Committee chair to resend vetoed employment bill to Riigikogu unchanged
MP Madis Timpson (Reform), chair of the Legal Affairs Committee, said he'll return the president-vetoed Employment Contracts Act to the Riigikogu floor unchanged for a vote.
Timpson said Thursday that the change President Alar Karis flagged wasn't substantive.
"In my view, there was no substantive amendment — it was a typo," he told ERR, adding that such things happen. He also said the rest of the issue could be traced through committee discussions.
Karis vetoed the amended law after discovering that, following the third-reading passage of the bill, a committee staffer had corrected a number in the text. In §433, subsection 2, clause 4 of the law, a reference to subsection 7 had been changed in the text to subsection 6.
Timpson argued the correction was warranted. Lawmakers had previously overlooked that deleting a subsection in the same section shifted the numbering of those that followed — turning subsection 7 into subsection 6.
The Office of the President said subsection 6 would still make sense substantively, however Timpson countered that this did not reflect the lawmakers' intent. Committee records, he said, show they meant the idea in question had originally appeared in subsection 7, which became subsection 6 only due to renumbering.
The Legal Affairs Committee chair stressed that the correction was made in accordance with the Riigikogu Rules of Procedure and Internal Rules Act, which governs how errors must be fixed. Several people took part in the review, he said, so this change wasn't the whim of a single staffer.
As a result, Timpson said he will move to bring the bill back to the Riigikogu floor for passage again unchanged from the version already sent to the president.
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Editor: Mait Ots, Aili Vahtla
