Judins: Government and Saeima Need a Plan for When Laws Cannot Be Promulgated

Andrejs Judins (JV), chair of the Saeima's Legal Affairs Committee, is calling on parliament and the government to agree on a clear procedure for cases when laws cannot be promulgated. The cause was a cybersecurity incident in Latvia: because of critical vulnerabilities in PHP software, websites and apps run by the state company "Latvijas vēstnesis", including "Vestnesis.lv" and "Likumi.lv", where official legal acts are published, were taken offline. PHP is a widely used programming language for building websites.

Judins' assessment

Judins described the situation as exceptional. In his view, the purpose of promulgation is to give everyone a chance to read a legal act, so if that chance is denied, the situation should be interpreted in the person's favour. If people could not learn of new obligations, they cannot be required to fulfil them. If someone has acquired a right and invokes the law being in force, that too should be assessed in their favour.

He doubted that publishing a law on recognising a person as a Latvian citizen a day late would cause complaints. A higher penalty that has not been promulgated cannot be applied to an act already committed. Urgent decisions would be harder, for instance closing a border, where border guards would be ready to work under the new rules while legally those would not yet apply. If promulgation has not taken place in any of the prescribed ways, the law is not in force.

Judins noted that laws used to be published in a printed newspaper, but restoring paper availability of all acts now would be neither feasible nor necessary. He also urged considering a crisis in which public media would not function.

Expert and ministry comments

Constitutional law expert Edgars Pastars, senior legal adviser at the Finance Latvia Association, recalled that Article 8 of the Law on Official Publications and Legal Information lets the President or the Speaker of the Saeima, in exceptional cases, promulgate a law by reading it out on public electronic media. If that is unavailable, another electronic medium can be used. In his view, the main problem would be laws requiring urgent promulgation.

Ilze Leimane of the Ministry of Justice said the law provides alternatives for such cases and that the "Latvijas Vēstnesis" site appeared likely to be restored on Thursday.

On Wednesday evening, access was restored to the shared platform hosting 165 state institution and municipal websites, but the "Latvijas Vēstnesis" resources were still down at about 23:15.