Õiguskantsleri seisukohad

Chancellor of Justice Opinions (seisukohad)

The õiguskantsler is the escalation route a citizen is pointed at when a state body has decided something about them: petitioning is free and needs no legal knowledge. What answers a question is the individual seisukoht — what the Chancellor was asked, which body it concerned, and what it concluded. The annual review is a summary of that work, not a substitute for it, so keep it secondary.

Access

• Opinion listing: GET https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/seisukohad-ja-algatused/seisukohad — server-rendered, filterable, 4181 opinions from 21.12.2004 to 13.07.2026, 20 rows per page.
• Opinion texts: PDFs at https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/sites/default/files/<YYYY-MM>/<Name>.pdf.
• No login, no JavaScript, no API. All filters are ordinary GET query parameters.

Retrieve

Add parameters to the listing URL:

• o=<term> — free text over title and indexed text.
• a=YYYY-MM-DD, b=YYYY-MM-DD — date window (start / end).
• men_liik_valj[N]=N — procedure type and outcome.
• tags[N]=N — topic.
• valitsemisala[N]=N — the body the opinion is about.
• sort_bef_combine=created_DESC (default), created_ASC, title_ASC, title_DESC.
• page=N — zero-based, 0 to 209.

men_liik_valj: 5 Põhiseaduslikkuse järelevalve · 6 Taotlus Riigikohtule · 7 Arvamus Riigikohtule · 8 Ettepanek · 9 Märgukiri täitevvõimule · 10 Ettekanne Riigikogule · 11 Vastuolu puudumine · 12 Selgitus · 13 Põhiõiguste kaitse · 14 Ettepanek · 15 Soovitus · 16 Õigusrikkumise puudumine · 17 Selgitus · 18 Kontrollkäik · 19 Muud ülesanded · 20 Riigikogu liikme arupärimine · 21 Riigikogu liikme kirjalik küsimus · 22 Lepitusmenetlus diskrimineerimisvaidluses · 23 Immuniteedimenetlus · 24 Distsiplinaarmenetlus kohtuniku suhtes · 25 Arvamus õigusakti eelnõule.

5, 13 and 19 are the three procedure branches; the rest are outcomes under them, which is why some labels repeat (8 and 14 are both "Ettepanek", 12 and 17 both "Selgitus"). Pick the ID from the right branch.

tags: 2 Lapse õigused · 26 Eraelu kaitse · 27 Haridus · 28 Hea haldus · 29 Keskkond · 30 Kodakondsus · 31 Raha ja vara · 32 Puuetega inimeste õigused · 33 Sotsiaalkaitse ja töö · 34 Valimised · 35 Võrdne kohtlemine · 36 Välismaalased ja ränne · 243 Inimõigused · 244 Tervishoid · 245 Digimaailm · 255 Õigusriik · 259 Ehitus ja planeerimine.

valitsemisala covers every ministry, agency and municipality (Tartu linn is 216) — too many to list. Read the ID off the filter checkbox or off a result row's data-tagid attribute; do not invent one.

Each row carries the title, the date as dd.mm.yyyy, the PDF link with its size, and the tag chips above as <a class="tag" … data-tagid="N">Label</a>. The chip's own href names the facet it belongs to (?men_liik_valj%5BN%5D=, ?tags%5B…, ?valitsemisala%5B…), which is how a row's procedure, topic and body are told apart.

valitsemisala tags two different things in one facet: the governing domain (a label ending in "valitsemisala") and the bodies inside it. The body the opinion is actually about is the first non-"valitsemisala" chip — taking the last one returns the ministry where the answer is the agency (verified 2026-08-01 on "Õigus isa vanemahüvitisele": chips are Sotsiaalministeeriumi valitsemisala, Sotsiaalkindlustusamet, Sotsiaalministeerium).

Return

Return title, date, procedure branch, outcome, the body concerned, topics, the PDF URL and retrieval time.

The outcome tag is the finding in one phrase, and it is available without opening the PDF: Vastuolu puudumine and Õigusrikkumise puudumine mean the Chancellor found no breach; Ettepanek, Soovitus, Märgukiri täitevvõimule and Taotlus Riigikohtule mean it acted. Report that from the tag — it answers "what did the Chancellor conclude" for one listing fetch, with no PDF opened.

For the reasoning, read the PDF: pdfText(url) from the archive returns the letter's text, and any PDF text extractor does the same job. Open one only when the question needs the argument rather than the outcome, and quote only what the extraction actually printed. If pdfText refuses (it names the encoding it could not map), link the PDF and say the reasoning was not machine-readable — never paraphrase an unread opinion.

Opinions are letters, headed Teie <date> nr … / Meie <date> nr …, addressed to one petitioner or one body. Present them as the Chancellor's position in that case, not as binding precedent.

Limits

• Every one of the 4181 entries is a PDF. Checked on pages 0, 1, 5, 50 and the final page 209: every row is a file--mime-application-pdf link, and there is no HTML version of an opinion anywhere on the site. Without PDF text extraction you can answer at metadata level — who, when, which body, which outcome — and must link the document for its argument.
• The PDFs are real text, not scans, but the encoding varies by generator. An individual opinion decodes readably from a naive inflate-and-(…) pass, littered with et-EE markers and broken word spacing ("Isap u h k u se k as u tam ise"); the annual review's streams are two-byte and come back as interleaved nulls unless decoded as UTF-16BE. Never state a figure, deadline or § from such output unless the characters around it came out clean.
• o stems aggressively: automaks returns 823 hits, mootorsõidukimaks 142, vanemahüvitis 76. Use the precise legal term and check the titles that come back.
• There are no petition statistics. The site publishes no count of avaldused by topic, and the 2024/2025 annual review PDF contains no occurrence of "statistik" and no counts at all — the topic picture in it is narrative ("automaks tõi õiguskantsleri töölauale üüratu koguse kaebusi"). Never present a topic breakdown of petitions as data from this source; quote the narrative as narrative.
• Over 3,000 opinions are also attached to consolidated act texts in Riigi Teataja (per the Chancellor's own 24.11.2025 announcement), reachable from the act view. No public API route for them was found on 2026-07-27 — every guessed /public-api/api/v1/akt/{id}/… variant returned 404. Retrieve opinions here; use legal-acts-data for the act.

claim No public API route for them was found on 2026-07-27
reason no-such-route
because Executing this would mean showing that NO endpoint anywhere on riigiteataja.ee serves the opinions attached to an act, and the 404s behind the sentence are evidence about the paths somebody guessed rather than about the register — a later run that guesses a different path could disprove it, so nothing here can confirm it.

• The Kantselei's own incoming and outgoing correspondence is a separate register at adr.rik.ee/akk/ — see ministry-document-registries.
• Practical routes for a citizen, if the question is "what can I do": /kontaktid/avaldus-oiguskantslerile and /kontaktid/avaldus-oiguskantslerile/kuidas-avaldust-esitada (both live 2026-07-27).

Annual reviews (secondary)

• Estonian index: https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/seisukohad-ja-algatused/aasta-ulevaade. 2006–2014 are direct PDFs under /sites/default/files/2024-12/Ulevaade%20<year>.pdf; 2015–2025 are microsites at https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/ylevaade<year>/.
• The microsite is a JavaScript shell: 6 KB of HTML with the chapter list in js/data.js, and every path beneath it (/ylevaade2025/oiguskantsleri-aasta, …-aasta.html) returns that same shell with HTTP 200. Do not read it as report content.
• The report itself is https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/ylevaade2025/aastaulevaade.pdf (575 KB). English mirrors are /annual-report-<year>/, where only the newest year serves overview.pdf — 2022, 2023 and 2024 return 404, and the Estonian sites answer overview.pdf with HTTP 200 and text/html, a soft 404.

claim 2022, 2023 and 2024 return 404
GET https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/annual-report-2023/overview.pdf
expect-status 404
# Status only, no body pattern: it is a bare Apache 404, and asserting nothing
# about the body keeps the runner from pulling the newest year's 556 KB PDF
# down every week just to look at it.
# The control is the NEWEST year's mirror, which must NOT be a 404. That is the
# other half of the same sentence — "only the newest year serves overview.pdf"
# — so if the office ever drops the English mirrors altogether, this goes red
# instead of passing on a 404 that no longer means what the guide says.
control GET https://www.oiguskantsler.ee/annual-report-2025/overview.pdf

• The year in the path is the review's label, not a calendar year: ylevaade2025 is "Õiguskantsleri aastaülevaade 2024/2025". Report the period the document states.

Verify

• The listing was retrieved only if the HTML contains Leitud vasteid: <b>A - B / N</b>. Parse N as the number of matching opinions.
• That string missing → you did not get the listing (wrong path, or a shell page). Do not report "no opinions".
• The string Otsing ei andnud tulemusi, täpsusta otsingusõna või filtrit → the search ran and genuinely matched nothing. Say so; loosen the filter rather than repeating the query.
• Before naming an opinion, require a row whose link points at /sites/default/files/…pdf and a dd.mm.yyyy date next to it.
• A PDF counts as retrieved only when the response is Content-Type: application/pdf and the body begins with %PDF-. This site returns HTTP 200 with HTML for files that do not exist, so the status code proves nothing.
• Known-good acceptance check: …/seisukohad?o=vanemahüvitis returns Leitud vasteid: 1 - 20 / 76, including "Õigus isa vanemahüvitisele" (09.05.2025, Põhiõiguste kaitse / Selgitus, Sotsiaalkindlustusamet).

Module API

findOpinions({term, from, to, procedure, topic, agency, page, sort}) -> {source, page, total, shown, ran, note, rows}