Legislation on the press and online media in Greece (1931-2017)

The subject of the article is the evolution of the legislation on the media in the Greek Republic since the adoption of the first law on the media in 1931 till the present day. The study is done on the basis of the material of legislative documents concerning printed media which were adopted in the period from 1931 till March 2017. The analysis used original texts of the documents, and the quotations in the article are translations made by the author. The documents selected were considered in the diachronic aspect (in the course of the history of modern Greece) and in the synchronic aspect (for each chronological stage). The general method of the study was essentially the comparison of the documents in question: Greek documents from different periods of Greek history, Greek documents compared to the legislation of other European states, and also in the context of the changing political situation in the country. A number of particular scientific methods were also used, which take into account specific features of Greek legal traditions. The following basic problems were solved in the study: to determine the basic themes of the laws on the media; to follow the dynamics of the development of relations between the state and the media in the period of the second half of the 20th c. and the beginning of the 21st c., and to analyze the content of the present corpus of the laws on the media and to assess the significance of the media in the life of modern Greece. After 1931 the Greek legislation on the media developed around the following basic subjects: the measure of freedom of the press and the work of journalists; the spectrum of subjects forbidden for publication and starting from the second half of the 20th c. the state control of the activity of enterprises and markets of the media. Nowadays politicians and owners of information corporations do not consider the press in Greece as a serious instrument in a competitive struggle; due to this the legislation on the media is practically not developing and is represented by only a few legislative acts. Besides the state legislation there is also a system of the self-regulation of the press: codes of ethics elaborated by professional journalistic organizations, in the first place, by the Journalists' Union of Athens Daily Newspapers. These documents do not have legal force; in the course of the economic crisis their authority and importance decreased noticeably, although they remain valid. There is no legislation in the field of the internet-media. The set of documents which constitute the system of the law on the media of the Greek Republic was practically not analyzed in Russian academic literature so far. However, these documents represent a part of the modern European legislation on the media, and their knowledge is necessary for the understanding of the general situation in the field of the modern European law on the media. The material collected and analyzed in the present article is new in the Russian scientific field, and it fills one of the significant lacunas in this field.

Keywords

Authors

References