ConsLeg The consolidation of the European legislation

1
ConsLegThe consolidation of the European
legislation

• Dr. Holger Bagola
• Publications Office
• Dir A Methods and development Formats

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Consolidation of EU legislation why?

• Consolidation of legislative acts is an important
  help for the citizens as well as their juridical
  counselors to collect information on the life of
  a given law.
• Consolidation offers the possibilities to know
  about the provisions of a law at a given time and
  a given place.
• Consolidation plays an important role in the
  politics of simplification and transparency.

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Types of simplification processes

• Consolidation brings together a basic law and all
  its modifiers, amendments and corrigendaThe
  result is a readable text with bibliographic
  references to the origin of a document
  component.The result is without any legal value,
  but for information reasons only.

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Types of simplification processes

• Codification is generally based on the
  consolidation of a family of acts, is revised by
  the competent services, controlled by the legal
  service and finally adopted and published
• Generally a codified act replaces the complete
  original family.

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Types of simplification processes

• Recast redrafts a single act or a collection of
  acts of a given legislative domain thus creating
  a single new act.The procedure is generally
  based on the consolidation of all basic acts of
  the group.The legal act is redrafted and enters
  into the normal legislative procedure.
• The single act is finally adopted and published,
  thus replacing the complete collection of
  original acts.

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Definition of a consolidation family

• Basic act
• At least one amendment
• Or at least one corrigenda
• Average relation 1 basic act 5 modifiers
  (amendments and corrigenda)
• Peaks gt 50 modifiers
• Generally several modifications expressed by the
  same modifier example 10 modifiers define more
  than 500 modifications.

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Consolidation production

• Daily consolidationIntegration of the provisions
  of an amendment into a basic act or already
  formerly consolidated family version
• About 3,000 families of the acquis communautaire
  (since 2003) are kept up-to-date in all languages
  for which the necessary basis is available
  (sometimes only 11, sometimes up to 19/20).
• The consolidation process in all languages takes
  6 weeks in average.

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Consolidation production

• Backlog consolidationConcerns the consolidation
  of the Secondary Legislation in the new language
  versions after 2004 accession.
• By end of 2005 about 800 families had been
  updated, the remaining ones will be finished
  until end of March 2007.
• Consolidation of Bulgarian and Romanian will
  follow on the same way.

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Consolidation production

• Consolidation work flow
• Pre-production
• Daily analysis of the Official Journal
• Identification of family for consolidation
• Preparation of working instructions
• Compilation of source files (Formex, TIFF images)
• Registration in the management system
• Internal validation of these steps
• Request for consolidation of identified family to
  external contractor
• Sending working instructions and sources to
  external contractor

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Consolidation production

• Consolidation work flow
• Production (stricto sensu)The execution of the
  consolidation is completely outsourced. The
  external contractor is charged with the
  consolidation and the preparation of the results
  in Formex and PDF
• Post-production
• Reception of consolidated families in a weekly
  rhythm
• Automatic validation of coherence of the
  delivered formats leading to acceptation or
  rejection
• Validation of contents
• Updating of the management system
• Publication of PDF version on EUR-Lex

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Types of modification

• Structural modifications
• Replacement of a structural component
• Insertion
• Deletion
• Restructuring
• Sequential/Textual modifications
• Replacement of an expression
• Insertion
• Deletion
• Secondary modifications (grammatical update)

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Some statistics

• Consolidation production
• 10,000 pages a week for daily consolidation
• 6,000 pages a week for backlog consolidation
• Acts concerned by consolidation
• Basic acts (as parents of a consolidation
  family3,005 corresponding to 51,077 pages a
  language
• Modifiers in force 8,049 on 66,136 pages a
  language
• Corrigenda in force 2,351 or 3,946 pages a
  language

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Some statistics

• Consolidation production in the context of
  codification
• Codified acts by end of 2006 250 families in 20
  languages
• Reduction of about 1,000 acts
• 10 less in volume of the acquis by December 2006

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Example of consolidated text (PDF)
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Example of consolidated text (PDF)
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Example of consolidated text (XML)

• Insertion of an article
• lt?CLG.MDFO ID"O001001M001000"
  IDREF"C001001M001000" ACTION"INSERTED"
  LEVEL"STRUCTURE" COMMAND"EXPLICIT"
  ACTIVE.DOC"32005D0755" ACTIVE.LOC"AR1PT1"
  MOD.LEVEL"1"?gt
• ltARTICLE IDENTIFIER"002A"gt
• ltTI.ARTgtArticle 2alt/TI.ARTgt
• ltALINEAgt
• ...
• lt/ALINEAgt
• lt/ARTICLEgt
• lt?CLG.MDFC ID"C001001M001000"
  IDREF"O001001M001000"?gt

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Example of consolidated text (XML)

• Opening processing instruction
• lt?CLG.MDFO
• ID"O001001M001000"
• IDREF"C001001M001000"
• ACTION"INSERTED"
• LEVEL"STRUCTURE"
• COMMAND"EXPLICIT"
• ACTIVE.DOC"32005D0755"
• ACTIVE.LOC"AR1PT1"
• MOD.LEVEL"1"?gt

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Example of consolidated text (XML)

• Closing processing instruction
• lt?CLG.MDFC
• ID"C001001M001000"
• IDREF"O001001M001000"?gt

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Example of consolidated text (XML)

• Replacement of an alinea
• ...
• lt?CLG.MDFO ID"O001001M002000"
  IDREF"C001001M002000" ACTION"REPLACED"
  LEVEL"STRUCTURE" COMMAND"EXPLICIT"
  ACTIVE.DOC"32005D0755" ACTIVE.LOC"AR1PT2"
  MOD.LEVEL"1"?gt
• ltALINEAgtAll costs of such destruction shall be
  chargeable to the person responsible for the
  consignment.lt/ALINEAgt
• lt?CLG.MDFC ID"C001001M002000"
  IDREF"O001001M002000"?gt
• ...

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Example of consolidated text (XML)

• Opening processing instruction
• lt?CLG.MDFO
• ID"O001001M002000"
• IDREF"C001001M002000"
• ACTION"REPLACED"
• LEVEL"STRUCTURE"
• COMMAND"EXPLICIT"
• ACTIVE.DOC"32005D0755"
• ACTIVE.LOC"AR1PT2"
• MOD.LEVEL"1"?gt