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EUR-Lex website

Access to European Union law
Screenshot Screenshot of EUR-Lex's portal
Type of site	Public service website and EU legal documents
Available in	Official languages of the EU
Owner	European Union
Created by	Publications Office of the EU
URL	eur-lex.europa.eu
Commercial	No
Registration	Not required
Launched	2001
Content license	Open

EUR-Lex is the official online database of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (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 of legal texts at the European Commission 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, 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 (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 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 website was opened to the public in 2001, while CELEX still existed as a separate database 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. 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 repealed 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 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 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 and white papers, 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, form sector 6 and include, inter alia, judgments, 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, 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 (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 downloaded in various formats (html, pdf, xml). For simultaneous work with several language versions, users can use the multilingual display, which is especially useful for translation and linguistics .

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

1. "25 years of European law online". Publications office of the European Union. Retrieved 23 August 2016.
2. "CELLAR, OPEN DATA, LINKED OPEN DATA EU Open Data Portal – presentation". Retrieved 23 August 2016.
3. "Common Access to EU Information based on semantic technology (presentation)" (PDF). Retrieved 19 August 2016.
4. Baisa, Vít; Michelfeit, Jan; Medveď, Marek; Jakubíček, Miloš (2016). "European Union Language Resources in Sketch Engine" (PDF). The Proceedings of tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16). Portorož, Slovenia: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-12-01. Retrieved 2017-11-21.
5. "EUR-Lex Corpus". Sketch Engine. Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. 2 June 2016. Archived from the original on 1 December 2017. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
6. "The Irish language gains full official and working status in the European Union". www.gov.ie. December 31, 2021.
7. "Irish is now at the same level as the other official EU languages - European Commission". commission.europa.eu.
8. "Irish gains full official and working status in the EU". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 2024-07-28. Retrieved 2024-07-28.
9. Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2015/2264 of 3 December 2015 extending and phasing out the temporary derogation measures from Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Economic Community and Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the languages to be used by the European Atomic Energy Community introduced by Regulation (EC) No 920/2005
10. "Types of documents in EUR-Lex". Archived from the original on 2022-03-18. Retrieved 2023-04-04.
11. "About the electronic edition of the Official Journal". Archived from the original on 22 September 2016. Retrieved 18 August 2016.
12. "About consolidation". Archived from the original on 28 August 2016. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
13. "JURE – Jurisdiction, recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters". Archived from the original on 2016-09-22. Retrieved 2016-08-18.
14. ^ "EUR-Lex - Help pages". Archived from the original on 2023-04-04. Retrieved 2023-04-04.
15. Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law
16. Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI)
17. "Access to legislation in force: a question of democracy. A view from a European Union Region: Catalonia. (presentation)" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 26 August 2016. Retrieved 18 August 2016.

External links

• Official website – Eur-Lex
• Official Journal of the European Union
• Types of documents in Eur-Lex
• N-Lex website

v t e Judiciary and law of the European Union
Judiciary	Court of Justice of the European Union European Court of Justice members Advocates General General Court Civil Service Tribunal European lawyer Relationship with ECHR Public Prosecutor European civil code
Treaties	Rome Treaty Merger Treaty Single European Act Maastricht Treaty Amsterdam Treaty Nice Treaty Lisbon Treaty Charter of Fundamental Rights Opt-outs
Acts	Acquis: Regulation Directive Framework Directive Decision Recommendation Digital Services Act
Procedures	Ordinary legislative procedure Consultation procedure Consent procedure Commission and Council acting alone Commission acting alone
Principles and terms	Acquis communautaire EUR-Lex Direct applicability Direct effect European labour law European Enforcement Order Gold-plating Four freedoms Home state regulation Indirect effect Incidental effect Minimum harmonisation Maximum harmonisation Preliminary ruling Precautionary principle Principle of legal certainty Recasting Principle of conferral Proportionality Staatenverbund State liability Subsidiarity Supremacy
Regulations	Council Regulation (EC) No. 1206/2001 Council Regulation (EC) No. 1348/2000 Customs Regulation 1383/2003 Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 EU-Eco-regulation Commission Regulation (EC) No. 2257/94 Commission Regulation (EU) No. 1170/2011 Customs Regulation 3295/94 Regulation on roaming charges Brussels Regime CLP Regulation Regulation on Community designs Societas Europaea European Union System for the Evaluation of Substances Commission Regulation (EC) No 474/2006 REACH Rome II Regulation Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation
Directives	Good Clinical Practice Directive Data Protection Directive ATEX directive Battery Directive Best available technology Biocidal Products Directive Birds Directive Capital Requirements Directives Clinical Trials Directive Computer Programs Directive Conditional Access Directive Copyright Duration Directive (93/98/EEC) Copyright Term Directive (2006/116/EC) Cosmetics Directive Dangerous Substances Directive (67/548/EEC) Dangerous Preparations Directive Data Retention Directive Database Directive Database right Directive 2000/43/EC on Anti-discrimination Directive establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation Information Society Directive (first Copyright directive) Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive on the Promotion of the use of biofuels and other renewable fuels for transport Directive on the re-use of public sector information Directive on Electricity Production from Renewable Energy Sources End of Life Vehicles Directive CHP Directive Directive on the energy performance of buildings Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights Directive 2004/38/EC on the right to move and reside freely Environmental liability directive European SEA Directive 2001/42/EC European units of measurement directives Habitats Directive Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Internal Market in Electricity Directive Landfill Directive Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions Directive on the legal protection of designs Markets in Financial Instruments Directive Measuring Instruments Directive Medical Devices Directive Posted Workers Directive Pressure Equipment Directive Rental Directive Resale Rights Directive Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive Satellite and Cable Directive Directive on services in the internal market Temporary and Agency Work Directive Trade Marks Directive European Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Unfair Commercial Practices Directive Universal Service Directive Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive Waste Incineration Directive Waste framework directive Water Framework Directive Working Time Directive
Cases	ECJ Rulings (Caselex): Allonby v Accrington and Rossendale College Apostolides v Orams Bosman Cassis de Dijon Chacón Navas v Eurest Colectividades SA Chen Ciarán Tobin Coleman v Attridge Law Costa v ENEL Factortame Francovich Kamer van Koophandel en Fabrieken voor Amsterdam v Inspire Art Ltd Kolpak Microsoft Corp. v. Commission Marleasing SA v La Comercial Internacional de Alimentacion SA Metock Nordsee Palacios de la Villa v Cortefiel Servicios SA Peter Paul and Others v Bundesrepublik Deutschland Procureur du Roi v Dassonville Ralf Sieckmann v Deutsches Patent und Markenamt Tanja Kreil Van Duyn v Home Office Van Gend en Loos
Fraud	Court of Auditors European Anti-Fraud Office Accountability in the European Union
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