Eur-Lex (stylized EUR-Lex) is an official

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and W ...

European Union law European Union law is a system of rules operating within the member states of the European Union (EU). Since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community following World War II, the EU has developed the aim to "promote peace, its valu ...

and other public documents of the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...

(EU), published in 24 official languages of the EU. The Official Journal (OJ) of the

is also published on EUR-Lex. Users can access EUR-Lex free of charge and also register for a free account, which offers extra features.

History

Data processing Data processing is the collection and manipulation of digital data to produce meaningful information. Data processing is a form of '' information processing'', which is the modification (processing) of information in any manner detectable by ...

of legal texts at the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

started way back in the 1960s, still using punch cards at the time. A system was being developed to capture relationships between documents and analyse them to extract and re-use

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

, but also to make retrieval easier. Through the years, the system and its scope grew as the Commission started collaborating with other institutions of the

and as the Union started expanding. It was named CELEX (Communitatis Europae Lex) and soon became a well-used interinstitutional tool. While initially used only internally, the system went through various degrees of availability to the public, including offering content under commercial

licences A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

via private companies. Finally, in 1997 a web version was launched and named EUR-Lex, hosted by the Publications Office of the European Union. The EUR-Lex

was opened to the public in 2001, while CELEX still existed as a separate

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

until the end of 2004. Subsequently steps were undertaken to merge the two services and to make them completely free of charge. With the accession of new countries to the

and advancements in web and data-processing technologies, the system needed to be improved. A new version was launched in 2004. In 2014 the website saw another major overhaul, including a new database called "CELLAR". "CELLAR" stores in a single place all metadata and digital content managed by the Publications Office in a harmonized and standardized way. An aligned parallel corpus consisting of 3.9 million EUR-Lex documents in 24 languages, ranging in size from 37 million tokens for Irish to 840 million tokens for

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

, was produced in 2016 and made available in the Sketch Engine. Unannotated data is provided to researchers under a Creative Commons license. At the time of publication, the authors considered the EUR-Lex Corpus the largest parallel corpus built from European language resources, more suitable for linguistically motivated searches than the EUR-Lex official website.

Content

On EUR-Lex users can access documents in the official EU languages. Language coverage depends on the date of the accession of a country to the EU. All EU law in force on the date of the accession of a new Member State is available in the language of the acceding country as are all documents adopted after this date. Documents

repeal A repeal (O.F. ''rapel'', modern ''rappel'', from ''rapeler'', ''rappeler'', revoke, ''re'' and ''appeler'', appeal) is the removal or reversal of a law. There are two basic types of repeal; a repeal with a re-enactment is used to replace the law ...

ed or expired before the date of accession are not available in the language of the acceding country. Irish (GA) has been an official EU language since 1 January 2007. However, for practical reasons and on a transitional basis, the institutions of the Union have been exempted from the obligation to draft or translate all acts, including judgments of the Court of Justice, in the Irish language. The derogation is reviewed every 5 years and is now in force until the end of 2021. It is gradually reduced according to a timetable annexed to Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2015/2264. While each document (and each language version) is an individual part of the database, the content is grouped into sectors. There are currently 12 sectors, each represented by a number or a letter:

Official Journal of the European Union

In 1998 the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) started being published online, on EUR-Lex. As of 1 July 2013, the digital version of the Official Journal bears legal value instead of the paper version, which is now printed on demand only. The e-OJ has an advanced

electronic signature An electronic signature, or e-signature, is data that is logically associated with other data and which is used by the signatory to sign the associated data. This type of signature has the same legal standing as a handwritten signature as long as ...

which guarantees its authenticity, integrity and inalterability. All the editions of the OJ are available on EUR-Lex, dating back to 1952, when they were available in

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

, Italian, Dutch and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

. They can be easily retrieved via a search or by browsing.

EU law

EUR-Lex contains all EU law (sectors 3 and 4), which can be retrieved by browsing or using the search options. The main types of acts under this heading are EU treaties (sector 1), directives,

regulations Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. Fo ...

, decisions as well as consolidated legislation (sector 0), etc. Consolidation is the integration of a basic legal act and all of its successive amendments and

corrigenda An erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) (comes from la, errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing pro ...

into one easy-to-read document. Consolidated texts are intended for use as reference and have no legal value. Acts which require transposition are published with a list of links to information about the national implementing measures (sector 7).

Preparatory documents and lawmaking procedures

The database contains also documents preceding legal acts, such as legislative proposals, reports,

green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combin ...

and

white paper A white paper is a report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. A white paper ...

s, etc. (sector 5). Some proposals never make it past the preparatory stage, but are still available for consultation. Each

legislative procedure A bill is proposed legislation under consideration by a legislature. A bill does not become law until it is passed by the legislature as well as, in most cases, approved by the executive. Once a bill has been enacted into law, it is called an '' ...

is presented in EUR-Lex with a timeline and a list of events and pertaining documents. Procedures can be accessed via the search or from one of the procedure documents.

EU case-law

These documents, authored by the Court of Justice of the European Union, form sector 6 and include, inter alia,

judgments Judgement (or US spelling judgment) is also known as ''adjudication'', which means the evaluation of evidence to make a decision. Judgement is also the ability to make considered decisions. The term has at least five distinct uses. Aristotl ...

, orders, rulings and opinions of the Advocates General.

CELEX number and other identifiers

CELEX number

While EU documents are numbered in different ways, each of them is assigned a unique, language independent

identifier An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical noncountable ...

, a CELEX number. This identifier is composed of the number of the sector, then 4 digits for the year, then one or two letters for the type of document and finally 2-4 digits for the number of the document. For example, the CELEX number of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive is 32012L0019 (3 is the sector, legislation; 2012 is the year of publication in the OJ; L represents EU directives and 0019 is the number under which the directives was published in the OJ).

ECLI

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) was introduced by the Council, which concluded that for "identification of judicial decisions a standard identifier should be used which is recognisable, readable and understandable by both humans and computers". Documents can be retrieved using ECLI also on EUR-Lex.

ELI

EUR-Lex offers also the possibility to retrieve documents by their

European Legislation Identifier The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) provides, among others, a solution to uniquely identify and access national and European legislation online. This will guarantee easier access, exchange and reuse of legislation for public authorities, prof ...

introduced with Council Conclusions of 10 October 2012 (2012/C 325/02).

Functionalities

Search

Documents can be retrieved via a

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

(IDOL by HP Autonomy) using various search forms. It is possible to search by document references, dates, text and a multitude of

. Registered users have the option of using the expert search and performing searches using Boolean operators.

Text display and formats

Texts and their

can be retrieved, displayed and downloaded in various formats (

html The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

pdf Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

xml Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

). For simultaneous work with several language versions, users can use the

multilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all ...

display, which is especially useful for

translation Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

and

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

Saved documents and searches

Registered users can save documents and searches in their EUR-Lex account, create search and print profiles, and set their own

RSS feeds RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many d ...

based on saved searches.

Preferences

Registered users have access to a plethora of settings with which they can customise their experience on the website.

Access to national law of EU member states (N-Lex)

N-Lex is a common access point to national law of each country of

. It is an interface between users and databases of national legislation.

References

External links

The Eur-Lex website

N-Lex website
{{Legislation of the European Union European Union law Internet and the European Union