Valitsuse istungite protokollid

Riigikantselei Public Document Register

The Government Office public register, and the government stage of a bill: who put an item on the cabinet agenda, who presented it, who spoke, what was decided, how the vote went, who was absent — as structured XML, not PDF.

Access

• Register root: https://dhs.riigikantselei.ee/avalikteave.nsf/byjournalkey?open
• Lotus Domino serving Content-Type: text/xml. No login, no cookies, no JavaScript, and no request headers — a bare fetch of every route below returned the same bytes as one sending Accept: application/json (verified 2026-08-03 with node; the certificates below are still required).
• Views, each opened as /avalikteave.nsf/<view>?open:
  • govmeetingsbydate, govmeetingsbynumber — Vabariigi Valitsuse istungite protokollid
  • byjournalkey — document series (sarjad) browse; the only view full-text search reaches
  • protocolsbydate, protocolsbynumber, protocolsbyissuer — government councils'/committees' protocols
  • legalactsbydate, legalactsbynumber, legalactsbyissuer — Government and Prime Minister acts
  • incomingcorrespondencebydate/bynumber, outgoingcorrespondencebydate/bynumber
  • decreesbydate, decreesbyissuer (Riigikantselei käskkirjad), contractsbydate
• Any record: /avalikteave.nsf/documents/<noteid>?open (?open is optional here). Attachments use the href on a <file> child, /avalikteave.nsf/documents/<noteid>/$file/<name>, served with their real content type (application/pdf, .docx, …).

Retrieve

Government session minutes and per-item decisions

The richest path in this register. Walk it by date:

1. govmeetingsbydate?open → <category> rows, one per year (2009 … current).
2. ?open&path=2026 → month categories labelled 07|Juuli. Encode | as %7C.
3. ?open&path=2026/07%7CJuuli → <document noteid="…"> rows with date and protocolnumber.
4. documents/<noteid>?open → <document form="frmGovMeetingMinutes"> with subject, protocolnumber, date, meetingplace, meetingchair, meetingparticipants, meetingparticipantsother, invitedparticipants, missingparticipants, protocolsigners, protocolcreator, docid (YYYYMMDD.<protocol>), then an <agenda number="…"> block listing every agenda item as its own <document noteid="…"> with the numbered subject.
5. The item's own record → <document form="frmDecision"> with date, protocolnumber, agendaitem, itemsubject, proposedby (Esitaja), presenters (Ettekandja), speakers (Sõnavõtja), votingresults (Hääletustulemused), body (Otsuse tekst), and an <agenda> block with <link rel="parent"> back to the minutes.

Items split into sub-points behave differently: the parent record is an umbrella carrying only agendaitem, itemsubject and subject, with the sub-point records listed in its <agenda> block. The decision and the vote live on each sub-point record, in agendasubitem, subitemsubject, subproposedby, subpresenters, subspeakers, subvotingresults and its own body.

Full-text search

GET /avalikteave.nsf/byjournalkey?SearchView&Query=<term>&count=10

• The response is Content-Type: text/html: the XML is wrapped in a Domino <form> between literal @@@XML_START@@@ and @@@XML_END@@@ markers. Cut between the markers before parsing.
• Inside: <entries viewname="search" query="…" hits="…" totalhits="…"> then <document noteid="" href=""> rows with date, docid, subject.
• Query takes Domino syntax: AND / OR, quoted phrases, and fielded terms such as [subject]=riigikaitsekohus or [DocAccess]=AK (URL-encode [, ], =).
• SearchMax raises the result cap, default 250. SearchOrder=4 sorts by date and reports the untruncated total. start is 0-based in this view.
• Search does not reach session minutes or decision records. The same term returns 7 registry documents from byjournalkey and totalhits="0" from govmeetingsbydate?SearchView. To reach a cabinet decision, walk the date path above — do not conclude the register lacks it.
• The fielded form at searchform?open is POST-only, so a GET-only agent cannot use it; use the GET SearchView route instead.

Journal-series browse

The root returns <category> rows. Pass a category's exact label as path, %20 for spaces and / between levels:

?open&path=02%20Vabariigi%20Valitsuse%20istungite%20ja%20n%C3%B5upidamiste%20ettevalmistamine%20ja%20korraldamine/2-5%20Vabariigi%20Valitsuse%20otsuste%20alusdokumendid

Rows are <document noteid="" href=""> with named <field> children; the <fieldtitles> block at the top of every response maps field names to their Estonian labels. Series 2-5 (Vabariigi Valitsuse otsuste alusdokumendid) holds the Riigikantselei resolutions that start a bill's government-stage circuit — they name each ministry, its task, its deadline and the EIS file number.

Records with a casenumber end in a <case number="…"> block listing every document in the same case. That is the whole government-stage paper trail for one bill in one hop.

Councils' and committees' protocols

protocolsbyissuer?open → issuer categories, then documents. A protocol is <document form="frmTANProtokoll"> (or frmProtokoll) with subject, docnumber, date, timebegin, timeset, chair, docsigners — the substance is only in the attached PDF, and there are no per-item decision records as there are for cabinet sessions.

Paging

<entries> carries totalhits, start, count, hits, from, to, prev, next, plus <link rel="next"> / rel="end". count=100 works. Read those attributes instead of assuming a page size; start is 1-based in ordinary views and 0-based under SearchView.

Where the reasons live

A frmDecision body states what was decided, not why. The reasoning — which ministries proposed the position and on what grounds — is in the kommenteeritud päevakord for that session on valitsus.ee, which is fully server-rendered and quotable per item. That hop is not part of this register: use the government-session-agendas recipe to locate and read it.

Return

• Preserve view name, category path or query, noteid, the documents/<noteid>?open URL, protocol number and session date, agenda item (and sub-item) number, every named field, and retrieval time.
• Quote votingresults / subvotingresults verbatim. It is free Estonian text (e.g. "ühehäälne otsus"), not a tally — do not convert it into vote counts.
• Multi-value fields (meetingparticipants, missingparticipants, speakers, protocolsigners, body) separate entries with the literal four characters \nl — a real backslash, n, l, not a newline escape. Split on that string.
• missingparticipants is a stated fact of record. Report who was absent when the question is who decided.
• Keep absent fields null; available fields vary by form. reference (Kehtestatud õigusakt) is declared on frmDecision but was empty in every record checked.

Limits

• The register answers, and reachable: false now means a real failure rather than a standing one. dhs.riigikantselei.ee serves only its leaf certificate — its issuer YR1 chains to ISRG Root YR, which Node's bundle does not carry — so it was genuinely unreachable from Node until 2026-08-02. That is fixed centrally: certs/estonian-state-chain.pem supplies the cross-signed certificate; the published archive ships it and its setup step installs it. Verified 2026-08-02 with Node: byjournalkey?open answers HTTP 200 text/xml with totalhits="23", govmeetingsbydate?open with 18 year categories, and ?open&path=2026 with seven months. riigikantselei.mjs decides reachability at runtime and its TLS note fires only on an actual certificate error. The lesson from that episode is still worth carrying, because it is general: macOS curl succeeded on this host throughout, because it fetches a missing issuer itself. A passing curl check proves nothing about what the agent can reach — verify with Node. www.riigikantselei.ee and riigikantselei.ee verify fine but answer 404 for /avalikteave.nsf/… (still true 2026-08-02), so dhs. is the only host. If a call ever does come back reachable: false, read its note: say the cabinet's minutes could not be retrieved — never that the government has no record — and fall back to government-session-agendas for the kommenteeritud päevakord and its grounds, riigikogu-open-data once a bill reaches the Riigikogu, or legal-acts-data for an adopted regulation. A human can open the register at https://www.riigikantselei.ee/asutus-uudised-ja-kontakt/dokumendiregister.

claim verify fine but answer 404 for `/avalikteave.nsf/…` (still true 2026-08-02)
# The register lives on `dhs.` alone. www.riigikantselei.ee is the Drupal site
# and answers its own 404 page ("Otsitud lehekülge ei leitud!") for anything
# under /avalikteave.nsf/ — 112 KB of HTML, nothing like the 225-byte Domino
# 404 an unknown noteid produces.
GET https://www.riigikantselei.ee/avalikteave.nsf/byjournalkey?open
expect-status 404
expect /Otsitud lehek/
# The control is that host's own front page, which must answer 200. Without it
# a Riigikantselei website outage would read as confirmation — and this is the
# guide that once declared a whole live register dead, so a check that cannot
# tell a refusal from an outage is exactly the failure to avoid here.
control GET https://www.riigikantselei.ee/

• Listing rows carry their data as <field name="…"> CHILDREN, not as attributes on <document>; only noteid and href are attributes. Reading attributes alone yields rows that are a noteid and four nulls, which reads as a register full of empty records.
• This is an older Government Office document system and may overlap newer ADR records (ministry-document-registries).
• Category labels have historical variants — two different "05 Peaministri nõustamine …" series and two different "18 Avaliku teenistuse …" series sit side by side in the root. Do not merge them solely by numeric prefix.
• Detail records can omit restricted document content while retaining public metadata. An Asutusesiseseks kasutamiseks record keeps companyname, date, docid, series and accessrestrictionreason (e.g. "Avaliku teabe seadus § 35 lg 2 p 2") but has an empty subject and no <file> children. docaccesstype values in use: Avalik, Asutusesiseseks kasutamiseks, Avalik, väljastatakse teabenõude korral.
• Protocol numbers restart each year, so govmeetingsbynumber is not chronological — it opens on protocol 90 of 2020. Use govmeetingsbydate whenever the date is known.
• Relevance-ordered search reports totalhits saturated at the 250 cap; add SearchMax=1000 or SearchOrder=4 before quoting a count.
• protocolsbyissuer covers four councils only. Kabinetinõupidamised and press conferences are not in this register.
• An unknown noteid answers HTTP 404 HTML ("Entry not found in index"), not an empty result.

claim An unknown `noteid` answers HTTP 404 HTML ("Entry not found in index")
# 225 bytes of Domino error HTML, not `<entries>` with nothing in it. So a
# noteid read off the wrong view fails loudly instead of looking like a
# document that is not in the register.
GET https://dhs.riigikantselei.ee/avalikteave.nsf/documents/NT00000000?open
expect-status 404
expect /Entry not found in index/
# The control is the register root: HTTP 200 text/xml. This guide spent a
# release telling the agent the register was dead while it was answering 200
# with totalhits="23", and the control is what stops that from happening in
# this direction — a 404 from a host that is down proves nothing.
control GET https://dhs.riigikantselei.ee/avalikteave.nsf/byjournalkey?open

Verify

• Every view must answer HTTP 200 text/xml with root element entries and paging attributes, carrying <category> or <document> rows.
• Session minutes: require <document form="frmGovMeetingMinutes"> with protocolnumber, date and an <agenda> block holding one <document noteid="…"> per numbered agenda item. Minutes whose <agenda> block says "No documents found" mean the wrong noteid.
• Decision record vs. empty form. Require <document form="frmDecision"> whose agendaitem matches the item asked about, AND a non-empty body of Estonian decision text (it reads as a numbered instruction, e.g. "1. Mitte toetada …" or "Anda Vabariigi Valitsuse määrus …"), AND at least one of votingresults / subvotingresults populated. A record whose only populated fields are date, protocolnumber, agendaitem, itemsubject and subject is an umbrella item, not a decision: open the sub-point documents listed in its <agenda> block and read those.
• Attribution must come from the fetched fields — proposedby, presenters, speakers (or their sub* equivalents) — never from which minister the topic suggests. Do not state a name, date, vote or decision text that is not present in retrieved output.
• Search: require <entries … query="…"> between the @@@XML_START@@@ / @@@XML_END@@@ markers with totalhits greater than zero. A 200 containing only the Domino <form> and no <entries> is a failed query. Zero hits on a term the register plainly holds means the search ran on a view other than byjournalkey, or that the target is a minutes/decision record, which search never indexes.

Worked example (walked 2026-07-26)

Government opinion on the Riigikaitsekohus bill (979 SE), cabinet session of 23 July 2026, item 7 — four requests, no search:

1. govmeetingsbydate?open&path=2026 → category 07|Juuli
2. govmeetingsbydate?open&path=2026/07%7CJuuli → noteid="NT0041A37A", 23.07.2026, protocol 36
3. documents/NT0041A37A?open → frmGovMeetingMinutes, chaired by rahandusminister Jürgen Ligi, five ministers absent, <agenda> item 7 → noteid="NT0041A35E"
4. documents/NT0041A35E?open → frmDecision: proposedby justiits- ja digiminister Liisa-Ly Pakosta, presenters Margus Tsahkna, speakers Jürgen Ligi, votingresults "ühehäälne otsus", body a numbered instruction not to support the bill and to convey the opinion to the põhiseaduskomisjon by 24 July 2026.

byjournalkey?SearchView&Query=riigikaitsekohus&count=10 finds the same bill's preparatory paperwork instead — 7 hits, including the Riigikantselei resolution 26-01311-2 of 25.06.2026 tasking two ministries with deadlines — but never the decision record itself.

Module API

govMinutes({date, year, month}) -> {source, page, reachable, note, path, totals, rows} govDecision(noteid) -> {source, page, reachable, note, form, protocol, date, item, subject, proposedby, presenters, speakers, votingresults, body, subitems}