The draft Presidential Decree had been submitted to the Fifth Chamber of the Council of State for legislative vetting, following the rulings of the Court’s Plenary Session (Decisions 146–149/2025). Today, the Council issued Opinion No. 135/2025, under the presidency of Councillor Roxani Giannoulatou and rapporteur Assistant Judge Andreas Skoufalos, which clarifies ambiguities regarding the application of building incentives under the New Building Code (NOK).
Specifically, the Council of State’s announcement reads as follows:
“With Processing Opinion 135/2025, the Fifth Chamber of the Council of State (President: R. Giannoulatou, Rapporteur: A. Skoufalos, Assistant Judge) deemed lawful the draft Presidential Decree prepared following Plenary Decisions 146–149/2025, which had ruled the NOK incentive system unconstitutional. The draft decree was developed in accordance with Law 5197/2025, particularly Article 68, which introduced an environmental equivalency mechanism to address incentives and bonus provisions applied to building permits issued before the annulment rulings were handed down.
This mechanism primarily concerns building permits that:
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Have been annulled by court decisions, or
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Were legally challenged by December 11, 2024, and therefore fall under the scope of the unconstitutionality identified by the Court, with a high likelihood of eventual annulment.
The mechanism includes the creation of a Special Urban Environmental Equivalency Upgrade Plan (ESPIAP), funded through environmental equivalency payments made by stakeholders. It also provides for the reissuance of building permits, using a process that varies depending on whether the structural framework of the building has already been completed.
It allows for the selection of the most appropriate environmental equivalency measures from those defined in Law 5197/2025 (Art. 68, para. 2), determined at the municipal unit level, or—within the metropolitan areas of Athens and Thessaloniki—at the municipal level. These measures are selected based on an environmental pre-assessment, or, where necessary, a Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment (SEIA).
In line with prior case law from the Supreme Special Court, the Fifth Chamber affirmed that when legal relationships have been irrevocably adjudicated by court rulings, the legislature is not prevented from regulating those same relationships anew, provided that the new legal provisions:
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Are of general application, and
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Do not target specific individual cases.
Therefore, the introduced system—developed following the aforementioned annulment decisions—was deemed constitutional, as any potential reissuance of building permits will be carried out under a new and distinct legal framework, which does not aim to resolve specific disputes but instead establishes a general and abstract regulatory scheme based on objective and impersonal criteria, such as the completion status of a building’s structural framework.
However, the Council held that, under the enabling provisions, any reissuance of the affected building permits requires the prior completion of an environmental pre-assessment of the applicable local plan or, where necessary, the completion of a Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment.
