Fundamental Rights

1. FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS It is generally accepted that the Constitution comprises rules that regulate the organization and exercise of State power, on the one hand, and the relations between the State and its citizens, on the other. The rules that stipulate and regulate the relations between the State and its citizens and, more generally, the relations between the controlling and the controlled are characterized as public freedoms or fundamental rights or human rights. Fundamental rights determine the percentage of freedom that the members of a certain society have in relation to State power, thus delimiting the size of self-existence and self-determination of every human being. It would also be useful to clarify that fundamental rights, when formulated in the Constitution, have increased formal power. This means that they cannot be abrogated or changed by a formal law or any regulatory deed of the executive power, but they lay down the limits and the legal framework within which State agents should act as regards their relations with the citizens. In this sense, fundamental rights have an interdisciplinary legal character, since they lay down the principal rules of administrative law, criminal law, labor law, civil law, as well as overall procedural law. For the notional approach to fundamental rights, the findings of political science, constitutional history and political sociology are useful, in addition to traditional legal interpreting methods. The enrichment of the list of fundamental rights and the re-conception of the content of the rights provided for in the Constitution are assisted by rules of international law, which are sanctioned pursuant to the procedure of article 28 of the Constitution of 1975/1986/2001 and are applicable as domestic law. An example is legislative decree 53/1974, which transposed into Greek legal order the European Convention of Human Rights (Rome Convention of 1950), whose formal validity is superior to any contrary provision of the