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 ...
of
European Union law 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 (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 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 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, 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 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 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,
Dutch and
German. 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 (sector 1),
directives,
regulations,
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 (: 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.
Other documents
EUR-Lex stores also international agreements (sector 2), parliamentary questions (sector 9),
EFTA acts, which include also acts by the
EFTA Court and by the
EFTA Surveillance Authority (sector E); judgments delivered by courts in contracting states and the EU Court of Justice under the
Brussels Regime; references to national case law concerning EU law (sector 8) and other public documents.
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 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 work with several language versions, users can use the
multilingual 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 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.
See also
*
Caselex
*
EudraLex
*
European Documentation Centre
*
European Union directive
*
EuroVoc
*
List of European Union directives
*
Treaties of the European Union
References
External links
* – Eur-Lex
Official Journal of the European UnionN-Lex website
{{Legislation of the European Union
European Union law
Internet and the European Union