A new stricter and clearer legislative framework that will criminalize the sale of alcohol to minors is being prepared by the Ministries of Justice, Public Order, Health, and Interior, removing the “window” in the law that currently allows nightclub owners to serve all kinds of alcoholic beverages to young people under 18 as part of “private events”.

Under the new regulations being drafted by the four relevant ministries, among other things, explicitly and the sale of alcohol to minors will be a misdemeanor-level criminal offense that can, however, send offenders to jail.

The main pillars of the new legislation, which is expected to come up for a vote in Parliament by the end of the year, are:

■ Repeal of the provision allowing the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors at “private events.”

■ Making it a criminal offense, without “asterisks” and exceptions, to sell alcohol to persons under 18 years of age.

■ Restoring the authority of the Greek Police to carry out checks in clubs and entertainment centers.

■ Possibility of immediate sealing of these places if it is established that criminal offenses have been committed.

8 students passed out

The new measures come in the wake of what happened recently in a club on Vouliagmenis Avenue, where eight students in the context of a “private” event (a dance party organized by a private company and “advertised” as a school festival) ended up in an almost comatose state in hospitals in the capital after excessive alcohol consumption.

It was this incident, which took place late last October and caused great upset and concern among parents and students alike, that was the trigger for the legislation of the new stricter framework being worked on by the relevant ministries. The images of students aged between 15 and 17, who participated in the “school event”, falling unconscious on the pavement and being taken one by one to hospital from excessive alcohol consumption caused a shock. One of the students had to be hospitalized in an intensive care unit.
One of the students had to be taken to a hospital.

After these scenes, which fully highlighted the lack of any kind of control in nightclubs, an inter-ministerial committee was set up on the initiative of State Minister Akis Skertzos to examine the existing situation from a legislative point of view. The members of the committee, looking back to the current legislative framework, found first of all that since 2016 under the SYRIZA-AN.EL. government, the authority to carry out checks on clubs and entertainment centers had been removed from the EL.AS.

The only thing that remained was the provision for imposing administrative fines on businessmen, a measure that in itself, however, is hardly a “deterrent” of any kind, since shop managers have the possibility to legally challenge it in court and delay, if not cancel its imposition.

But the most important finding made by the members of the inter-ministerial committee was that there is currently a provision in our criminal law that does indeed prohibit the entry of minors into nightclubs and the sale of alcohol in them, but not when it is a “private event”, as was the case with the party organized at the Vouliagmeni club.

Specifically, this provision is contained in Law 3730/2008 (article 4) and stipulates the following: “It is prohibited for minors to enter and stay, as well as any form of employment in entertainment centers and pure bars, as well as the consumption of alcoholic beverages in all public centers, except in the case of private events”. Therefore, as has been noted, the above provision has no practical effect, since it essentially removes any punishment for those responsible as long as the parties organized in their centers are classified as “private events”. Thus, comfortable nightclub operators to date can serve alcohol to young people without any criminal consequence.

Now, however, with the new regulations in the pipeline, the landscape is changing as this provision is repealed and the sale of alcohol to minors is clearly established, i.e. without exceptions, as a criminal offense in the degree of a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor may sound like an offense that carries impunity, but in practice, it is not quite so.

With the amendments to the Criminal Code brought about by the Ministry of Justice, misdemeanors also carry prison sentences. This means that with a court order, the owner of a shop who served alcohol to children can be taken to jail even for a few months, and at the same time his shop can be sealed without any bureaucratic delay.

What the judges say

The abolition of the above provision seems to agree with judges and prosecutors, who until now have been unable to intervene in incidents like the one in Vouliagmeni. “It creates a problem that the issue of selling alcohol to minors is punished with an administrative act (ed: fine) and not in a clear criminal way, because this has resulted in the judicial authorities not being able to intervene and wait to see if a minor… would fall under excessive alcohol consumption so that they could intervene,” a competent judicial source commented to THEMA, welcoming the abolition of the provision in question and the explicit provision in the legislation for criminal consequences for businessmen who serve alcoholic beverages to minors by bringing a misdemeanor prosecution against them.

“The purpose of this initiative is to provide a safe environment for the health of young people,” Justice Minister Giorgos Florides tells THEMA, with legal circles appearing confident that the new measures, namely the reintroduction without asterisks of the sale of alcohol to minors as a criminal offense with the risk of imprisonment, the immediate sealing of shops that violate the law and the close checks by the National Police, will be effective.AΣ. in entertainment centers, combined with the imposition of administrative fines, will act as a deterrent for those entrepreneurs who aim for easy profit, overlooking the fact that they are dealing with minors and with what the unrestrained consumption of alcohol certainly entails for their health and their psyche.

Abuse

But it’s not just what happened at the Vouliagmeni club that was troubling. The amount of alcohol consumed by young people in our country seems to be increasing rapidly, a condition that comes along with the increase in juvenile delinquency rates.

According to a condition that is also linked to the increase in the number of juvenile offenders and the number of juvenile offenders.

According to statistics that have recently seen the light of day, one in three 15-year-olds consume alcoholic beverages at least once a week, while one in four boys and one in five girls aged 15 drink at least three drinks every time they go out. At the same time, two in five teenagers (40%) aged 15 have been drunk at least once in their lives. 15% of underage boys and girls admit to having been drunk more than three times in a year.

Thus, the picture of high school students who went to the club to have fun and ended up in Attica’s hospitals in a state of heavy intoxication probably came to confirm the alarming findings of the surveys and demonstrate the need to take measures based on a new legislative framework that will not be “empty words”, i.e. unenforceable.

They are looking for the owner

What took place in the early hours of October 26 at the club on Vouliagmeni Avenue is reflected in the testimonies of children who participated in the “event” and their parents who were called to the scene to pick them up. Indicative is the testimony of the father of a minor schoolgirl: “We were luckier than the others because our child was not admitted to the ICU.

When I got outside and they took her out of my arms I saw that she was unconscious. Her head was down, she was unconscious. I was talking to her, hitting her, slapping her, raining on her, nothing, she wasn’t coming to at all. I went crazy.” For her part, a student who participated in the “event” described: “The children couldn’t cope. Half of them were unconscious, the others were vomiting. By the time we were leaving, there were still children passed out who were being taken out. One child from my school was taken to hospital.”

That night, as students passed out one by one and ambulances picked them up off the sidewalk to take them to hospitals, officers who rushed to the center handcuffed a young man, a spokesman for the operation said.

The arrested man was then taken to the Athens Prosecutor’s Office, which proceeded to prosecute him for the offense of exposure causing grievous bodily harm to the victim in a serial manner (misdemeanor). Subsequently, the accused was brought to an Autophonic Three-Member Court for trial, but his trial was postponed until 31/1/2025.

However, as judicial circles told “THEMA”, the key point of this particular case was not the arrest of the young man who declared himself as the temporary manager of the shop that night. As it was established from the study of the data collected by the authorities, one night before the party in question took place, the domestic owner of the business had “ceded” it, as judicial sources said, to a foreigner.

After this finding, the Athens Prosecutor’s Office of the Athens Prosecutor’s Office ordered copies of the case file that had been formed to identify the real owners of the club and to investigate their responsibilities and of course the responsibilities of the foreigner to whom it had been “ceded” in the context of a criminal investigation.