Judicial Review of Pension Cuts
Supreme Administrative Court Judgment 2287/2015
Nikolaos Nikolakis / Eirini Spanaki
Assistant Judges, Greek Supreme Administrative Court (Council of State)
Pension cuts are measures with direct effect and capable of reducing the public deficit and cannot be precluded in exceptional cases. However, such cuts cannot violate the constitutional principles of social solidarity and of equal burden-sharing, the proportionality principle and the core of the right to social insurance. To that end, such measures must be based on a specific, thorough and well-founded scientific study, enabling the judicial review of the measures according to the above principles, although this kind of study can be omitted only in extreme occasions. As a result, only the cuts of the years 2010 and 2011 were considered constitutional in view of the imminent threat of the financial collapse of the State at that time. On the contrary, the pension cuts effected with L. 4051/2012 and L. 4093/2012, after the elimination of the above imminent threat, were considered unconstitutional. The retroactive effect of that unconstitutionality was limited only to the plaintiffs and the persons already having filed judicial remedies by the time the decision was issued.
