European legislation identifier: Making EU laws easier to find and reuse
A common standard helps citizens and governments access legislation across borders
The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) is a European initiative designed to make legislative documents easier to access, share, and reuse across the European Union. The ELI providers a standard way to identify and describe legal documents published at both EU and national level. By assigning each legal act a unique web identifier and consistent metadata, it helps users find and understand legislation more easily, regardless of country or language.
At its core, ELI is built on a simple idea: every piece of legislation should be accessible through a stable and meaningful web link. The links, known as Uniform Resource Identifiers, are supported by structured metadata that describes key aspects of the legal text, such as its type, date, and legal basis. The system follows four main pillars, including identification, metadata, description, publication and data synchronisation, which together ensure interoperability between different legal systems. Today, ELI is implemented on EUR-Lex and in several national legal publishing platforms on a voluntary basis.
ELI is crucial to ensure the advancement of open data in Europe. By standardising how legislation is published online, it enables legal information to be machine-readable and reusable across borders. This improves transparency and allows researchers and public administrations to build new services based on legal data.
To explore how ELI works in practice, visit the EUR-Lex ELI help page and discover examples of ELI-based legislation. You can also learn more about its implementation and benefits through the ELI register on EUR-lex.
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