The Content of the Celex Database: Its Structure and Document Types
| Author | Michael Düro |
| Profession | Documentalist in the EUR-Lex Unit of the Publications Office |
| Pages | 48-59 |
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On the occasion of its anniversary it is almost obligatory to approach a unique system like CELEX by having a closer look at its history and development over time. This is not only interesting, from an academic or historical point of view, and sometimes entertaining, but also contributes to a better understanding of the tool and its future perspectives.
The last version of CELEX, which was still available online at the time this article was written, provided a solid foundation for the new EUR-Lex. A rough overview over the document references gathered in CELEX can complement its own history and provide a bridge to its successor.
The growth of the CELEX databases came with a history of its own: early statistics mention 8 000 document references in CELEX in 1974 1, the size of the database already exceeding 100 000 references in 1987 (31 December 1987: 104 942 2) and finally 300 000 in 2003 (on 30 November 2003 an expert search [CELEX_number=+] resulted in 303 879 references). As CELEX was no longer updated from 31 December 2004 onwards the total number of references available for the transfer to the new EUR-Lex was 316 072 references.
These references represent four principal groups of documents, which are legislation, case-law, preparatory acts and parliamentary questions. These four general groups are spread over 11 sectors in each of the final 20 language version databases.
The content of the databases can be described by presenting the different CELEX sectors, which also indicate the quite varying origin of the various document types.
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The following table gives an overview of the number of references available per sector:
CELEX references per sector
| Sector | Content | Number of references |
| 1 | The treaties | 5 117 |
| 2 | International agreements | 6 151 |
| 3 | Secondary legislation | 99 844 |
| 4 | Supplementary legislation | 1 489 |
| 5 | Preparatory acts | 46 627 |
| 6 | Case-law | 15 370 |
| 7 | National implementation measures of directives | 2 940 |
| 9 | Parliamentary questions | 107 604 |
| E | EFTA (European Free Trade Association) documents | 481 |
| C | Other documents published in the Official Journal | 30 449 |
| 0 | Consolidated documents | 0 |
| Total | 316 072 | |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
As the importance of each sector depends on the type of documents gathered there, the document types covered by each sector are briefly presented. The descriptors used within each sector are listed together with the number of references they are attributed to. This is to allow for a better understanding of the distribution of references not only across the database, but also across the different document types within a particular sector.
This section covers the basic treaties of the Union (including the amending and accession treaties as well as their consolidated versions) and provides a separate document (including a set of metadata) for every single article, protocol, annex or declaration. The Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, which dates back to 18 April 1951, is not only the oldest document in this sector, but in the whole database. The descriptors attributed are the following:
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| 1 | K ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) Treaty 1951 E EEC (European Economic Community) Treaty 1957; EC (European Community) Treaty consol. version 1992; EC Treaty consol. version 1997 A Euratom Treaty 1957 F Merger Treaty 1965 F Treaty amending certain budgetary provisions 1970 B Accession Treaty 1972 (UK, Denmark, Ireland, Norway) R Treaty amending certain financial provisions 1975 H Accession Treaty 1979 (Greece) I Accession Treaty 1985 (Spain, Portugal) G Greenland Treaty 1985 U SEA (Single European Act) 1986 M Treaty on the European Union, Maastricht (1992); EU Treaty — consol. version 1997 N Accession Treaty 1994 (Austria, Sweden, Finland, Norway) D Treaty of Amsterdam 1997 C Treaty of Nice 2000 T Accession Treaty 2003 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia) |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
The notification most widely attributed is the 'E' (1 518 references) covering the EEC Treaty of 1957 and the consolidated versions of the EC Treaty of 1992 and 1997. At the other end of the scale, the notification for the Greenland Treaty 'G' covers only 10 references, out of the 5 117 overall.
This section (which is further elaborated on in the contribution by P. Kustor, p.91) covers the external relations and contains instruments generated by the European Union in the exercise of its international responsibilities. The following descriptors can be found:
CELEX sector 2 (international agreements): descriptors
| 2 | A Agreements with non-Member States or international organisations D Acts of bodies created by international agreements P Acts of parliamentary bodies created by international agreements X Other acts |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
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Most of the 6 151 references in this sector are covered by the 'A' notification for agreements with non-Member States or international organisations (3 128), respectively the 'D' notification for acts of bodies created by international agreements (2 620).
The second biggest sector (99 844 references) contains not only acts adopted pursuant to the provisions of the basic treaties or under the second (Common Foreign and Security Policy - CFSP) and third (Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters) pillars. It also covers the statutes and rules of procedure of the institutions and Community bodies.
Most widely attributed are the notifications 'R' for regulations (64 940) and 'D' for Decisions (22 683), whereas only 17 Declarations are referenced ('C'). The complete list of descriptors is as follows:
CELEX sector 3 (secondary legislation): descriptors
| 3 | E CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy): common positions; joint actions; common strategies F Police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters: common positions; framework decisions R Regulations L Directives (accompanied by a hyperlink to a document containing references to national implementing measures) D Decisions (DE: Entscheidung); decisions sui generis (DE: Beschluss) S ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community): decisions of general interest M Non-opposition to a notified concentration J Non-opposition to a notified joint venture B Budget K Recommendations ECSC O Guidelines ECB (European Central Bank) H Recommendations A Opinions G Resolutions C Declarations Q Institutional arrangements: rules of procedure; internal agreements X Other documents Y Other documents |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
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One of the particularities of the database worth mentioning is the variety of documents gathered in sector 3 with the descriptor 'D': this descriptor covers, inter alia, decisions (DE: Entscheidungen) as legal provisions pursuant to Art. 249 of the Traety establishing the European Community as well as decisions sui generis (DE: Beschlüsse).
This rather small sector (1 489 references) covers legal acts, which result from agreements concluded between Member States. Thus they are instruments of international law in the traditional sense, usually located in areas closely associated with activities of the European Union.
The following descriptors are attributed to references within this sector:
CELEX sector 4 (supplementary legislation): descriptors
| 4 | A Agreements between Member States D Decisions of the representatives of the governments of the Member States X Other acts Y Other documents |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
Next to 543 decisions of the representatives of the governments of Member States ('D') the second biggest group within this sector is the 'other acts' with 498 references attributed the descriptor 'X'.
Preparatory acts are usually understood to mean all the documents corresponding to the various stages of the legislative or budgetary processes, including documents in which the institutions express an opinion on a question of general Community interest. The number of references (46 627) is, compared to sector 3, surprisingly small, because the biggest group within sector 5 (i.e. 'PC', Commission proposals for legislation, attributed 14 239 times) is available in CELEX only since 1984. The resolutions of the Parliament are covered by CELEX only since 1974 ('AP' with 7 370, 'IP' with 7 292 references).
The descriptors for this sector are grouped by authoring institution and cover the following:
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CELEX sector 5 (preparatory acts): descriptors
| 5 | G | Council and MS | AG Common positions KG Assent ECSC IG MS — initiatives XG Other acts |
| C | Commission | PC COM — prop. f. legislation DC COM — other document SC SEC XC Other acts | |
| P | European Parliament | AP Legislative resolution BP Budget IP Other resolution DP EP decisions XP Other acts | |
| A | Court of Auditors | AA Opinion TA Report SA Special report XA Other acts | |
| B | European Central Bank | AB Opinion HB Recommendation XB Other acts | |
| E | Economic and Social Committee | AE Opinion on consultation IE Other opinion AC Opinion XE Other acts | |
| R | Committee of the Regions | AR Opinion on consultation IR Other opinion XR Other acts | |
| K | ECSC Consultative Committee | AK Opinion XK Other acts | |
| X | Other organs | XX Other acts | |
| Other references | IC References only CC References only | ||
Source: CELEX [Expert].
The representation in the CELEX bibliographical details of the adoption of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 following the co-decision procedure might serve as an example for the legislative process and some references of document types involved. The retrieval for this legal provision in CELEX produces in addition to the full text and some metadata also the links to PreLex, the database on interinstitutional procedures managed by the Commission, and the Legal Observatory, maintained by the Parliament for the same purpose.
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The Court of Justice is the judicial authority of the European Communities. It ensures the implementation of the treaties and the interpretation and application of Community law. Since 1989, a Court of First Instance has been attached to the Court of Justice, which is not an institution in itself, but operates under the responsibility of the latter. The Court of First Instance deals with all direct actions against Community legal acts brought by natural or legal persons. The Court of Justice serves also as a court of appeal for its decisions 4.
The case-law file includes 15 370 references, most of them judgments (6 367 'J') of the Court of Justice or conclusions of the Advocate-General (6 048 'C'). A peculiarity of the references available in this sector is that the analysis and the attribution of metadata are within the sole responsibility of the Court, which provides the data for the CELEX database. The descriptors available are as follows:
CELEX sector 6 (case-law): descriptors
| 6 | A Judgment B Order F Opinion C Opinion of the Advocate-General J Judgment O Order S Seizure T Third party proceeding V Opinion X Ruling | Court of First Instance |
| Court of Justice |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
As an example, the CELEX search 5 for case-law from the Court of Justice of the European Communities on 'Access to documents' and '1049' produces as a result only one reference, i.e. to Case C-41/00 P 6. The full text is presented in an unstructured HTML format, which is quite hard to read because of the lack of formatting. Added value is provided through the results of the legal and documentary analysis done by the Court itself: not only the 'subject matter' or 'type of procedure' are available in the 'All' view, but also the 'Instruments cited in case-law' or the 'Case affecting' as more complex relational information.
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When using the retrieval form on the website of the Court of Justice 7 by selecting 'Judgments' and entering 'Access to Documents, 1049' into the text field, the search produces a short-list with 4 judgments: Case C-41/00 P and three hits from the Court of First Instance. The presentation of the judgment is in HTML, but it is richer and better structured than the one in CELEX. Additional information is not available within this form of presentation.
A directive is binding on Member States as regards the objective to be achieved but leaves to national authorities the choice of form and methods used to attain the objective. CELEX aims to reflect some aspects of this interaction between Community law and national law by providing publication references to Member States' national provisions enacting Community directives (and ECSC recommendations). The creation of a directive (or, at the time, of an ECSC recommendation) in the database is systematically (i.e. automatically) followed by the addition of a corresponding Sector 7 document. Each Member State is responsible for supplying references to its own implementing legislation to the Commission, which has set up an own monitoring system to follow the transposition processes. But due to technical problems Sector 7 of CELEX had not been updated since June 1999. For that reason the only files added on the monthly update are the automatically created references to the directives, which count 2 940 overall, 106 of which come with the year 2004 in the document number. The new EUR-Lex, however, presents up-to-date data from the backlog, as well as more recent references from 2005 and 2006.
The questions addressed by the members of the European Parliament to the institutions are loaded in CELEX once answered by the institution concerned. This sector is the largest sector (107 604) in terms of number of documents and represents more than one third of the number of database entries. The descriptors available for this sector of the database are the following:
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CELEX sector 9 (parliamentary questions): descriptors
| 9 | E Written question (worded with a request for a written answer published in the Official Journal) since 1963 H Question at question time (published in the debates of the EP) since 1975 O Oral question (raised during session and published in the debates of the EP) since 1973 |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
Most references concern written questions (84 280 'E'). A search example for a document from 1996 shows that older documents are not available in full text: the search for written question 2868/96 8 in CELEX provides the bibliographical data including the subject, the relevant dates and the publication reference in the Official Journal. The search for more recent written questions proves that these are available in TIF format, which can be ordered online from the EUDOR archive. In contrast the search for the 1996 question on the website of the European Parliament 9 results not only in the full text of the question, but also in a link to the full text of the reply.
Sector E, introduced on 13 December 2002 10, covers the full text of acts adopted by the EFTA institutions (Surveillance Authority, Standing Committee, Court) and published in the Official Journal within the framework of the Agreement on the European Economic Area of 1994 11. As a consequence the coverage extends to documents from 1994 onwards and includes the attribution of the following descriptors for the different document types:
CELEX sector E (EFTA documents): descriptors
| E | A International agreement C Act of the EFTA Surveillance Authority G Act of the EFTA Standing Committee J Decision, order, consultative opinion of the EFTA Court P Pending case of the EFTA Court X Other acts |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
Containing 480 references overall, sector E is the smallest CELEX sector, with the biggest group being documents from the EFTA Surveillance Authority (289 'C').
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The whole range of metadata is not applied to EFTA documents. For example the relation between documents is not covered: when looking for the rules of procedure of the EFTA Court, CELEX provides the reference to the initial version and the option to order the full text in TIF format from the EUDOR archive. The bibliographical data do not refer to any of the amendments 12, which are in fact contained in the CELEX database. The EFTA Court itself presents a (presumably) consolidated version on its website 13, but without giving a date of entry into force or a reference to any or at least the most recent amendment.
Sector C is available since January 2001 14 and serves as a default sector for all documents that are published in the Official Journal C series since 1995 that do not have a direct legal interest and, therefore, are not classified and analysed as traditional CELEX documents. This sector contributes to providing complete coverage of the Official Journal within the framework of the development of the EU law portal, i.e. the integration of CELEX and EUR-Lex. The number of documents entered per year is shown in the following table:
CELEX sector C: number of references per year
| C | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | Total |
| Documents | 0 | 3 226 | 3 760 | 2 916 | 2 924 | 3 004 | 3 223 | 3 452 | 3 017 | 3 013 | 1 910 | 30 445 |
Source: CELEX [Expert].
From 1998 on the full text is available in CELEX: via the menu search in TIFF and PDF, via the expert search only in PDF.
Sector 0, which in the reference manual was announced to be available in 2003, is to cover consolidated texts, i.e. non-official documents integrating basic instruments of Community legislation with their amendments and corrections. This sector is intended for use as a documentation tool only. The documents have no legal value. In view of the ongoing nature of the consolidation of legal instruments, there is no guarantee that a consolidated text incorporates the latest state of an act. Although numerous consolidated versions of legal provisions werePage 58 available already in the respective section of the EUR-Lex portal, the searches on the whole sector in CELEX expert (CELEX_number=0+) match no document.
Sector 0 can serve as an example, and provide evidence for the ongoing development of CELEX, and now its successor EUR-Lex: at the end of July 2006, 9 285 references to consolidated versions of acts of secondary legislation could be found in the new system. They were made available from December 2005 15 onwards and illustrate that the new system is not only meant to be more user-friendly and completely free of charge, but also continues to open access to a growing variety of document types, together with the accompanying metadata, which provide additional value.
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[1] cf. SEC(76)239, Annex.
[2] cf. SEC(86)688, p. 4.
[4] In the meantime the Civil Service Tribunal has become operational; its documents will be made available via EUR-Lex.
[5] Menu search: File Category: Case-law, Search terms: 'Access to Documents' with '1049' in 'Title and text', result narrowed by 'type of document' All case-law: Court of Justice.
[6] cf. 62000J0041 or European Court reports 2003, page I-02125.
[7] Recent Case Law - Formulaire [http://curia.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en].
[8] [91996E2868] written question No 2868/96 by Alex Smith to the Council. Publication of study on public access to documents (OJ C 138, 5.5.1997, p. 15).
[9] Simple search for parliamentary questions, e.g. using the question number [http://www2.europarl. eu.int/omk/OM-Europarl?PR OG=FORMS&L=EN&PUBR EF=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+SSIM PLE+0+FORM+HTML4+V0/ /EN&LEG_ID=5].
[10] cf. CELEX news, 13.12.2002.
[11] [21994A0103(01)] Agreement on the European Economic Area (OJ L 1, 3.1.1994, pp. 3-36).
[12] e.g. [E1995J0302(01)] Amendments to the Rules of Procedure of the EFTA Court, adopted on 9 January 1995 (OJ L 47, 2.3.1995, pp. 31-32); or [E1997J0918(01)] Amendments to the Rules of Procedure of the EFTA Court adopted by the Court on 22 August 1996 and approved by the governments of the EFTA States (OJ L 255 , 18.9.1997, pp. 36-39).
[13] cf. EFTA Court - rules of procedure [http://www. eftacourt.lu/rulesprocedure. asp].
[14] cf. CELEX news, 13.12.2000.
[15] cf. CELEX news, 5.12.2005.
