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Thursday, 08 June 2017

BO ECLI Conference has been successfully concluded in Athens

On 8 & 9 June 2017, the BO-ECLI Conference “ECLI AND BEYOND -Improving Online Access to Court Decisions” was successfully organized and hosted in Athens at Titania Hotel by the European Public Law Organization (EPLO).

Building on ECLI (BO-ECLI) is a project co-funded by the Justice Programme of the European Union, involving sixteen partners from ten Member States (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Estonia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Romania) that aims to broaden the use of ECLI and to further improve the the accessibility of case law.

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) is a human readable and computer processable code that can – in principle – be assigned to every judicial decision from every national or European court. Its aim is to facilitate unequivocal citation of judgments and to improve cross-border accessibility of case law.

The decision on the (voluntary) implementation of the ECLI has been taken by the Council of the European Union in December 2010. Within these 'Council Conclusions' also a set of fifteen metadata has been decided upon to improve searchability of published judicial decisions. To complete the ECLI infrastructure the European Commission has developed a search engine that can index all judgments with an ECLI assigned, from whatever data provider. Responsibility for national implementation of the European Case Law Identifier is borne by the national ECLI coordinators.

Greece participates in the BO-ECLI project with the European Public Law Organization and the Hellenic Council of State.

The opening of the Conference was declared by Professor Spyridon Flogaitis, Director of the Public Law Organization, while welcome speeches were addressed on behalf of the Minister of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights and the President of the Hellenic Council of State.

The Conference attracted many delegates from many EU Member States, as well as representatives from the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Publications Office of the European Union, the Hellenic Council of State and many attendees from the legal community of Greece.

The Conference was coordinated by the Project Manager of the BO-ECLI project Mr Marc Van Opijnen, who was also one of the key note speakers of the event.

The Conference was a great forum for the promotion of the use of ECLI in the European legal community while it also offered a valuable opportunity to the delegates to provide and receive a wide range of information and updates, to discuss issues of mutual interest and work together with a view to a promising future on improving the online accessibility of court decisions.

For further info and photos of the Conference, please visit bo-ecli.eu Part of the presentations will be presented online shortly.

tags: BO-ECLI, co-funded project, Justice Programme of the European Union,the accessibility of case law