In a preparatory meeting, the Constitutional Court decided to refuse to initiate a case based on the application of the Prosecutor General, in which the Court was asked to assess the conformity of two protocol decisions of the Cabinet of Ministers’ sittings of 19 December 2023 and 25 June 2024 with the provisions of the Satversme, several laws and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
In both protocol decisions, the Cabinet of Ministers assigned the Ministry of Agriculture the task of ensuring that the weighted average sawlog prices determined in the short-term sales procedure and the changed price indexation mechanism are applied in the long-term supply contracts for coniferous sawlogs of the joint stock company “Latvijas valsts meži” until the introduction of a new price determination mechanism or the expiry of the existing contracts.
The Constitutional Court concluded that the contested acts are legally binding on one institution within a public law entity and do not directly require any actions to be taken outside the state administration. Moreover, they do not govern an indeterminate number of situations and are not applicable repeatedly. Thus, the contested acts are not normative acts, the examination of which would fall within the competence of the Constitutional Court to examine cases on the conformity of other normative acts or parts thereof with legal norms of higher legal force or the conformity of national legal norms of Latvia with international agreements concluded by Latvia. The above protocol decisions are considered to be individual legal acts of the Cabinet of Ministers, which also do not meet the criteria of an administrative act.
The examination of the conformity of such acts with the law is within the competence of the Constitutional Court, but the legislator has provided in the Constitutional Court Law only a specific range of subjects that may submit an application to the Constitutional Court regarding them: the President of the State, the Saeima, not less than twenty members of the Saeima, the Cabinet of Ministers and the Council for the Judiciary within the scope of its competence. The Prosecutor General is not one of those persons. The legislator has deliberately included an exhaustive list of subjects and relevant acts in the Constitutional Court Law, which may not be extended by those applying the law. Therefore, the Prosecutor General is not entitled to submit an application to the Constitutional Court regarding the above claim.