Riigikogu — Approval of Basic Principles for Legislative Policy until 2030 — RT V, 2021, 1

Under clause 1 of § 65 of the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia and in accordance with subsection 1 of § 20 of the State Budget Act, the Riigikogu adopts the following resolution.

I. Vision and Aim for Legislative Policy 1. Legislative policy is made and applied to give effect to the legal order founded by the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia. Where legislative action is not required under the Constitution, the State’s regulatory intervention will be limited to a minimum. 2. To achieve regulatory quality, the Government of the Republic as well as the Riigikogu are resolved to abide by the principles of good legislative practice. The Riigikogu will only pass a law if it complies with the principles of such practice. II. Principles of Good Legislative Practice 3. Legislative policy is made on an inclusive and foreseeable basis and is knowledge-based. Citizens enjoy an equal right to be heard in legislative matters. 4. Legislative practice must be informed by the need to administer institutions of government flexibly, efficiently and sparingly. 5. Estonia’s legal order is characterized by stability and clarity – it allows users of the law to know its rules and to be able to observe them. 6. Each year, the regulatory load of legislative intervention will be reduced perceptibly. To achieve this, new bills will not be introduced lightly. New rules will be made at the appropriate regulatory level and only if the need for them has been convincingly demonstrated. Resorting to the law as a means to deal with a problem is the last option, to be used only if the other options have been considered and rejected. When proposing a regulatory solution, excessive regulation and haste are avoided. 7. The planning of legislative work on all regulatory levels, including in the action plan of the Government of the Republic, will move away from focussing exclusively on amending a specific law or provision, shifting towards problem-centred or vision-centred approaches. 8. Legislative work will continue to be based on the principle that, whenever possible, legal rules dealing with a specific area should be organized into separate laws laying down, respectively, general principles and specific rules for the area. Alternative ways of employing regulatory means to achieve politically mandated results – including comparative analysis of solutions adopted concerning similar problems in countries that are similar to Estonia in terms of their legal institutions, culture and political arrangements. The codification of rules should not be an aim unto itself. 9. Estonia’s legal order should help to ensure that our country remains an internationally competitive economy, to provide for the continual well-being of our people and to make our society a safe environment to live in – and the State should make novel solutions available for achieving this. Legislative action must go hand in hand with accelerating globalization. The legal framework that shapes the environment that we live in has to ensure protection of public interests without diminishing every individual’s own responsibility and freedoms, and without interfering unduly with discretionary decision-making powers, with private property and with entrepreneurship. 10. The making of pro-active high-level contributions to legislative work on the European Union and international level remains important, as is contributing, also on those levels, to the application of good legislative practice. When participating in legislative efforts in the European Union, principles of domestic legislative policy are reflected to the greatest extent possible. The application of European Union law and of international law in the national setting must be systematic and informed by a vision encompassing the entire area of application. 11. When elaborating regulatory solutions, the opportunities offered or applications made possible by newest technologies must always be considered. Any regulatory solution to be adopted must be suitable for implementation in a digital society and support the development of such a society. III. Envisaged Directions of Development PRODEEDINGS CONCERNING LEGISLATIVE BILLS 12. Drawing up a notice of intention to initiate a bill, bringing the matter to the attention of the stakeholders, as well as regulatory impact assessment before and after regulatory action – all represent material elements of effective law-making. 12. 1. Before preparing a bill that it intends to introduce, the Government of the Republic draws up, as a substantive political document, a memorandum of intention to prepare the bill, which states the reasons for the regulatory intervention envisaged. Where a decision is made to forgo drawing up such a notice, the reasons for the decision must be stated at the initial stage of legislative proceedings. 12.1.1. A notice of intention to prepare a bill provides an outline description of the problem to be remedied, of the aims to be accomplished, of the ways for remedying the problem and of their impact. 12.1.2. The notice is presented for public debate and, for information purposes, to the Riigikogu. 12.1.3. The Government of the Republic may decide not to draw up a notice of intention in the following situations: 1) when transposing or implementing European Union legislation, provided its impact has already been assessed; 2) where the proceedings concern an international treaty; 3) where the proceedings concern the annual law on the State budget; 4) if the bill does not bring a material change in the law or any other material impact; 5) proceedings on the bill must be urgent and the urgency justified. 12.1.4. A notice of intention is not required when a bill is introduced by a member, a parliamentary group or a committee of the Riigikogu. 12.2. The principal regulatory solutions proposed by the bill are discussed with the stakeholders at the earliest possible stage of proceedings. 12.2.1. Involvement of the stakeholders is effective only if it is supported by the work arrangements of State agencies. Stakeholder involvement must encompass the entire course of legislative proceedings. 12.2.2. To provide for the accessibility of legal acts and transparency of legislative proceedings, any information technology solutions used to support these must be citizen-friendly, accessible to the public and comprehensive in their scope. Important legal information will continue to be provided through the Riigi Teataja portal and will be made easier to use. 12.2.3. To assess and develop stakeholder involvement, the Government of the Republic monitors the practice of such involvement by government agencies on a regular basis. 12.3. Laws must have an impact. 12.3.1. The impact that a law initiated by the Government of the Republic is likely to produce is assessed before the preparation of the corresponding bill according to the principle of proportionality – the impact assessment of a proposed amendment that aims to achieve a far-reaching impact must be more detailed and include, among other things, an analysis of other possible regulatory solutions. 12.3.2. When participating in legislative efforts in the European Union and internationally, the impact of the legislative instruments to be drafted is assessed already at the stage where Estonia’s position is formulated. Top specialists of the field must be enlisted and ways must be found to carry out a comprehensive analysis of such an instrument’s compatibility with Estonia’s legal order. 12.3.3. Impact assessments must increase their use of input data. To ensure quality results, the analysis must be systemic, purpose-driven and, in addition to known methods, also make use of novel ones such as heuristic models and nudging where appropriate. 12.3.4. The Government of the Republic will take steps to ensure central coordination of the system of regulatory impact assessment and to make available the required methodology support and tools. The Government of the Republic will establish effective arrangements to provide for reasonable use of existing data, including Big Data. Efforts must be made to bring Artificial Intelligence to bear on the analysis. The aim is to reach a stage where all legislative instruments in force are machine-readable. 12.3.5. Reduction of administrative burden is a shared goal of the Government of the Republic and of the Riigikogu. The Government of the Republic takes steps to make the assessment of administrative burden a systemic effort that is based on a single set of principles; the Government also provides methodology support for the assessment and monitors assessment. The aim is to achieve a real reduction of the burden, and a shift of focus to the need for and practicality of rule-making. Continuous efforts must be made to reduce the existing burden. 12.4. The proportion of post-application assessment in legislative work must increase. 12.4.1. Post-application regulatory impact assessment serves to verify – especially following entry into force of bills expected to have a far-reaching impact – whether the rules achieved their objective. Post-application regulatory impact assessment is mandatory in exceptional cases where, due to reasons or urgency, the decision is made to forgo the drawing up of a notice of intention. 12.4.2. The Government of the Republic will introduce a framework for undertaking post-application regulatory impact assessment obligations and for fulfilment of these. 12.4.3. The Government of the Republic disseminates the results of post-application assessment and presents the conclusions drawn from such assessment to the Riigikogu. LANGUAGE OF THE LAW 13. The language used in legislative instruments must be clear, precise and as straightforward as possible. 13.1. To achieve a consistently high standard in legislative language use, the Government of the Republic will prepare a corresponding training programme. Legislative language courses will be arranged on a regular basis and made mandatory for all officials involved in the making of legislative policy. 13.2. To achieve terminologically consistent and accurate formulations, the drafters of a bill will engage in cooperation with linguistic editors already at the stage of drawing up the notice of intention to prepare the bill. On the level of work arrangements, provision will be made for any bill that the Government of the Republic presents to the Riigikogu to have undergone comprehensive linguistic review. 13.3. To achieve maximum clarity of legislative expression, novel methods will be employed – among other things, in situations where this is justified, the clarity of the text for its intended users will be checked already at the drafting stage. 13.4. The Government of the Republic will coordinate closer cooperation between linguistic editors working with legislative bills, to be developed into an effective arrangement for standing cooperation. COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT WORK 14. Cooperation in the areas of legislative practice and the development of legislative process will contribute to quality rule-making. 14.1. Steps will continue to be taken to improve and bring up to a high standard the specialized skills of legislative lawyers and, with respect to officials involved in the making of legislative policy, the awareness of good legislative practice. Incentives will be created for legislative lawyers to rotate to other positions in the civil service as well as beyond it. Regular exchanges of views will be arranged between legislative lawyers and legal practitioners. 14.2. To make legislative policy knowledge-based and to provide for research on the implementation of the principles of good legislative practice, cooperation with research institutions will continue. Similarly, new forms of cooperation and new technologies to assist such cooperation will be investigated and developed further. For the preparation of bills, a work environment will be set up that is inspired by contemporary solutions. 14.3. The sine qua non of training new generations of legislative lawyers is the provision, in the Estonian language, of academic higher education in law, which imparts in-depth knowledge of the Estonian legal system. Comparative legal scholarship and interdisciplinary approaches constitute an important aspect of such education. IV. Reporting 15. Starting from the year 2021, the Government of the Republic will present an annual report to the Riigikogu on the implementation of the principles of good legislative practice and of the progress achieved on envisaged directions of development, appending to it an expert’s assessment concerning observance of the Basic Principles.