1. European Case Law Identifier
OASIS / LegalCiteM
22 July 2015
Marc van Opijnen
Publications Office of the Netherlands

2. Topics The ECLI ecosystem: Implementation: state of play
Identifier
Metadata
National co-ordinator
European ECLI portal
Implementation: state of play
Future work / BO-ECLI. 2 2

4. ECLI Ecosystem 1: Identifier
Identifies the judgment, not the case
Identifies the judgment at an abstract level, not a specific document
Vendor and medium neutral
As citation readable by humans and computers
Not (necessarily) replacing national identifiers
Fixed format of (always) five elements:
ECLI:
country:
court:
year:
number
ECLI:
NL:
HR:
2012:
938
ECLI:
SI:
VSTS:
2015:
VIII.IPS 4

5. ECLI Ecosystem 2: Metadata
Based on international standard 'Dublin Core'
Mandatory / optional
Most allow different language versions, e.g. an English summary on a Spanish judgment
Technical scheme available.

6. ECLI Ecosystem 3: National Co-ordinator
Court codes
Fifth part of ECLI
Maintain information on e-Justice portal
National implementation, technical and organizational
Introduction in stages
With or without historical records
Connecting to the EU ECLI portal. 6

7. ECLI Ecosystem 4: EU portal
Part of the European e-Justice portal
European Commission harvests national repositories, which are standardized into a common scheme
Using standards like Sitemaps and Robots.txt.

12. Implementation: State of Play

13. Implementation ECLI Legend (Partly) implemented and public
Work in progress
No implementation started
Non-EU
Court of Justice of the European Union
Board of Appeal European Patent Office
European Court of Human Rights 13

16. Future Work Going live of the portal (2015-H2)
More implementations of ECLI
More countries / organizations
More courts within participating entities
Historical records
More secundary data providers
BO-ECLI.

17. BO-ECLI Building on the European Case Law Identifier
EU-commission funded in programme JUST/2014/JACC/AG/E-JU Action grants to support National or transnational e-Justice projects
Start 1 October 2015
Duration 1,5 – 2 y
Budget ca. € 1,2 mil.

18. BO-ECLI objectives
(Further) implementation of ECLI & integration with ESE-EEJP in:
Belgium
Italy
Germany
Estonia
Czech Republic
Greece
Croatia
Netherlands.

19. BO-ECLI objectives
Improving accessibility to case law by creating linked open data
A 2.0 version of the ECLI standard, which is aligned with other semantic web standards as well as backwards compatible with the 1.0 version
To have EU wide policy guidelines on the publication of case law, specifically addressing the issues of selection criteria, data protection and open data.

20. BO-ECLI objectives
To have ECLI widely used for citing case law in all legal and academic writings and for interoperability in (legal) IT applications.

21. Partners BO-ECLI 21

22. Thank you