Dear Andreas Bauer,

Thank you for writing.

The court decisions available to the public in Riigi Teataja are not made available through API access. The court decisions must remain in an up-to-date state and in a lot of cases, personal data from those decisions may be removed by courts due to the information concerning a punishment of a person being deleted from the database or due to the data subject motioning for removal of personal data in civil and administrative court cases. It is important that the decisions remain in an up-to-date state and previous versions, which included personal data, would no longer be accessible.

However, there is a large collection of court decisions that have been anonymized and made available to the public in a machine readable format. They are accessible at https://avaandmed.rik.ee/andmed/ERT/lahendid/ and are free to use for the purpose you describe.

I hope this information is helpful towards your research.

Best regards,

Valter Lani

Riigi Teataja division

Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing on behalf of Aegis Compliance and Strategies OÜ to request written, source-specific authorization and the technical conditions for a limited research use of publicly available official Estonian court-decision data.

Project and bounded scope

AEGIS is developing an evidence-backed EU court-decision research and retrieval context across connected official and authorized sources. Coverage, selection rules, time range, freshness, and access mode are documented separately for every source. Full texts would be stored only where automated access, retention, reuse, data-protection safeguards, and correction/removal duties are sufficiently clear.

For Estonia, the intended scope is limited to a time-stamped context of official public expressions discoverable through the Riigi Teataja court-decision search. We understand that public coverage for first- and second-instance courts should be treated as reliable only from 2006. Older Supreme Court material would be handled only as a separately authorized cross-check. We will not describe the result as all Estonian judgments or as all judgments ever issued in Estonia.

We have identified:

• the official court-decision search:
  https://www.riigiteataja.ee/kohtulahendid/koik_menetlused.html

• an endpoint family observed during a very small, completed technical reconnaissance:
  https://www.riigiteataja.ee/public-api/api/v1/kohtuteave

• detail and document paths linked from official records.

We do not treat the observed endpoint family as a documented or supported API. We will make no new automated probe, pilot, inventory, detail request, or file download unless and until the responsible authority confirms the permitted official channel in writing. We will not bypass robots directives, terms of use, authentication, rate limits, or technical safeguards.

Requested written clarification

Please confirm, or refer us to the competent authority for, the following points:

1. Official access channel
   • Which API, bulk export, snapshot, feed, search interface, or other channel should be used?
   • Which HTTPS hosts, endpoint/path families, parameters, and HTTP methods are permitted for automated search, detail retrieval, and linked document retrieval?
   • Which paths, parameters, categories, or times must be excluded?

2. Staged research use
   • May AEGIS first run one deterministic, stratified pilot of 150 unique decisions, within a fixed range of 100–200?
   • The pilot would cover source-supplied time bands from 2006 onward, court groups, procedure/legal areas, decision types, publication forms, and file formats.
   • Would a later metadata inventory, document phase, incremental synchronization, or Supreme Court cross-check require separate written approval?

3. Rate and identification
   • Maximum request starts per second or minute, concurrency, burst size, hourly/daily quotas, preferred time windows, and retry rules.
   • Required handling of HTTP 429, Retry-After, and temporary server errors.
   • Required User-Agent, contact address, and any source-IP registration. Our proposed contact identifier is [email protected].

4. Retention and reuse
   • Whether AEGIS may retain exact search/detail responses, official files, metadata, URLs, retrieval timestamps, response headers, SHA-256 hashes, and backups, and for how long.
   • Whether a non-public local research archive, metadata index, full-text index, OCR, clearly marked machine translations, semantic representations, aggregate coverage reports, and an EU-wide subject-oriented search linking back to the official source are permitted.
   • Whether individual files or a complete corpus may be redistributed, and the applicable licence, legal basis, attribution, or other conditions.

5. Data protection
   • Official machine-readable anonymisation or redaction signals, if any.
   • Restrictions for criminal, family, youth, asylum, health, victim, or other sensitive decisions.
   • Whether any category must not be indexed or made searchable, particularly by personal name.
   • Rules for query logs and for requests by data subjects. Our default is no EU-wide person-name search, no person facets, and no name autocomplete.

6. Corrections, replacements, and removals
   • The authoritative signal or feed for corrected, replaced, further-redacted, temporarily unavailable, or permanently removed decisions.
   • Required reaction time and the treatment of local raw files, hashes, indexes, translations, caches, and backups after such a change.

7. Coverage and reproducibility
   • The reliable publication start date by court level, known historical gaps or selection rules, the meaning of official result totals, and whether a stable snapshot or cut-off mechanism exists for two independent inventory passes.

Proposed safeguards

Any authorized pilot would use one global rate limiter, the authority’s maximum concurrency, mandatory Retry-After handling, exact-source provenance, immutable hashes, an exclusive single writer, and fail-closed validation. Public browser accessibility would not be treated as reuse permission. Storage capacity would be selected after the authorized pilot; the current development drive is not intended as a mass-data target.

The Riigikohus portal is a separate source. Unless your written response expressly covers it, AEGIS will keep that source closed and seek separate confirmation from the Supreme Court.

Research reference

This request forms part of AEGIS’s disclosed 2026 research programme. A relevant public working paper is:

Andreas Bauer (2026), “The Institutional Window: Occupation- and Jurisdiction-Specific Calibration of Liability Signaling for Preserved Human Fallback Capability,” arXiv:2608.05969.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05969

The paper examines jurisdiction-specific legal institutions and provides research context for a source-transparent comparative evidence base. It is not cited as a legal basis for automated access.

Because this request involves technical operation as well as reuse and data-protection questions, I have copied the Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs and the Riigi Teataja contact address. If another unit is responsible, please forward this request or identify the appropriate contact.

Please provide a written reply with a case/reference number, the competent contact, the approved source and stages, any conditions, and the validity or revocation period. If a requested use is not permitted, we would appreciate confirmation of the permitted alternative, such as an official bulk channel or a metadata-only, federated approach.

Yours faithfully,

Andreas Bauer
Member of the Management Board / Managing Director

Aegis Compliance and Strategies OÜ
Juhkentali tn 8-9
10132 Tallinn, Harju maakond
Estonia

Registry code: 16772229
VAT ID: EE102678628
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://aegis.us.org/en/