The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) is an identifier for court decisions in Europe. The identifier consists of five elements separated by colons: ECLI:[country code]:[court identifier]:[year of decision]:[specific identifier].[1] The standard is laid down in the Council Conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law of the European Union. The ECLI framework also contains a set of uniform metadata to improve search facilities for case law. Court decisions that have an ECLI assigned can be indexed by the ECLI Search Engine of the European e-Justice portal.
The concept of ECLI was first[2] launched at the Legal Access Conference (Paris, December 2008)[3] and at Jurix Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in Florence (December 2008).[4] Around the same time, the study by a task group of the EU Council Working Group on e-Law showed that accessibility of judicial decisions, both at the national and European level, was seriously hampered by the lack of standardised identifiers and metadata:
The task group suggested to establish a voluntary common identification system based on the European Case-Law Identifier (ECLI). ECLI as an identifier would be linked to an index with references. This would enable any citizen or legal practitioner to find any decision to which ECLI has been attributed from any public or private register or database in the EU. In addition a Dublin-core implementation for case-law should be established to facilitate searching case-law in different search engines.[5]Based on the report of this task group, the Council of Ministers agreed on the principles of ECLI and common metadata, and asked the EU Council Working Party on Legal Data Processing (e-Law) to elaborate the initial work. This continued work resulted in the Council Conclusion inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law of the European Union, decided upon by the Council of Ministers on 22 December 2010. It was published in the Official Journal of 29 April 2011 (2011/C 127/01).
ECLI does not primarily identify a paper or electronic document containing a judgment, but instead identifies the court decision at a more abstract level. In the terminology of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records on which it is based, ECLI is a work-level identifier. It is constructed with the intention to be meaningful, open, technological neutral, recognisable for both humans and computers, error-proof and interoperable with other identifiers.[6] The formatting rules for ECLI are prescribed in detail in the Annex to the Council Conclusions. Summarized, an ECLI always consists of five parts, separated by a colon:
Only the Latin alphabet is to be used, and that ECLI is case-insensitive, although it is written preferably in capitals. An example of a case law identifier of the Dutch Supreme Court is ECLI:NL:HR:1841:1,[8] which indicates a Dutch decision (NL) of 1841 of the Supreme Court (HR) with serial number 1.
According to paragraph 4 of the Annex to the Council Conclusions an ECLI website has to be set up, containing
The ECLI website was set up within the frame work of the e-justice portal of the European Union.
According to paragraph 5 of the Annex to the Council Conclusions an ECLI Search Engine has to be set up, enabling search by ECLI and metadata. This ECLI search engine launched on 4 May 2016. It provides access to national and European case law, stored in whatever database. Searches are possible on the basis of the ECLI, its metadata as well as full-text.
As prescribed by the Council Conclusions a resolver is available at https://e-justice.europa.eu/ecli/; with an ECLI typed after it, this link with show all available information on this ECLI, from whatever indexed website. As an example: https://e-justice.europa.eu/ecli/ECLI:CZ:NS:2015:32.CDO.2051.2013.1 shows from, a decision from the Czech Supreme Court, the information from the website of that court as well as from the Jurifast database of the Association of Councils of State and Supreme Administrative Jurisdictions of the EU. The latter document also has English and French metadata.
Documents are indexed by the ECLI search engine in cooperation between the European Commission and data providers, using the sitemaps protocol and robots.txt.[9]
The Council of Ministers is responsible for any future changes in the standard, while the European Commission is responsible for the ECLI-website and the maintenance of the ECLI Search Engine.
Every Member State (or other entity that wishes to participate in the ECLI system, including the EU itself) must have a national ECLI co-ordinator. The main responsibilities of this national ECLI co-ordinator are:
According to the Council Conclusions, Member States are free to decide on their own implementation route. A big-bang scenario is possible, but also a step-by-step approach is allowed. International organizations may also participate and can request a "country code" from the European Commission.
The table below lists all EU Member States and their current state of ECLI implementation. Also relevant European organisations that have implemented ECLI are included.
| Austria | Yes | 2014 | Federal administrative court, Federal financial court, administrative courts, Constitutional court, Data protection Authority, Supreme Court | Federal Chancellery. | No | 0 | ||
| Belgium | Yes | 2017 | Decisions in the internal database VAJA (all courts except administrative courts). | Yes | 96.000 | ECLI is not included in the public database Juridat. Hence, assigned ECLI codes can only be found via the ECLI Search Engine. | ||
| Bulgaria | Yes | 2018 | All decisions published by all courts in the national database. | Supreme Judicial Council | Yes | 1.933.000 | ||
| Croatia | Yes | 2017 | Most decisions from Supreme Court and other relevant decisions in the Croatian database. | Supreme Court | Yes | 176.000 | ||
| Cyprus | No | Department of Legal Publications | No | 0 | ||||
| Czech Republic | Yes | 2012 | Decisions in the database of the Supreme Court (also from other courts). | Supreme Court | Yes | 120.000 | ||
| Denmark | No | Danish Court Administration | No | 0 | Implementation of ECLI is foreseen in a new database with court decisions.[10] | |||
| Estonia | Yes | 2017 | All published decisions. | Yes | 293.000 | |||
| Finland | Yes | 2016 | Unknown. | Ministry of Justice | No | 100 | ECLI is only added in the open data portal, not on the Finlex public website. The Finnish decisions that can be found in the ECLI Search Engine are those included in the JuriFast database of ACA Europe. | |
| France | Yes | 2012 | Decisions of Council of State (Conseil d'Etat), Supreme Court (Cour de cassation),[11] Constitutional Council (Conseil Constitutionnel), Tribunal des conflits. | Office of Legal and Administrative Information | Yes | 90.000 | ||
| Germany | Yes | 2013 | Federal administrative court, Constitutional Court and the Federal Labour Court. ECLI is also available for 100 000 decisions of the courts of North Rhine-Westphalia.[12] | Competence center for the federal legal information system of the Federal Office of Justice | Yes | 49.000 | ||
| Greece | Yes | 2016 | Council of State. | Yes | 75.000 | |||
| Hungary | No | No | 0 | |||||
| Ireland | No | Department of Justice | No | 0 | ||||
| Italy | Yes | 2016 | Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, Council of State, administrative courts, Court of auditors. | Ministry of Justice's Directorate‑General for Automated Information Systems (ad interim) | Yes | 3.504.000 | ||
| Latvia | Yes | 2017 | All decisions published in the national database. | Court administration | Yes | 40.000 | Implementation was realised in an EU co-funded project.[13] | |
| Lithuania | No | National Courts Administration | No | 0 | ||||
| Luxembourg | No | No | 0 | |||||
| Malta | No | No | 0 | ECLI has been introduced in December 2011 for all new court decisions, but the code is as still not visible to the public.[14] | ||||
| Netherlands | Yes | 2013 | ECLI has been assigned to all decisions published in public database of the judiciary, in internal databases as well as to (historic) decisions published by commercial publishers. | Yes | 487.000 | Only the (487.000) decisions that have been published (full-text) in the public database of the judiciary have been indexed by the ECLI Search Engine. Metadata about all other ECLIs (around 2 million) that have been assigned can be found in the Dutch public database as well. | ||
| Norway | No | No | 0 | |||||
| Poland | No | No | 0 | |||||
| Portugal | Yes | 2017 | All decisions published since 1932, accessible via the Portuguese ECLI search engine. | Judicial High Council | Yes | 160.000 | Implementation was realised in an EU co-funded project.[15] | |
| Romania | No | Ministry of Justice | No | 0 | ECLI has been introduced in the internal ECRIS database,[16] but has not yet been included in the public ROLII database. | |||
| Slovenia | Yes | 2011 | All decisions in the public database. | Supreme Court | Yes | 136.000 | Slovenia was the first country to implement ECLI. | |
| Slovakia | Yes | 2012 | All decisions delivered after 25 July 2011 have an ECLI assigned. If a decision from before this date is appealed after it, it has an ECLI assigned as well. | Informatics and Project Management Section of the Ministry of Justice | No | 0 | ||
| Spain | Yes | 2014 | All decisions published in the public database have an ECLI assigned. | Centre for Judicial Documentation (CENDOJ) | Yes | 3.642.000 | ||
| Sweden | No | No | 0 | |||||
| United Kingdom | No | N/A | No | 0 | Brexit took place prior to any attempt at ECLI implementation. | |||
| European Union | Yes | 2014 | ECLI is assigned to all decisions of the Court of Justice. These decisions are available in EUR-Lex as well in the database of the Court of Justice. | Court of Justice of the EU | Yes | 36.000 | ||
| Council of Europe | Yes | 2015 | ECLI is assigned to all decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in the public HUDOC database. | European Court of Human Rights | No | 0 | Uses CE as its "country code" and ECHR as its "court code". | |
| European Patent Office | Yes | 2013 | ECLI is assigned to all decisions of the Boards of Appeal in the public database. | Publication Department of the European Patent Office. | Yes | 36.000 | Uses EP as its "country code". |
Metadata are to be attached to documents containing a judicial decision. They can relate to the ECLI itself (on the bibliographic work level, e.g.: date of the decision), but also to a specific editorial version (the 'expression level', e.g. a summary). In the Council Conclusions nine mandatory and eight optional metadata are listed. All these are based on the Dublin Core metadata standard. The mandatory means that without these metadata, a document can not be indexed by the ECLI Search Engine.
The mandatory metadata, as listed in the Annex to the Council Conclusions, are:
The optional metadata, as listed in the Annex to the Council Conclusions, are: