EUR-Lex is the official

online database In computing, a database is an organized collection of Data (computing), data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, Application software, applications, and ...

European Union law European Union law is a system of Supranational union, supranational Law, laws operating within the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). It has grown over time since the 1952 founding of the European Coal and Steel Community, to promote ...

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 Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

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

Official Journal A government gazette (also known as an official gazette, official journal, official newspaper, official monitor or official bulletin) is a periodical publication that has been authorised to publish public or legal notices. It is usually establish ...

(OJ) of the European Union 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 an o ...

of legal texts at the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

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 (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * 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 European Union and as the Union started expanding. It was named CELEX () 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 via private

companies A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether natural, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specifi ...

. Finally, in 1997 a web version was launched and named EUR-Lex, hosted by the

Publications Office of the European Union The Publications Office of the European Union is the official provider of publishing services and data, information and knowledge management services to all EU institutions, bodies and agencies. This makes it the central point of access to EU law ...

. The EUR-Lex

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

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 or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

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 European Union 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 Digital content is any content that exists in the form of digital data. Digital content is stored on digital media or analog storage in specific formats. Forms of digital content include information that is digitally broadcast, streamed, or ...

managed by the Publications Office in a harmonized and standardized way. An aligned parallel

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

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, was produced in 2016 and made available in the Sketch Engine. Unannotated data is provided to researchers under a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bu ...

. 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 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 was reviewed every five years until Irish received full status as a working language of the EU joining the other 23 official languages of the EU on 1 January 2022. 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: * 1 - Treaties * 2 – International agreements * 3 – Legal acts * 4 – Complementary legislation * 5 – Preparatory documents * 6 – Case-law * 7 – National transposition measures * 8 – References to national case-law concerning EU law * 9 – Parliamentary questions * 0 – Consolidated texts * C – Other documents published in the Official Journal C series * E –

EFTA The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is a regional trade organization and free trade area consisting of four European states: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The organization operates in parallel with the European Union ...

documents

Official Journal of the European Union

In 1998 the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) started being published online, on EUR-Lex. From 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,

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

, Dutch and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also 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 Browsing is a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something of relevance for the browsing organism. In context of humans, it is a metaphor taken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open sh ...

or using the search options. The main types of acts under this heading are

EU treaties The Treaties of the European Union are a set of international treaties between the European Union (EU) member states which sets out the EU's constitutional basis. They establish the various EU institutions together with their remit, procedure ...

(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

amendment An amendment is a formal or official change made to a law, contract, constitution, or other legal document. It is based on the verb to amend, which means to change for better. Amendments can add, remove, or update parts of these agreements. They ...

s and

corrigenda An erratum or corrigendum (: errata, corrigenda) (comes from ) is a correction of a published text. Generally, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an a ...

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 com ...

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. Since the 199 ...

s, etc. (sector 5). Some proposals never make it past the preparatory stage, but are still available for consultation. Each legislative procedure 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 The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ( or "''CJUE''"; Latin: Curia) is the Judiciary, judicial branch of the European Union (EU). Seated in the Kirchberg, Luxembourg, Kirchberg quarter of Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, this EU ins ...

, form sector 6 and include, inter alia,

judgments Judgement (or judgment) is the evaluation of given circumstances to Decision-making, make a decision. Judgement is also the ability to make considered decisions. In an informal context, a judgement is opinion expressed as fact. In the context o ...

, 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, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...

, 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) ontology is a vocabulary for representing metadata about national and European Union (EU) legislation. It is designed to provide a standardized way to identify and describe the context and content of natio ...

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 that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

(IDOL by HP Autonomy) using various search forms. It is possible to search by document references, dates, text and a multitude of metadata. Registered users have the option of using the expert search and performing searches using Boolean operators.

Text display and formats

Texts and their metadata can be retrieved, displayed and

download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar systems. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote ...

ed in various formats (

html Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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

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

). For

simultaneous Simultaneity may refer to: * Relativity of simultaneity, a concept in special relativity. * Simultaneity (music), more than one complete musical texture occurring at the same time, rather than in succession * Simultaneity, a concept in Endogenei ...

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. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

display, which is especially useful for

translation Translation is the communication of the semantics, meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The English la ...

and

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

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 ...

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

References

External links

* – Eur-Lex
Official Journal of the European Union

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