During recent months, the Riigikogu has enjoyed the relatively stable support of about one-third of the population. What should the Riigikogu actually do in order to deserve at least a half of the Estonian residents' approval ofto its activities?
Siim Kallas | Presentation in the Riigikogu at the 1st Reading of the Draft State Budget Act 2000 |
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Kalle Jürgenson | State Budget 2000, What and Why? |
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Olev Raju | Commentaries on the State Budget 2000 |
Madis Võõras | Estonia on the Way to Full Membership of the European Space Agency |
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Ene Ergma | Estonia Has Become a Space State |
Urve Läänemets | A Good Teacher Should Be Ready to Learn Also from the Pupils |
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Külli Eichenbaum | Using the Local Peculiarities of Old Võromaa |
New foundations for party fund-raising. Drawing lessons from presidential elections. A concerned view of the public health project. How the Legal Chancellor protects the legitimacy of the legal system. The Riigikogu rostrum as propaganda platform. Education and work. On some problems in assessing the quality and impacts of legislation. The role of the Estonian Parliament after accession to the European Union. Fighting poverty with social policy. New Technologies in public administration. Security: The system and the people.
Summaries of articles are in English.
During recent months, the Riigikogu has enjoyed the relatively stable support of about one-third of the population. What should the Riigikogu actually do in order to deserve at least a half of the Estonian residents' approval ofto its activities?
Democracy is a form of political culture and communication. In order for it to work and be sustainable, it requires, like any other sophisticated system, fixed rules, a certain cultural environment, and - most importantly - a system for ensuring the observance of all these principles.
This article gives an overview of the issues related to party financing.
Regulation of party financing has been a topic for discussions in Estonia for almost the whole period since independence was restored. There has been one direction to pursue: namely, to separate the activity of the parties and the parliament from the financial interests of semi-anonymous donors, and to increase the proportion of state budgetary finances in the political process.
Despite some interesting precedents in 1996, the 2001 presidential elections were undoubtedly much more innovative. Indeed, these elections provided a great deal of experience and created a number of precedents, both for society as a whole and the President as an institution, and both in terms of the election campaign and for the parties.
This time the presidential elections turned out to be clearly party-based. This may be considered as an indication of maturity of the Estonian political landscape and of the strength of the political parties.
As a result of comprehensive reform, the interests of the patient must become better protected and the queues for health care must become shorter. Doctors and nurses should have an opportunity to earn more money, and what is perhaps particularly important from the state's point of view, public health money should be used reasonably, not spent in a pork-barrel manner.
The public health project has crept past the real issue of health and couched itself in medical care issues alone. In order to rearrange the system, we have to take inventory. We do not know what actual demand is for medical aid.
From the activities of the Legal Chancellor so far, it can be inferred that there is a need for more comprehensive analysis of the problems that have become evident, both from the requests and proposals presented to him, and as a result of an audit performed on the Legal Chancellor's own initiative. There is also a need for development of proposals for more effective protection of individual rights.
Democracy is impossible without free press. This is what media theoreticians, political scientists and commentators tell us. But this consensus brings up new questions: what kind of free press does democracy need, and why does it need it?
Propaganda has been around for centuries, and the word has always had a derogatory connotation. Around the middle of the last century propaganda was renamed public relations, so that the people would not associate the agitation of democratic governments with the brainwashing of dictatorships.
The origins of propaganda may be traced back to the time when groups of people first exercised power over others. This implies that in those days already attempts were being made to influence the public. The word propaganda (L. propagare - 'to spread') is assumed to originate from the organisation Congregatio de propaganda fide of the Roman Catholic cardinals that was founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.
There is a considerable gap between the output of the Estonian educational system and the demand for education from the labour market.
Will Estonian educational policy be successful? It all depends on to what extent it will be possible to harmonise the activities of the ministries that influence the implementation of educational policy, and also whether these activities can be linked to the overall strategic goals of the educational policy.
In the European Union (EU), integration works mainly through legal instruments. In formal addresses, the community is often referred to as a "legal community", "une communauté du droit", "Rechtsgemeinschaft". Legal forms are the focus of the whole of the EU's operation. Indeed, in terms of legal influences, membership in the EU differs radically from the common activities of other international associations. What makes the situation a complicated one, both for Estonia and several other countries of Eastern and Central Europe, is that the legal reforms introduced during recent years have not been completed.
The letter of the law gives the laws their form, but the deeper goals of laws are not juridical in their essence.
Examining the practices of investments of the local governments so far, it may be said that the seven-year-old system of investment subsidies to local governments has been characterised by permanent changes; fragmentary distribution of financial means; arbitrary decision-making; lack of clear criteria; during some years also a great influence of lobby work; and during the last two years, centralisation.
European Union (EU) decisions are made not only in Brussels. The homework performed in each member state is what matters. If we want this to go smoothly and want one common vote representing the state of Estonia in Brussels in the future, then now is the time to start thinking what the procedure of EU-related decision-making could look like in Estonia. It is true that first a number of foundational issues should be settled: conducting a referendum, possible amendment of the Constitution - which should not be confined to politics, but should also be carefully contemplated and justified also judicially.
After accession to the European Union, the role of representation of the people will be limited, in the context of legislation, to the problem of how to ensure legislative control over the executive power, which is the state's main representative in the decision-making process on the European level.
After entering into the Association Agreement in 1995, Estonia started making preparations for harmonisation of its legislation with the European Union's acquis communautaire. In reply to The White Paper: Preparation of the Associated Countries of Central and Eastern Europe for Integration to the Internal Market of the European Union, an action plan of the Government of the Republic was developed in 1996 for Estonia's integration into the European Union (known also as The Blue Paper). The action plans of the subsequent years also rely on the structure of The White Paper.
A great proportion of the state's social benefits, including welfare, are paid to families that are not poor. Of the financial means allocated for ensuring the coping threshold, 62.3% is spent on supporting non-poor families. In the case of child or unemployment benefits, it is actually not the aim that these should reach only poor families. But unemployment benefits turned out to be directed most of all towards the poor - nearly half was received by the families living below poverty level.
Application of information and communication technology in public administration will ring great changes in the arrangements of public administration and set new requirements in front of the institutions executing public power.
The aim of administrative reforms of the recent decades has been to simplify administrative procedure and to introduce a focus on the citizen in public services. For the citizen, the main indications of quality service are speed, competence, comfort, fairness, and effectiveness. Focus on the citizen is provided by concentrating as many services as possible in a single location or unit in order to reduce the number of direct contacts with civil servants necessary to receive a service or meet a request.
On the Riigikogu's anniversary on 23 April 2001, a significant document - Conception of Development of the Estonian Civil Society (CDECS) - was submitted to the Board of the Riigikogu.
Grey zones in European security structure are reality insofar as Russia's interests extend far beyond its current borders, and are, as such, more important than the right of single nations to self-determination. If we want more security in Europe, we must recommend the eradication of the grey zones; and this is feasible, if we insist on pursuing a more organized state of affairs in Europe.
The Estonian Defence Forces recently celebrated their 10th anniversary. Now the Defence Forces may step into their second decade of existence with clear development on a qualitatively new level: the "Analysis of the Structure of the Defence Forces", based on the Partnership for Peace between the Republic of Estonia and the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation, has been completed, as has a document called "The Structure and Development Goals of the Defence Forces for a Medium-Term Period" which sets out the development goals of the Estonian Defence Forces up to the year 2015, relying on the structural analysis performed in 2001. The document was approved by the Government of the Republic on 6 November 2001.
With the 1938 Constitution, Estonia attained a two-chamber parliament consisting of a State Assembly (Riigivolikogu) and a State Council (Riiginõukogu). Its term was five years. The State Assembly was a house of deputies that had 80 members elected from a list of names on the basis of relative majority, from one-mandate constituencies. It adopted laws, approved the state budget and controlled the Government. The State Council was the passive house of the Parliament. It did not have the right to make law by itself, as all legal acts only became law after being reviewed by the State Assembly.
This article is an overview of the activities of the Estonian National Library as a parliamentary library culling and creating databases.