New law to scrap several reasons for postponing conscript service in Estonia

Photo: Toomas Huik

The new Defense Forces Service Act taking effect from April 1 will eliminate several of the causes that young men subject to conscript service can cite to put off the call-up or evade it altogether, Postimees said in its Monday edition.

Under the currently valid law, adjournment of conscription or exemption from it can be sought for 17 different reasons.

The director general of the Defense Resources Agency, Kairi Rikko, said the new law will draw a line as to how long a young man can adjourn entering conscript service on the grounds that he is studying. "Lifelong learning's fine of course – I graduate from one college, go to another, then to a third –, but now the right to adjourn will be valid until July 1 of the year the young man turns 23," Rikko told the newspaper.

The line has been drawn there in order for a young man who graduated from high school aged 19 to 20 to be able to complete his bachelor's studies if he wishes. If the young man is planning to study more he will have to do his conscript term before embarking on the course of study.

Besides the law will scrap the practice whereby a young man who has received a punishment under criminal law for a traffic offense is exempted from conscript service and assigned to the reserve. As Rikko said, having a traffic offense on one's record doesn't hinder a person from doing conscript service. "We hope there will be an effect – the number of conscripts will definitely be bigger in the future not in the thousands, but in the hundreds," the head of the Defense Resources Agency said.

Another change expected to boost the number of young men eligible for conscript service is a new regulation concerning the work of medical panels at the Defense Resources Agency, Postimees said.

"It's about switching to function based evaluation. It may be that a rock fell on the person's toe when he was small. We, however, will uncouple the mobility and function of the limb from the diagnosis and look at whether the trauma from a long ago actually hinders [certain functions]," Rikko said. "If in fact the limb is mobile, the person engages in sports and goes to work, we have reasons to believe that he will cope in conscript service too."

The changes are necessary because under conditions of declining birth numbers and big emigration there may not be enough healthy conscripts in the future to man the necessary units. Over the next 15 years the number of young males entering conscription age will be in the range from 5,000–6,000 annually.

There are two more changes under discussion. First, the Defense Resources Agency wishes that doctors on its medical evaluation panels had access in the future to the data of the e-Health system so that the panel would see immediately a young man's medical history and vice versa, his family doctor would see the reason for adjournment and what treatment the young man should undergo based on the diagnosis.

The second change discussed is enabling the sending of summons to conscript service via the eesti.ee internet environment so that sending of the summons would formally count as delivery. That would put an end to problems related to incorrect addresses and evading acceptance of registered mail.