In a letter to Parliament Speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, Greece's President declined to convey her objections to prior actions bill.
Konstantopoulou has penned a letter to Greece’s President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, asserting that the measures demanded by Greece's creditors were a “violent attack on democracy.” In her letter she argued that lawmakers had been given very little time to study the voluminous bill.
President Pavlopoulos replied Wednesday to the firebrand Parliament Speaker, declining her request to inform his counterparts that proper constitutional procedures had not been followed in the case of the draft bill on prior actions tabled for approval in Parliament.
As ANA-MPA reports:
President Pavlopoulos explained that the Constitution did not allow him to inform his counterparts about the claims made in her letter, as she requested.
"First, the letter expresses your personal opinions, since there has been no decision of the Parliament in this direction. There is no article in the Constitution, nor in international and European practice, that allows me to inform my Counterparts to this effect, especially when you have the right, which as an esteemed jurist you know, to correspond with them directly.
"Secondly, even if it was a decision of the Parliament, the president of the Republic would again, under the Constitution and international and European practice, have no authority nor therefore the means to convey such to his Counterparts. Given that in this case also, the Hellenic Parliament is in no way prevented from addressing them directly."