Greek Constitution of 1827

The Greek Constitution of 1827 was signed and ratified in June 1827 by the Third National Assembly at Troezen during the latter stages of the Greek War of Independence and represented the first major step towards realizing a centralised system of Government pooling together some of the more disparate elements of the liberation struggle. The Third National Assembly initially convened in Piada in 1825 and subsequently in Troezen in 1827. After unanimously electing John Capodistria as Governor of Greece for a seven-year term, it voted for the "Political Constitution of Greece". The Assembly wanted to give the country a stable government, modeled on democratic and liberal ideas, and for this reason it declared for the first time the principle of popular sovereignty: "Sovereignty lies with the people; every power derives from the people and exists for the people". This key democratic principle was repeated in all the Greek Constitutions after 1864.

Features

The Constitution consisted of 150 articles. It established a strict separation of powers, vesting the executive power to the Governor and assigning to the body of the representatives of the people, named Vouli, the legislative power. The Governor only had a suspending veto on the bills, and he lacked the right to dissolve the Parliament. He was 'inviolable', while the "Secretaries of the State", in other words the Ministers, assumed the responsibility for his public actions (thus introducing into the text of the 1827 Constitution the first elements of the so called 'parliamentary principle'). The Constitution was also comparatively developed in its approach to human rights for the time.