ECLI
In Brief

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) is a human readable and computer processable code that can – in principle – be assigned to every judicial decision from every national or European court. Its aim is to facilitate unequivocal citation of judgments and to improve cross-border accessibility of case law.

The decision on the (voluntary) implementation of the ECLI has been taken by the Council of the European Union in December 2010. Within these 'Council Conclusions' also a set of fifteen metadata has been decided upon to improve searchability of published judicial decisions.

To complete the ECLI infrastructure the European Commission has developed a search engine that can index all judgments with an ECLI assigned, from whatever data provider. Responsibility for national implementation of the European Case Law Identifier is borne by the national ECLI co-ordinators.