EUR-Lex developments: 12/2018

We are pleased to communicate the latest changes of EUR-Lex.

The law-making procedures have a new display resulting in a clearer and simpler view as well as facilitating the understanding of all different stages in the lifecycle of a legal act.

The biggest improvement is grouping the existing procedural steps ('events') under the relevant categories such as ‘Proposal’, ‘Opinions’, ‘First reading’, ‘Adoption’, corresponding to the steps of the decision making process.

At first view, only the highest level of events and metadata are available. Then, thanks to the expand/collapse functionality the user can discover additional information.

The new display concerns ordinary legislative procedures (COD), non-legislative procedures (NLE) and special legislative procedures (requiring either European Parliament’s consent (APP) or consultation with the European Parliament (CNS)), launched after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty (1st December 2009).

Additional information has been added such as:
- indication of the status of the procedure,
- links to the relevant glossary of summaries of EU legislation explaining the type of legislative procedure,
- link to the Commission internal procedure,
- possibility to reverse the order of categories (from the oldest to the most recent ones).
New type of documents are now available:
- Opinions from the European Parliament committee
- Opinions from the European Central Bank on draft national legislation.
Linked documents represented only by their CELEX identifier now display the titles in a pop-up frame appearing when the mouse is positioned over the CELEX.
Additional pages have been optimized for the mobile version.
ELI identifiers have been assigned to the Articles of the Treaties.
A new dedicated page, mainly addressed to data re-users, is now available under the 'About' tab. It contains information about EUR-Lex architecture and how to retrieve content from EUR-Lex or its data repository.
Expert search, Webservice, RSS feeds: The new release of EUR-Lex includes technical updates mainly affecting expert users and web service users.

More concretely, the EUR-Lex tables used for defining the following data have changed:
- author of document
- name of the treaty/treaties that form the legal basis upon which the document was adopted
- authentic language version of an act or a European Court case
- country of origin of a question referred for a preliminary ruling and nationality of parties, and
- institution, body or Member State having presented observations on the case in a preliminary ruling (EU case law)
The update brings harmonisation and significant improvements to the data. In terms of display, the changes are visible in the expert search form.

Finally, your saved searches or RSS feeds using the above metadata have been updated in order to use the equivalent new codes or labels.

Web service users should contact us in order to be informed of the need to update their web service client applications.