Amendment in the Criminal Code enforces restrictions in playing of music in cafes, bars and restaurants and those violating the law will be arrested and tried in zero time.
According to the amendment, music should stop at 10 o’ clock at night in winter and at 11 in summer. No music should be played also during the noon hours 3:00 to 5:00 commonly known as “hours of public quietness.”
Exempted are those facilities that have obtained special license by the municipalities.
At the same time, the amendment stipulates that loud noise caused by customers will be a felony and not a misdemeanor as usual.
This means that the person in legal charge of the facility will be arrested immediately, taken to the next police station and be tried within 48 hours.
The amendment has angered the sector which will suffer a second blow by the state after the total banning of smoking.
“They want to close us down,” a friend, owner of a taverna with live music on weekends told me. “First the smoking, now the music,” he said.
A similar music restriction legislation was due a couple of years ago but it never found its way to the Parliament.
In 1994, when a law enforced that music in entertainment facilities should stop at 2 a.m., epic protests took place in Athens.
notice the magic trick here: customer is noisy, arrest the owner of the facility. Was he the one being noisy? no, but he’s an easier target to grab and shake down, and if you arrest him, there will be a lot less public uproar about it when people know they can still be noisy without any new consequences.