Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis today chaired a meeting with the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, during which the bill on the reform, simplification, acceleration and tightening of the awarding of disciplinary justice in the State was presented in the context of the broader attempt to upgrade.
The bill, which was put into public consultation yesterday, provides for the replacement of existing primary disciplinary councils and the Secondary Council by a new body, the Disciplinary Board of Human Resources Public Sector.
The new Council will be staffed by 50 specialized officials of the State Legal Council, who will deal exclusively and fully with disciplinary law in the State. They are currently involved in the compositions of the disciplinary bodies and members of the NSP who have other main employment, which is estimated to contribute to delays.
The new system estimates that most cases will be heard in a few months, and today delays in the administration of disciplinary justice is approaching up to six years. Binding deadlines are provided for any stage of the disciplinary procedure and responsibility for unjustified delays.
Utilizing technology and redefinition of misconduct and penalties
The work of the new Council will be supported through the further digitization of the disciplinary procedure, as it will be made available to the Ministry of Interior’s Public Employees’ Register and the E-Peitharxika database of the National Transparency Authority, which allows any discipline. At the same time, it will be possible to hold meetings via teleconference, and all documents will be electronically engaged.
The bill also brings tightening and modernizing the legal framework, as cases of mild disciplinary sanctions have been found in the past when criminal justice had come to much stricter decisions.
In this regard, the list of misconduct is expanded, which will now include the refusal of evaluation. New sanctions, such as the deprivation of salary scales and the prohibition of liability. Criminal offenses are also foreseen due to a discount of those convicted by their service, such as computer fraud, certificate forgery, infidelity and bribery.
The solution to disciplinary conciliation is also established for the resolution of the pending cases. The new institution will allow accused to accept what is being brought against a milder sentence. Disciplinary conciliation cannot be subject to cases where there is a possibility of a definitive cessation of the official, nor cases where the State has suffered financial damage.
The new Council will judge the most serious disciplinary cases in five -member compositions. Smaller severity will be evaluated by three -member committees.
The bill will be passed in late July and will be implemented immediately afterwards.
The meeting was noted that by 2019, 1,155 officials have been permanently ceased by the State, as efforts to deal with the Operations have intensified, while, with the separate mechanism of evaluation and bonus productivity, processes and incentives have been instituted and incentive to reward.
Mitsotakis: Another attempt at Great Accountability Reformation in the State
During the meeting, the prime minister noted: “The reform of disciplinary law had been concerned with me since I was a Minister of Administrative Reform when the first systematic efforts were made to award disciplinary justice. And it is time to take a major step forward, which I believe is achieved by the bill we have put in public consultation and which will have become a law of the state by the end of July.
The purpose is to have a significant acceleration of all procedures for the performance of disciplinary justice, through the creation of a major central disciplinary council.
And, of course, to emphasize that, in the context of the reform of disciplinary law, the refusal of evaluation will now constitute a disciplinary offense and will be evaluated respectively by the competent disciplinary council.
It is another effort that we are making, in the context of the great reform of the wider public sector, to be able to modernize procedures so that disciplinary civil servants can close their pending within a few months, and not within many years, as we have, He is sentenced to very severe misconduct, disciplinary councils to actually judge that they had to save her with a simple “caress”. This is time to leave them permanently and irrevocably behind us. “
Interior Minister Thodoris Lebanese said:
“With the Disciplinary Law Reforming bill, which was put into public consultation yesterday and will be on July 21, we will be on public consultation, we are attempting a comprehensive reform of the procedures and the way of awarding disciplinary justice, with the aim of being awarded the faster and auction. before the Disciplinary Board for a long time.
We are making a systematic struggle to strengthen the public sector with specific actions. Disciplinary councils, as they have been operating to date, had long response times, which in many cases have reached six years and may have in some cases beyond, and we want to continue in public sector evaluation, improving the services provided by public officials to citizens.
And let’s say that from 2019 to the present day, 1,155 civil servants have been dismissed by the State, either due to counterfeit supporting documents or due to specific disciplinary offenses. The times that these disciplinary procedures took place were great, completed, but we want to accelerate more to give a sense of justice and to reward the capable and worthy civil servants in this way. “
At the meeting they participated Also the Minister of State Akis Skertsos, the Deputy Ministers of the Interior Vassilis Spanakis and Vivi Charalambogiannis and the Secretary General of the Prime Minister Stelios Koutnatzis.