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Thanks to the votes of the current governing party, the Bill on the Concentration and Licensing of Media Undertakings (see IRIS 2007-5: 11) was recently passed into law by the Greek parliament. The final text differs only slightly from the one which was the object of informal discussions within the circle of interested parties last March. The final text puts an emphasis on the licensing procedure for analogue television (12 articles), since in Greece only a certain number of television and radio stations hold such a license. The granting of licenses is based on a tender initiated by the Ethniko...

The European Commission has decided to refer Greece to the European Court of Justice. The Commission believes the Greek Ministerial Decision No 24014/2005 on the evidence required for the application of Law No 3310/2005 as amended by Law 3414/2005 - on tenderers "interconnected" with mass media businesses- introduces grounds for exclusion from public procurement in Greece. Such exclusion is deemed incompatible with Community Law. That Act provides that unless both participants and other so-called "inter-connected" persons operating in the media market submit a number of "extracts from the judicial...

The draft of the Bill on “Concentration and Licensing of Media Undertakings” was informally introduced to interested parties during the month of March, a year after its initial presentation (see IRIS 2006-5: 14). The European Commission almost simultaneously announced its decision to refer Greece to the European Court of Justice for failure to comply with the Court’s ruling of 14 April 2005 (see IRIS 2006-3: 8). The ruling found that Greece had failed to implement the Electronic Communications Competition Directive (2002/77/EC). Judging from the many provisions of the draft Bill relating to electronic...

On 28 June 2006, Act no. 3471/2006 was adopted for the protection of personal data and privacy in electronic communications. It implements, with significant delay, Directive 2002/58/EC and amends Act no. 2472/1997 for the protection of personal data. The new law includes provisions for the security and confidentiality of communications, as well as for the processing of personal data, including traffic and location data. It should be mentioned that even before this implementation, the Greek legal framework contained mechanisms to guard against the unlawful processing of electronic communications’...

On 11 April 2006, a draft law on the concentration and licensing of media enterprises was presented by the government and could be voted on by Parliament before the end of May. The new text aims to abolish the existing restrictions on ownership of media companies, as well as to reorganize the licensing rules for radio and television stations. A new concept that dominates the rules concerning audiovisual enterprises ownership is the concentration of control in the media market; for the assessment of such a concentration one must take account of the provisions of the existing law on competition and...