ECLI
Background

Access to case law is of fundamental importance for the Rule of Law: it facilitates the scrutiny of justice, contributes to the transparency of the judiciary and informs the public about the continuous development of the law.

Apart from access to national case law, the integration of Europe also necessitates for easy and cross border access to case law of the European courts and other Member States of the European Union. In the Cilfit Case (ECLI:EU:C:1982:335) the Court of Justice even decided that in specific circumstances the national judge has an obligation to consult the case law of other European Member States.

Although in recent years we have witnessed an impressive increase in the number of judicial decisions published online, qualitative accessibility of the information contained therein has not kept pace with this quantitative growth. The lack of standardized identifiers, citation styles, metadata and document structures seriously hampers effective case law search. The adoption of the ‘ECLI Council Conclusions’ was an important step in addressing these problems.

The introduction of ECLI was a result of political demand for an improved cross-border accessibility of national case law. Judicial decisions are registered in various national and cross-border databases, but often having a different identifier in each and every database or law review. All these identifiers – if known at all – had to be cited to enable readers of the citation to find the cases in the database of their preference. Different citation rules and styles complicated the search. Moreover, users had to go to all the databases to find out whether these documents were available – s ummarized, translated or annotated.

By creating one single overarching identifier – that can also be used for citation – a standardized set of metadata and one European search interface, a first but important step has been taken to improve the cross-border and multilingual accessibility of judicial decisions within the European Union.