Opinion: ATS amendment does not strip civil servants of their rights

Henri Lempu argues that proposed changes to Estonia's Civil Service Act do not undermine officials' rights. He contends that if the goal is a fairer and more unified public service, special protections that contradict the reform's own principles cannot be hidden at the end of the law. The piece calls for consistency between stated reform goals and legislative practice.

A debate is unfolding in Estonia over proposed amendments to the Civil Service Act (ATS), with commentator Henri Lempu pushing back against claims that the changes strip public officials of important protections.

Lempu's central argument is straightforward: the amendments do not remove rights from civil servants, but rather aim to bring greater coherence and fairness to the public service as a whole. According to him, critics of the reform have misread both the intent and the practical effect of the proposed changes.

Reform and its contradictions

At the heart of Lempu's critique is a concern about legislative consistency. If the declared goal of the ATS reform is to build a fairer and more unified civil service, then it is contradictory — and intellectually dishonest — to quietly insert special protections for certain groups at the end of the bill, protections that run directly counter to the reform's stated principles.

Lempu warns that tucking such carve-outs into the final provisions of legislation is a well-known political manoeuvre that undermines public trust in the reform process. A reform that claims to treat all civil servants equally while simultaneously creating privileged exceptions cannot be called a genuine reform, he argues.

Fairness as the guiding principle

For Lempu, the question is not whether individual officials deserve protection — they do — but whether those protections should be distributed unevenly based on which part of the civil service a person belongs to. A coherent legal framework, he concludes, must apply the same standards across the board, and any amendment to the ATS should be judged by whether it brings the law closer to that standard, not further from it.