New Rules Not Necessary for Improving Legislative Drafting Quality

By the initiative of the Ministry of Justice, the draft of legal policy principles has been drawn up, establishing the general directions for legislative drafting until the year 2030. In the Chamber’s opinion, it is not necessary to establish new principles in order to improve the quality of legislative drafting, instead officials and politicians should start following the existing principles of good legislative drafting on a daily basis.

The state, too, has noticed that one of the most significant problems in Estonia is the failure to perform impact analyses or superficial impact analysis. This is a problem mainly in a situation where a legal act contains an amendment that has a significant impact. Low quality of impact analyses is further highlighted by the explanatory memorandum to the draft act prepared by the Ministry of Justice, according to which only a third of the impact analyses of the development intentions and draft acts were of good quality in 2017. Now the draft act sets out that the volume of legislative drafting must decrease, and more attention should be paid to impact assessment.

The Chamber does not see the need to make new proposals to the legislative drafting principles. Already today, there are reasonable principles in place that help to ensure foreseeable, good quality, honest and stable legal policy. These principles are written down in the Rules for Good Legislative Practice and Legislative Drafting, good inclusion practice and impact assessment methodology. For example, there is currently a principle in place according to which the impact of planned amendments must be analysed, each draft should be preceded by the intention to develop, stakeholders should be included in the legislative drafting process, but generally these principles are not followed in many cases.

Thus, instead of adding new principles or specifying the existing ones, the principles in force should be followed. And if it happens that a politician or an official forgets to do it, the stakeholders as well as other politicians and officials should remind it. Estonia should strive towards a situation where a draft act is not approved during the approval round, rejected by the Government or the Parliament if the good legislative drafting principles have been violated during the processing of the draft act.