European Case Law Identifier (ECLI)

National ECLI coordinator

The National ECLI coordinator is CENDOJ (CENTRO DE DOCUMENTACION JUDICIAL), the Centre for Judicial Documentation, a technical body in Spain’s General Council of the Judiciary: cendoj.ecli@cgpj.es.

Country code

The code for Spain is: [ES]

Creation of the national ECLI

The ECLI was introduced in Spain in November 2012.

This was possible because, since the start of the ECLI Project on 27 October 2011, case law in Spain already had a national identifier, called the ROJ (Repositorio Oficial de Jurisprudencia) - the Official Case Law Repository, which identifies the decisions handed down by all the Spanish courts, from the Courts of First Instance to the Supreme Court.

Through the website https://www.poderjudicial.es, we offer all citizens open access to the decisions handed down by all the Spanish courts, consisting of a total of 5 600 000 judgments, a number which increases every year. Judges/Senior Judges, Prosecutors and Court Clerks have access in a restricted environment with additional information and hyperlinks to the case law of the Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional), the European Court of Justice, as well as national and international legislation and doctrine: https://www.poderjudicial.es.

We currently maintain the ROJ national identifier - the Cendoj ID - as the official body for the dissemination of Spanish case law, and the ECLI at European level. On the e-justice portal, we therefore have, as of 2014, 2 500 000 decisions of the Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo), the National High Court (Audiencia Nacional), the High Courts of Justice (Tribunales Superiores de Justicia) and Provincial Courts (Audiencias Provinciales), as well as a selection of judgments from the Courts of First Instance (Primera Instancia) that are of legal interest or have social impact. The number of decisions increases every day as they are uploaded into the system. The ECLI integration process was successfully completed in Spain, and we are currently a partner in the BO-ECLI project.

The ECLIs in Spain consist of the following fields:

• ‘ECLI’;
• The country code: ‘ES’
• The court code: an acronym to indicate the court in which the judgment was given. – see the section ‘ECLI court codes’;
• The year of the decision;
• A serial number, which in the case of Spain is the sequential number of the ROJ national identifier. This means that once a judgment has been assigned its ROJ, it is possible to automatically assign to it its corresponding ECLI.
• Furthermore, in the case of Orders (Autos), the letter ‘A’ is added to the end of the sequential number.

EXAMPLES:

Where the ROJ is: the national case-law identifier.

1) *Judgment of the National High Court of 30 May 2014. Criminal Court, with ROJ SAN 2389/2014

The corresponding ECLI will be:

ECLI:ES:AN:2014:2389

2) *Judgment of the High Court of Justice of 15 April 2011. Appeals Chamber of Burgos, Autonomous Community of Castile-Leon, with ROJ: STSJ CL 782/2011

The corresponding ECLI will be:

ECLI:ES:TSJCL:2011:782

Order of the National High Court Chamber for Criminal Matters of 29 October 2015, with ROJ: ANN 199/2015

The corresponding ECLI will be:

ECLI:ES:AN:2015:199A

ECLI court codes:

In Spain, the court code for the ECLI is represented using the acronym of the court that issued the judgment and which corresponds with that used in the judgment’s ROJ national identifier.