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European Union Legal Research - Treaties

As you know, all legislation is adopted under an article or provision of the Community treaties. Although all treaties are published in the Official Journal following ratification, the compilation European Union: Selected instruments taken from the Treaties (Luxembourg: OOP, 1995) is quite handy to have. In addition to the Treaty on European Union, the text of the EEC Treaty is given as amended by the TEU and other texts in frequent use are included. Westlaw has files with the full text of all the treaties, making it very easy to find an elusive section or phrase in any of the treaties. In Westlaw the database ID is EU-TREATIES. These are also available on the Web at http://europa.eu.int/abc/obj/treaties/en/entoc.htm.

The basic treaties are:

Treaty Establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), April 18, 1951, 261 UNTS 140, often called the Paris Treaty.

Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), March 25, 1957, 298 UNTS 3, often called the Treaty of Rome.

Treaty Establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC), March 25, 1957, 298 UNTS 259, often called EURATOM Treaty.

Single European Act (SEA), Feb. 17, 1986, O.J. (L159).

Treaty on European Union (TEU), often called the Maastricht Treaty. 31 I.L.M. 253 ; 1992 OJ (C 191) 1.

Treaty of Amsterdam, 1997 O.J. (C 340) 1.

Consolidated versions incorporating the changes made by the Treaty of Amsterdam:

Treaty on European Union - 1997 OJ (C 340) 145-172
Treaty Establishing the European Community - 1997 OJ (C 340) 173-308

Another important basis of EU law are the accession treaties admitting new countries to the Union. These are:

Accession to the European Communities of the Kingdom of Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Jan. 22, 1972, 1972 O.J. (L 73).

Accession to the European Communities of the Hellenic Republic, May 28, 1979, 1973 O.J. (L 291).

Accession to the European Communities of the Kingdom of Spain and the Portuguese Republic, June 12, 1985, 1985 O.J. (L 302).

Accession to the European Union of the Republic of Austria, the Republic of Finland and the Kingdom of Sweden, August 29, 1994, 1994 O.J. (C 241).

European Court of Justice and Case Law

The Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance make up the judicial branch of the EU. In addition to the OJ, the decisions of the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance are published in their own reporter, Reports of Cases before the Court [ILS KJE 924.5.A2 Current issues: ILS RR] which takes usually several months to publish a decision. Probably the most commonly used commercial sources for court decisions are either the Common Market Law Reports [ILS KJE 923.7.C65] published by the European Law Centre or CCH’s Common Market Reporter [ILS RR KJE 925.5.E97]. Both of these reporters are more timely than the official reporter but do not reprint all cases.

Many libraries also hold slip opinions and all depository libraries receive Proceedings of the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance of the European Communities [ILS RR KJE 924.3.P76]. This weekly publication contains summaries of judgments, opinions of the Advocates-General as well as listings of new cases to be brought before the Court. ILS generally receives issues about eight weeks after the judgment is handed down. These are available on the Court's Web page one week to two weeks after the decision at http://europa.eu.int/cj/en/act/index.htm.

When we look for cases we turn first to online services. The Court of Justice decisions are available full text on Westlaw in the database EU-CS. The Court publishes the full-text judgments on their Web page at  http://europa.eu.int/cj/en/jurisp/index.htm a few days following the publication of the summary in the Proceedings.

European Parliament (EP) Documents

The European Parliament documentation has become increasingly important with the addition of the co-decision procedure after Maastricht. The parliamentary documents consist of the Debates, which are published in the Official Journal, and the Session Documents, which are available only in microfiche. European Parliament Documents are indexed in SCAD and the Commission's catalogue called Documents.  
The following is an example of a Parliamentary document number:

PE DOC A 3-343/91

These documents (A Series only) are available in microfiche Mic KJE 5390.A3 S47 (drawer 413).

The easiest, and really the only thorough way to research Parliamentary activities is to use the Legislative Observatory available on the Web at http://www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm. It contains references to all documents, including Parliamentary Debates, produced or discussed by the Parliament. Unfortunately, there is no paper equivalent of this database. 

In addition, PreLex (http://www.europa.eu.int/prelex/apcnet.cfm?CL=en) database was created by the Commission to allow other institutions to access information on the decision-making process between institutions. This database will allow you to find out what stage a proposal sent to the Council or Parliament has reached. It follows all Commission proposals and communications from their transmission to the Council or the European Parliament through to their adoption or rejection by the Council, their adoption by the Parliament or their withdrawal by the Commission.

Finally, you will probably need to know which member states have implementing legislation for EU directives. Finding Members States’ legislation implementing EU directives is not always easy as sources are rarely up to date. One of the most comprehensive publications is the Commission’s National Implementing Measures to Give Effect to the White Paper of the Commission on the Completion of the Internal Market. This guide is issued twice yearly. EU legislation is grouped along broad subject lines with official citations, deadlines for implementation, and citations to official sources for the Member States’ measures. European Current Law contains a cumulative table of legislation implementing EU directives.

The CELEX database from the European Union contains citations to national implementing measures. These are also available on Westlaw. Additionally they are also available on SCADplus (http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/scad_en.htm) under the heading "European Union Policies--Summaries and legislative follow-up." Select a topic and then click on "National Implementing Measures." Be warned, however, that these lists are very out of date. While they are a good starting point, careful research will be needed to update them. Currently the EU is making an additional database available that will track member states' implementing measures.

Online Research

Although we have mentioned the availability of specific information online throughout this guide, we want to emphasize in this section the value of databases available for EU research. The EU has been concerned with making as much information as possible about the organization available electronically from its inception. Therefore it has richer resources of information available online that any other international organization. We have appended to this guide information about Lexis and Westlaw databases which are important for EU research, but they do not have everything. 

The Internet

Certainly one of the best things to occur in EU research is the development by many EU institutions of excellent web sites for EU information. Although these sites are changing on a daily basis we are confident they are here to stay and we would be remiss if we did not survey a few of the best sites for this guide, but please remember this will almost certainly be out of date by the time you read it. We maintain an annotated "Favorite Web Sites" guide on the Harvard Law Library's Web site. In this guide there is a section on the European Union which contains hypertext links to sites that we find particularly useful. Because we use and review these links fairly regularly, this could be a good starting point for finding materials on the Web. The following sites are especially useful:

Europa Homepage  (http://europa.eu.int/) is at the top of the official heap of EU web sites and offers links to many other sites. News gives quick access to press releases for recent events in the EU. Here there are links to information on the Council Presidency and to the calendars of the Parliament, Commission etc.  The links to EUR-OP, the office for official publications, gives you instant access to their catalog and information about all the electronic databases. Clicking on "Information" gives links to the different databases available as well as links to the different institutions' web servers.  Since this site has search software, it is the most painless way to search the catalogs.

SCAD (http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/scad_en.htm), the bibliographic database of the EU, is often the best place to search for citations to the C part of the Official Journal because they have usually indexed the C part within a month of publication but they are generally several months behind in loading the C section on CELEX in full text.  SCAD is also one of the best sources for citations to periodical articles on the EU since the Commission and Court Libraries review over 1500 periodicals for articles relating to the EU for inclusion in this database. Their index of Community publications is also the best in our experience.

PreLex (http://europa.eu.int/prelex/apcnet.cfm) database was created by the Commission to allow other institutions to access information on the decision-making process between institutions. This database will allow you to find out what stage a proposal sent to the Council or Parliament has reached.

The Legislative Observatory (OEIL), the database of the European Parliament, (http://www.europarl.eu.int/home/default_en.htm) is the best and, in many cases the only, source for researching the EP. This database gives bibliographic references for all documents complied or examined by the EP. It give the status of legislative features, references and stages reached.

The European Parliament’s homepage (http://www.europarl.eu.int/sg/tree/en/) is another excellent site.

The Court of Justice of the EC (http://curia.eu.int/en/index.htm) also has a Web site. It is a timely source for a full text of the Proceedings and Press Releases and recent cases in full text.

IDEA: The Interinstitutional Directory (http://158.169.50.70/idea/ideaen.html)  is the electronic version of the Interinstitutional Directory of the European Union, which comprises the directories of the various Union institutions. It is the best source for finding current fax and telephone numbers. The search engine allows you to search by name or entity, and the divisions are very complete. If you want to figure out to whom to write about a problem with the OJ, this is the database where you should begin your search.

Finally, CELEX gives full-text coverage to a wide range of legal acts, providing multi-lingual access to the founding treaties, legislation, and case law. Texts are usually fully loaded and enhanced within a week of publication in the OJ. CELEX, available over the Web, is by subscription only. The ILS Reference staff can assist you with access. Although there are many other sources available, these sites and their links to other sites are more than enough to get you started surfing for very high quality research sources.