GREECE Trends and Developments Contributed by: Ovvadias S. Namias, Vasileios Petropoulos, Ilias Spyropoulos and Emmanouil Apostolakis, Ovvadias S. Namias Law Firm
University of Cologne in international criminal law and criminology, and an LLM in criminal law and criminal procedure from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has been a member of the Athens Bar Association since 2018. Emmanouil is a lecturer in criminal law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Ovvadias S. Namias Law Firm 16 Voukourestiou Street 106 71 Athens Greece
Tel: +30 210 7239738 Fax: +30 210 7239773 Email: info@namiaslaw.gr Web: www.namiaslaw.gr
Participation in Criminal Proceedings in Support of the Prosecution in Cases Involving a Large Number of Victims Under Greek Law Definition and purpose Αs is commonly known, “collective redress” is a broad term used, especially in Europe, to describe legal pro- cedures that allow a group of people who have expe- rienced the same or similar harm (eg, as a result of a company’s product, policy or conduct) to seek col- lective legal remedies. This umbrella term can include class actions, group litigation orders, representative actions, mass torts and public interest litigation. Its purpose is mainly to provide efficient access to justice for individuals who might not be able to afford indi- vidual lawsuits and to enhance judicial efficiency by consolidating similar cases. On the contrary, a class action is a specific form of collective redress in which one or several individuals (representative plaintiffs) file a lawsuit on behalf of a larger group (“the class”) with common legal or fac- tual issues. Its purpose is to streamline litigation when there are many victims of the same wrongdoing, such as in the case of defective products, data breaches, or securities fraud.
Collective redress and class actions are civil law insti- tutions because they deal with private law disputes (eg, product liability, consumer rights, competition law), they provide civil remedies, such as compen- sation and injunctions, and they involve plaintiffs v defendants. Class actions in the Greek jurisdiction Under Greek law, class actions are limited in scope and are not as broadly developed as in some com- mon law jurisdictions like the United States. How- ever, Greece recently implemented the EU Direc- tive 2020/2018 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2020 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers, repealing Directive 2009/22/EC through Law 5019/2023. EU Directive 2020/2018 aims to contribute to the func- tioning of the internal market and the achievement of a high level of consumer protection by enabling qualified entities, that represent the collective inter- ests of consumers, to bring representative actions for both injunctive measures and redress measures against traders that infringe provisions of EU law. Those qualified entities should be able to request that
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