A proposal for a new version of the ECLI standard, provisionally called ECLI 2.0, was presented at a conference in Athens by Prof. Monika Palmirani, lecturer at the University of Bologna, Italy. The proposal was developed by an expert team of the BO-ECLI (Building on ECLI) project, funded under the Justice Program of the European Commission. The new version will be fully compatible with the current standard, which ensures that the investments made so far by a number of EU Member States to implement ECLI will be retained.
On the one hand, the proposed changes (see Prof. Palmyrani’s presentation, posted on the BO-ECLI project website) are aimed at eliminating some imperfections in the current version of the standard, taken into account during its implementation in actual working conditions. For example, the third element of the ECLI identifier, the code of the court rendered the decision, may contain only seven characters, making it difficult to place user-friendly codes. ECLI 2.0 adds another five characters, with which the code of the court will already consist of 12 characters. The fourth element makes it possible to indicate only the year in which the judgment was rendered, but not the date. For this reason, many Member States are forced to include the exact date of the decision’s adoption in the fifth element, thus making an unnecessary repetition of the year. ECLI 2.0 enables the fourth item to be extended to eight digits, thus enabling the inclusion the date the decision was rendered.
On the other hand, the proposed new version of ECLI 2.0 provides a number of additional options, including:
- Unique identification of linguistic, time or editorial versions of the decision, as well as the file formats in which it is presented
- Referring to structural elements of the text of the decision (e.g. when its paragraphs are numbered)
- Extension of the syntax of the identifier with HTTP-URI.
More information about the new version of the standard is contained in the “Analysis Report: Requirements Concerning ECLI 2.0”, which is published on the BO-ECLI project website and can be downloaded from here: http://bo-ecli.eu/downloads.
