What it is
A case citation points at a decision closely enough that a reader can find it. It assembles some of: the court, the date, the parties, a case number, a report reference, a machine-readable identifier and a paragraph number. Which of those are present, in what order, and with what punctuation between them is what a community settles.
The languages settle none of it. A citation can lead with the case number or bury it after the parties, give the year in brackets or the full date in words, name the report or leave it out.
One boundary has to be stated because it is easy to cross. A separate convention governs which elements are set in italics, the parties' names being the usual candidates. That is a typographic question and not this record's, and the test separates them cleanly: strip the italics and a complete, correctly composed citation remains, wrongly typeset; strip the identifier and the citation is incomplete.
Where the expectation comes from
House, and here on the strongest warrant the tier can have, because the instrument that created the identifier says in its own text that it binds nobody.
The Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier, Official Journal 2011/C 127/01, fix five components in a required order at Annex 1.1: the abbreviation "ECLI", a country code, a court code, the year of the decision in four digits, and an ordinal number unique to that court and year. At 1.2, "All components are separated by a colon (':')". Then paragraph 19: Member States "are invited to introduce, on a voluntary basis at the national level", the identifier and a minimum set of uniform metadata. Later conclusions on the same subject, Official Journal 2019/C 360/01, describe themselves as following the first version and repeat the invitation rather than converting it into a requirement.
Around the identifier, everything is a house rule of whoever commissioned the text. The English Style Guide of the Directorate-General for Translation governs the presentation of references, at 13.1 placing footnote references before punctuation and at 13.3 starting footnotes with a capital and closing them with a full stop.
Nothing opened for this record binds a target community, and no national rule was opened at all, so the record says nothing about what the courts of the Netherlands, Germany or Türkiye require. A reviser should not read that silence as evidence that they require nothing.
Consequences for translation
The presentational half converts and the identifier does not, which is the split a reviser most needs to hold.
- The identifier is carried across unchanged. Its right output is to be left alone, and localizing any part of one destroys the single element designed to survive translation.
- Everything around it converts, and the conversion is larger than it looks. Between two versions of one judgment the report abbreviation changes, the case number moves relative to the parties, the bracketed year gives way to a full date, and the word for a numbered paragraph changes with it.
- The conversion is determinate in form but not always derivable from the source string. An English citation carrying only a bracketed year does not contain the day and month a Dutch citation requires, so that element has to be retrieved from the judgment. A checker can verify the form of the output; only the judgment supplies the content.
- Because no instrument binds across communities, a case citation is answerable to the guide of whoever commissioned the text, and only the identifier is stable across all of them. That is a practical reason to include one even where the commissioning guide does not ask for it.
- A citation wrong for the commissioning guide is a finding inside that body's work and a preference outside it. A localized identifier is a finding everywhere.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: Case C-415/93 Bosman [1995] ECR I-4921, paragraph 59
- Target: arrest van 15 december 1995, Bosman, C-415/93, Jurispr. blz. I-4921, punt 59
- Comment: One judgment in two language versions, Case C-391/09 at paragraph 30. Five things change and the party name does not: the Dutch states the judgment date, puts the case number after the name, replaces the report abbreviation, drops the bracketed year and renumbers by punt. The date is the trap, since the English citation does not contain it.
NL>EN
- Source: arrest van 28 november 1989, Groener, C-379/87, Jurispr. blz. 3967, punt 19
- Target: Case C-379/87 Groener [1989] ECR 3967, paragraph 19
- Comment: The same two versions at paragraph 85, in the other direction, where the loss runs the other way: the day and month go and the year alone survives in brackets. The reference carries no volume prefix because the report itself had none in 1989, so supplying one by analogy with the pair above invents a page.
References
- Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law, Official Journal 2011/C 127/01 of 29 April 2011. Annex, points 1.1 and 1.2, and Section IV, paragraph 19.
- Council conclusions on the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law, Official Journal 2019/C 360/01, OJ C 360 of 24 October 2019, page 1.
- Judgment of the Court (Second Chamber) of 12 May 2011 in Case C-391/09, Runevič-Vardyn and Wardyn, English and Dutch language versions, paragraphs 30, 53 and 85.
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Sections 13.1 and 13.3 (Footnotes, citations and references).