotion of Alternative Methods of Dispute Resolution (OPEMED), “a major investigation is underway and the drafting of a report by OPEMED, which will be delivered to the Ministry of Justice in six months, to be able to organize the new framework in Greece and we aspire that from the autumn, when we will legislate it, Greece will enter a new era in this field, so we expect a lot”.
The operation of the institution at levels, such as those reached in other European countries, would help speed up the delivery of Justice, since too many cases could be resolved out of court. “Despite the fact that the new Law 4640/2019 on mediation coincided with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and this created difficulties in its implementation, due to the suspension of the courts, the official statistics announced by the Central Mediation Committee ( KED) in 2023 give encouraging messages for the acceptance of the institution of mediation by citizens and businesses”, he said to “ET”. of Sunday Despina Laskaridou, member of the Central Mediation Committee of the Ministry of Justice and executive secretary of OPEMED.
From the published results of the Annual Report of the Central Mediation Committee on the course of the institution to date, it appears that approximately 8% of the cases subject to the Mandatory Initial Session are resolved out of court, while the corresponding percentage for voluntary mediation (when the parties address themselves them to a mediator) exceeds 80%.
Specifically, for the year 2023, out of the 10,165 mandatory IAS, 1,126 parties agreed to continue the process, i.e. a rate of 11.08%, and of the 1,126, 786 had a successful outcome, i.e. a rate of 87%. In the corresponding time period there were 1,397 voluntary mediations, of which 1,165 resulted in an agreement (ie 83.39%) and the parties did not have to proceed to court.
“These results are very encouraging, while in recent years approximately 3,000 new mediators have been certified, who were trained in the 21 Mediator Training Centers operating in Greece”, notes Mrs. Despina Laskaridou, who characterizes the establishment of the Mandatory Initial Session as a success of Mediation (YAS), after “introducing the institution of mediation into the daily life of citizens, traders, businessmen as a new way of resolving private disputes, a different legal culture, which results in the resolution of many cases outside the courts, which will gradually help – evolutionarily in the improvement of the situation of Justice”.
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