European Case Law Identifier (ECLI)

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) has been developed to facilitate the correct and unequivocal citation of judgments from European and national courts. A set of uniform metadata will help to improve search facilities for case law.

Main characteristics of ECLI
ECLI is a uniform identifier that has the same recognizable format for all Member States and EU courts. It is composed of five, mandatory, elements:
‘ECLI’: to identify the identifier as being a European Case Law Identifier;
the country code;
the code of the court that rendered the judgment;
the year the judgment was rendered;
an ordinal number, up to 25 alphanumeric characters, in a format that is decided upon by each Member State. Dots are allowed, but not other punctuation marks.