---
id: "ecli"
kind: "datatype"
status: "draft"
is_pii: false
categories: ["legal", "government"]
country: ["EU"]
langs: ["common"]
quality: 85
url: "http://registry.apicrafter.io/datatype/ecli"
---

# European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) (`ecli`)

> **Draft.** Draft records have not been reviewed yet and may be incomplete or wrong; do not treat them as authoritative for legal or compliance decisions.

Identifier of a court decision, introduced by conclusions of the Council of the European Union published in 2011. It has five parts separated by colons: ECLI, the country code, a court code of at most seven characters, the year of the decision and a unique part of at most 25 letters, digits and dots. Country codes follow the EU style guide, so Greece is EL and the United Kingdom UK; the EU courts use EU and the European Court of Human Rights CE.

- Personal data (PII): no
- Categories: Legal and compliance (legal), Government related (government)
- Countries: European Union (EU)
- Languages: Common to most languages (common)
- Classification: identifier

## Detection

Regular expression (Python `re`):

```
^ECLI:[A-Z]{2}:[A-Z0-9]{1,7}:\d{4}:[A-Za-z0-9.]{1,25}$
```

## Examples

- `ECLI:NL:HR:1841:1` — Decision of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands
- `ECLI:EU:C:2009:344` — Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union
- `ECLI:CZ:NS:2015:32.CDO.2051.2013.1` — Decision of the Czech Supreme Court
- `ECLI:NL:HR:1841` (invalid example) — The unique part is missing

## Mappings

- wikidata: `P3570`

## Sources

- wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Case_Law_Identifier>
- wikidata: <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P3570>
- doc: <https://e-justice.europa.eu/topics/legislation-and-case-law/european-case-law-identifier-ecli_en>

## Quality

Score 85/100. Missing: translation, detector coverage.

JSON: <http://registry.apicrafter.io/api/v1/datatypes/ecli.json> · Edit: <https://github.com/apicrafter/metacrafter-registry/edit/main/data/datatypes/EU/legal/ecli.yaml>