The President of Latvia proposes to consider an opportunity to provide in the Rules of Procedure of the Saeima that only those proposals that include grammatical or technical corrections or that are required to prevent non-compliance with the Satversme could be submitted and reviewed in the third reading. Raimonds Vējonis is confident that that submission of any proposal that is beyond the purpose and scope of the draft law discussed during previous readings is inadmissible in the third reading.
In his letter to the Saeima, the President of Latvia has outlined that the discussion of draft laws in several readings allows preparing a sound and thorough regulation. It also creates an opportunity to involve its potential addressees in discussion of the draft law and ensure the quality of the drafted text. Hasty last-minute solutions where probability of errors is very high as the experience shows would not be desirable.
Raimonds Vējonis encourages to lay down also an obligation for all applicants of draft laws to add an annotation to a draft law in the Rules of Procedure of the Saeima, which currently is only required from the Cabinet of Ministers, because a responsible committee provides it to other applicants. Such procedure would disclose intentions of an applicant of a draft law more precisely, would provide information on the need, the impact on different areas, process of development process and planned application of the draft law, including by ensuring that applicants of the draft law have considered potential impact of the law on the state budget, compliance with the Satversme and Latvia’s international commitments.
For the laws adopted by the Saeima would be clear to the public and an action of the legislator would be explained to the public, the President of Latvia also proposes to consider an opportunity to provide alignment of an annotation text of a draft law with wording of the law as of the final reading, or to prepare an explanatory memorandum or explanatory report for each draft law in the third reading and all those sources of information make available on the website of the Saeima in a modern manner. The President of Latvia indicated in his letter that it would improve the opportunities of the public to access information on the laws adopted by the Saeima greatly and enhance the public trust in the state administration.