Postimees Digest, Tuesday, April 30
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Believers make up 29 percent of population.
Religion statistics from the 2011 population and housing census suggests that Orthodox Christianity has become the most widespread religion in Estonia as the church has managed to attract 33,000 new members since 2000 and dethrone Lutheranism that has lost around 43,000 followers over the same period of time. Orthodox believers number 176,773.
All in all, Estonia remains a secular country as only 29 percent of the population admits strict adherence to a religion while 54 percent adhere to none. Estonia's national minorities are far more religious than Estonian-speakers as more than 50 percent follow a religion compared to 19 percent in case of the latter. Other religions with more than a thousand followers include Catholicism, Baptism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Free Believers, Old Believers, Islam, Adventism, Methodism and Pentecostalism.
Pikamäe: penal power has its limits.
Candidate for the position of Supreme Court chief justice Priit Pikamäe says in an interview, concerning the so-called Berlusconi bill, that the more crimes committed and the higher the level of criminal activity in a country, the more politicians tend to restrict people's basic rights in criminal proceedings. Pikamäe also says that it is perhaps an even bigger problem that too many activities have been criminalized in Estonia and refers to the tendency as criminal inflation. The justice also proposes changes to Estonia's currently linear courts jurisdiction and says that more severe and complicated cases could be handled by district courts right from the start as it would help cut costs and because the concentration of expertise tends to be higher in the court of appeal.
Fiscal strategy aims to lower crime rate and unnatural deaths.
Estonia's four year fiscal strategy aims to tackle the country's crime rate and number of unnatural deaths. The strategy aims to bring the latter statistic down from last year's 628 deaths to 385 by 2020. Unnatural deaths include fire deaths, traffic deaths, drownings, fatal assaults, drug-related deaths, suicides and occupational accidents. The strategy also aims to lower the crime rate from 40,816 registered cases in 2012 to no more than 38,000 by 2017. The document aims to pursue the said goals by carrying out a prisons reform, establishing a nationwide alarm center, greater involvement of volunteers and introduction of neighborhood watch principles.