Peer learning session #6 “Legal interoperability” event highlights

Agencies that draft regulatory or legislative texts are welcome to contact the project team. An established operational business case already exists for entities whose draft texts are subsequently adopted formally by the European Commission, such as regulatory bodies within the banking sector. These agencies are granted direct access to draft and co-draft within "EdiT", the Commission's internal implementation of the tool. For regulatory agencies not involved in direct drafting workflows with the Commission, the team remains fully open to bilateral discussions to support their internal administrative needs.

The governance of the Akoma Ntoso for the European Union standard is managed by the Publications Office of the European Union, which develops specific schemas per act type. Legal drafters do not begin from a blank page. Rather, they are drafting initiatives from pre-configured templates where static, mandatory formal elements are protected and pre-filled, enabling drafters to edit recitals, citations, and articles on a case-by-case basis. When reusing existing legislation, conversion pipelines exist to import published acts into the structured schema. Furthermore, evolving drafts present no technical impediment, as the platform's analytical assistance tools generate preliminary proposals that drafters can modify, enrich, or discard as the policy develops.

The European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the Publications Office of the European Union have committed to a joint rolling action plan to transition all legislative exchanges to Akoma Ntoso for the European Union within the next two years. The Commission currently covers five ordinary legislative procedure templates for regulations, directives, and decisions, which will soon be adopted, transmitted, and published in this format. Rollout will subsequently expand to delegated and implementing acts, aiming for comprehensive institutional production by 2027 - 2028. The European Parliament's internal tools are already based on Extensible Markup Language and are converging towards the shared model, while consultative bodies like the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Committee of the Regions have initiated preliminary testing.

Compliance checks and assessment rules depend directly on where the solution is hosted and the specific legal and governance frameworks of the implementing organisation. Within the European Commission Corporate Information systems environment, all deployments must undergo and satisfy mandatory internal security evaluations and data privacy compliance checklists prior to production. 

The solution is currently deployed within the European Commission under the internal system name "EdiT". Production workflows actively support the Ordinary Legislative Procedure, covering five core proposal templates for regulations, directives, and decisions of the European Parliament and Council. The roadmap will progressively incorporate delegated and implementing acts over the next two years, targeting complete coverage of the Commission's legislative production across 2027-2028.

The framework is fully capable of supporting non-legally binding texts, including supervisory guidelines. While current commitments among the primary European institutions focus on mandatory acts within their shared legislative pipeline, the team remains open to collaborating with supervisory bodies and financial authorities to define required schemas and onboard their documentation.

Preliminary standardisation work and testing were successfully conducted on draft opinions and resolutions produced by both committees. Both consultative bodies remain engaged in their inter-institutional governance of Akoma Ntoso for the European Union, although internal deployment within their respective workflows was temporarily placed on hold by their IT administrations due to financial considerations.

The European Parliament's internal drafting and amendment tools are already built upon Extensible Markup Language. The ongoing inter-institutional initiative is aligning these systems to coverage upon the shared Akoma Ntoso for the European Union schema, ensuring that amendments and legislative proposals flow seamlessly across institutions without formatting or structural loss.

The technical team is currently assessing available options, confirming the recognised necessity to upgrade either to a modern version or to transition toward an alternative open-source drafting component.

The platform is developed in-house by the European Commission, and its source code is openly hosted on the European Commission Code Repository. Public administrations can engage with the project team via email at DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu or submit technical requests directly through the official LEOS Service Desk.

Structural granularity and provenance tracking are governed fundamentally by the Akoma Ntoso for the European Union Extensible Markup Language schema, which defines and structures legal acts from the broader document level down to specific articles, paragraphs, and clauses. Because drafting begins within pre-structured templates, hierarchical provenance and semantic compliance are built into the text by design, with further detailed bilateral exchanges encouraged for specialised provenance architectures.

The operational scope and priorities of the programme are defined through the annual workplan, which is shaped by available funding lines and their specific statutory requirements. Within that framework, the primary operational objective is to progressively expand the legislative templates supported by EdiT, with the long-term goal of fully replacing LegisWrite as the Commission's universal drafting tool. Policy domains specifics, including sectors such as public health, are integrated naturally as their respective legal act types become supported templates.

Direct importing or mass copy-pasting of legacy Microsoft Word documents into Legislation Editing Open Software was intentionally avoided within the European Commission. Operational experience revealed that importing unformatted legacy text perpetuates structural errors and inconsistencies, whereas requiring drafters to begin form a clean, standardised template prevents document corruption and ensures legal quality from the outset. However, the requirement regarding agencies' onboarding efforts has been noted for internal review and further consideration.

Public authorities would derive immediate value from evaluating the reusability of the framework. The standard is intrinsically designed for reuse, as proven by its operational deployment across twenty-six countries and multiple European Union institutions, making it a reliable and mature candidate for interoperability assessments.

Active cooperation and teamwork represent indispensable prerequisites for success. The primary challenge stemmed from disparate level of technical modernisation across member states, which was successfully mitigated through community collaboration and the buddy system. Furthermore, for technical advanced administrations, securing dedicated implementation budget remains an occasional challenge depending on national financing structures.

The initiative is entirely open to all European countries wishing to participate. Non-participating entities regularly attend European Legislation Identifier Task Force meeting to gain operational insights, and the community actively welcomes any member state or Union body seeking to engage in future developments.

The standard is highly flexible and successfully implemented at both national and regional administrative tiers across various member states. While comprehensive national adoption maximises added value across legal levels, implementing the solution within specific regions or individual entities remains highly beneficial, supported by expert consultancy provided by the Publication Office of the European Union.

Unlike many technical solutions and standards originating outside Europe, the European Legislation Identifier is an authentic European standard developed within the European Union. By structuring and standardising multilingual legal corpora across borders, the solution safeguards technological sovereignty and provides an essential, trustworthy asset for training European Artificial Intelligence systems.

Prospective implementers should contact the European Legislation Identifier team at the Publication Office of the European Union, who will provide immediate assistance along with comprehensive technical and strategic consultancy.

Cross-border discovery of national transpositions is enabled via the N-Lex portal, which utilises European Legislation Identifier metadata to search across member states repositories. While national databases maintain the underlying acts locally, exposing them through the shared framework allows users to query transposition texts across participating jurisdictions.

The framework provides a harmonised semantic infrastructure without prescribing or imposing domestic legal models upon member states. It defines common vocabularies, metadata properties, and Uniform Resource Identifiers that connect autonomous national legal systems, creating a shared semantic baseline essential for multilingual discovery and European artificial Intelligence applications.

The European Legislation Identifier provides the overarching structural foundation to link legal resources across jurisdictions, but the granular mapping of Union-level legal obligations to specific national transposition articles is addressed complementarily through dedicated accession and transposition frameworks rather than the core identifier schema alone.

Formal versioning is maintained systematically for the ontology. Three distinct versions of the European Legislation Identifier ontology are currently accessible via the EU vocabularies portal, both for the European Legislation Identifier and the European Legislation Identifier Ontology versions, each supported by detailed release documentation and technical specifications to prevent data fracturing and ensure backward compatibility across implementations.