Preparatory documents of EC-law: their classification in CELEX Database

AutoreStratos Meintanopoulos
Pagine77-83

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@1. Introduction

CELEX, the database of European Union (EU) law, was initially conceived in the 70s as an internal tool of documentation for the law of the European Communities. Nowadays, while still remaining a valuable tool for the EU staff, it is also used extra muros by national administrations, academic institutions and the private sector worldwide. CELEX, which is produced and managed by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, offers multilingual, full-text coverage of a wide range of legal acts in html format as well as links to the same acts in other formats (PDF, TIFF) as far as they are available outside the database itself. It is the EU-law database par excellence, as it does not only gives access to legal documents but also accompanies each documentary unit (more than 200 000) by legal information, presented in the form of searchable fields, such as date of adoption, publication reference, validity, subsequent amendments, to name only a few of them. Furthermore, its coverage is not restricted solely to (primary and secondary) EU legislation; it also includes case law and references to national legislation. It contains, finally, documents providing additional information, useful for a thorough understanding of EU law.

Among this latter type of additional information, the "preparatory documents " represent the numerically most important category, in this paper we address their classification in CELEX. After explaining how the term "preparatory" is used in the database (2), we proceed to the presentation (3) and the analysis (4) of the current structure of classification, before examining problems related to its modification (5). Finally, we attempt to evaluate classification as a search option from the user's point of view (6).

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@2. Delimiting Preparatory Documents

Preparatory documents are considered as a valuable source for the understanding and even the interpretation of legal acts at national (constitutions) or international level (treaties). They are understood to denote all written preparatory work earned out by national or international bodies, leading to the adoption of a legal act. In CELEX, the term is used in both a more restrictive and a broader sense. More restrictive, as it does not cover the preparatory documents concerning acts of "constitutional" rank (founding treaties) but only those related to secondary legislation, Broader, because the database does not include documents corresponding to the various stages of the legislative or budgetary process but also various acts in which the institutions express an opinion on a question of general Community interest,

Most of the preparatory documents in CELEX belong to a specific sector, The eight sectors which are given below represent the first level of breakdown in the classification of acts:

- founding and accession treaties

- international agreements concluded with non-member States

- secondary legislation

- supplementary legislation (intergovernmental cooperation)

- preparatory documents

- case law

- references to national legal acts incorporating directives into the law of member States

- parliamentary questions

Three new sectors are under way:

- consolidated legislation

- acts of EFTA relevant for the European Communities

- a residual sector with not legally relevant documents published in the C series of the Official journal of the European Communities.

Parliamentary questions, which could fall under the broad definition of preparatory documents, make up a separate sector. Preparatory acts, issued pursuant to intergovernmental procedures belong also to a separate sector ("supplementary legislation"). Thus, the following concern exclusively documents adopted within the legal...

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