Justice ministries in Latvia and Estonia to cooperate on confiscating property in Ukraine’s favour

Friday, 11 August 2023, 00:52

Latvia’s Justice Minister Inese Lībiņa-Egnere and Estonia’s Justice Minister Kalle Laanet have agreed to cooperate on confiscating property in Ukraine’s favour.

Source: Delfi, a Latvian news website

Details: Lībiņa-Egnere and Laanet met in Riga on Thursday, 10 August. The main topic on their meeting’s agenda was cooperating to support Ukraine in the field of justice, as well as developing cross-border cooperation in the enforcement of court decisions, alimony cases, and in the education of judicial personnel.

Lībiņa-Egnere said that Latvia and Estonia have similar goals in terms of how they want their countries’ justice sectors to evolve and have a number of opportunities to share their experience with one another in order to formulate a joint strategy at the European Union level.

"It is especially important to use both existing legal frameworks and develop new ones when providing assistance to Ukraine; this affects, in particular, the issues around confiscating property in Ukraine’s favour," said the Latvian Minister of Justice said.

She did not elaborate on the agreement with her Estonian counterpart.

Background:

In February, the Latvian Saeima (the Latvian parliament) passed amendments to the law on support for Ukraine’s civilian population in final reading; the amendments provide for the possibility of transferring state-owned vehicles to the Ukrainian government free of charge to support Ukrainian people. Vehicles confiscated from drunk drivers are also being transferred to Ukraine.
On 20 July, the EU confirmed that the European Commission's proposal to use frozen Russian state assets in the EU in Ukraine’s favour would not be published until September.
On 14 July, Bloomberg reported that the European Union could not reach an agreement with the European Central Bank on a plan to use the profits from more than 200 billion euros of Russian Central Bank’s frozen assets to restore Ukraine.

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