---
id: "eli"
kind: "datatype"
status: "draft"
is_pii: false
categories: ["legal", "government"]
langs: ["common"]
quality: 75
url: "https://registry.apicrafter.io/datatype/eli"
---

# European Legislation Identifier (ELI) (`eli`)

> **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.

HTTP URI that identifies a piece of legislation under the European Legislation Identifier framework. Each jurisdiction defines its own URI template from common components such as jurisdiction, type, year, number, version and language, in an order it chooses; the EU level uses data.europa.eu/eli/. There is no fixed syntax: the regexp only requires a web URI with an /eli/ path segment, which every known implementation has but the framework does not mandate.

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

## Detection

Regular expression (Python `re`):

```
^https?://[A-Za-z0-9.-]+(?:/[^\s/?#]+)*/eli/[^\s?#]+$
```

## Examples

- `http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2009/138/oj` — ELI of Directive 2009/138/EC
- `https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/de` — ELI of a Swiss federal act
- `http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2012/act/10/enacted/en` — ELI of an Irish act
- `https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679` (invalid example) — A EUR-Lex link without an ELI path

## Sources

- wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Legislation_Identifier>
- doc: <https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14172-2017-INIT/en/pdf>
- doc: <https://op.europa.eu/documents/2050822/2138819/ELI+Implementation+Methodology.pdf>

## Quality

Score 75/100. Missing: mapping (Wikidata, Schema.org, ...), translation, detector coverage.

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