No. 17

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Do we need the Law Enforcement Act?

  • Ain Seppik

    Member of the Riigikogu’s legal committee, Estonian Centre Party

The writer argues that the draft Law Enforcement Act being read in the Riigikogu contains a series of reforms and necessary standards and that the drafting of the act represents an immense amount of work with regard to amassing, cataloguing and codifying Estonia’s experience in this field.

At the same time, one is perforce left with the impression that, just as in the case of many other draft legal acts submitted to the legal committee, the draft Law Enforcement Act is guilty of trying to regulate everything at the same time. Due to this fact, it has become evident upon closer reading of the draft legislation that such a wide range of topics has exceeded the capacity of the authors of the bill. Many clauses have been developed superficially, which has resulted in need for endless revisions and corrections to the draft legislation. This has raised the justified question of whether the government, as the initiator of the bill, should review its work, which is now been changed beyond recognition, and take a position with regard to the new norms. On top of it all, a number of the provisions of the draft legislation are extremely questionable from the point of view of their constitutionality. A piece of draft legislation that is in clear contradiction to the Constitution may not be adopted by the Riigikogu even under the influence of political will and decision.

Full article in Estonian

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