EUR-Lex progress, September 2005

Uncompleted areas of EUR-Lex are slowly being developed and there are also some welcome new features which will make tracking information simpler. Background files about the legislative process and the workings of the institutions have now been added to the site. From August 2005, there is now a live link to the text of COM documents from the list of legislative proposals adopted which is published in the Official Journal C series. Click on the page number in the electronic table of contents to go to the relevant entry in the OJ C then click on the document reference which appears on the left of the page. This will take you to the full text of the document.

Under the Collections heading in the menu the International Agreements and Parliamentary questions links are now live with their own search templates. There are also links leading respectively to the Council's database of international agreements at http://ue.eu.int/cms3_fo/showPage.asp?lang=en&id=252&mode=g&name= and to the European Parliament's Parliamentary questions section on its own website at http://www.europarl.eu.int/QP-WEB/home.jsp?language=en. Now that the new European Parliament site has been launched the EUR-Lex link is already out of date but is diverted automatically to the new location. However it gives access at this point only to questions for 2005 and no answers are yet available. Earlier years are accessed separately under the archives section of Activities. Questions here do include answers in most cases though the answer is not immediately displayed with the text of the question - you need to click on the answer icon to see the text. Within EUR-Lex itself it appears that fewer answers are available overall so this section is not yet complete. Notes explain that the full text of answers are only loaded once published in the Official Journal and while it is true that this data is running far behind in publication, nevertheless there are gaps in the electronic content. In its explanatory information EUR-Lex does state that further development and analysis of the documents - both for parliamentary questions and for international agreements - remains to be done.

So it is two steps forward and one step back. The previously announced access to consolidated legislative texts via the bibliographic notice is suffering technical difficulties and is not working. Also worrying is the fact that EUR-Lex has been fairly inaccessible for most of the 30th September due to maintenance work which is expected to continue over the week-end. Commercial services could not afford such major downtime during prime working hours, even with prior notification, and it makes it difficult to rely on a source that does this, even if it is free.