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infoTECHNICAL COOPERATION REGIONAL FOCUS ECLIBuilding the search engine of the European e-JusticeThe project is funded by the European Commission and implemented by: Publications Office ofthe Netherlands (leader), EPLO, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna (Italy), Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (Italy), Documentary Centre for the Spanish Judiciary, Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Croatia, Supreme Court of the Republic of Croatia, Centre of Registers and Information Systems (Estonia), Council ofState of the Netherlands, Ministry of Justice of Romania, University of Torino (Italy), Federal Public Service Justice (Belgium), Federal Administrative Courtof Germany, Federal Office of Justiceof Germany, Supreme Court of the Czech Republic, Hellenic Council of State.The EPLO is a partner in the project “Building on ECLI” aimedat building on the European Case Law Identi er (ECLI) and accompanying metadata into case law repositories of Italy, Estonia, Croatia, Belgium, Greece, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands and connects these repositories to the ECLI search engine of the European e-Justice.The program started in October 2015 and has a duration of 14 months.ECLI provides easy access to judicial decisions of other member States. This is a matter of growing importance in reinforcing the role of the national judge in applying and upholding EU law. Today, searching for, and citation of judgments from other Member States is seriously hampered by differences in national case law identi cation systems, citation rules and technical elds describing the characteristics of a judgment.The main characteristic of the ECLI is a uniform identi er that has the same recognizable format for all Member States and EU courts. It is composed of ve, mandatory, elements: ‘ECLI’: to identify the identi er as being a European Case LawIdenti er; 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 formatthat is decided upon by each Member State. Dots are allowed, but not other punctuation marks.Among the objectives of the project are: To improve qualitative accessibility of case law, i.a. within the ESE- EEJP, by having computer readable - and hence searchable - legal references within judicial decisions, especially to jurisprudence and national/European legislation (“linked open data”). To have EU wide policy guidelines on the publication of case law, speci cally addressing the issues of selection criteria, data protection and open data.106 ACTIVITY REPORT 2016