Treaties added to EUR-Lex, March 2003

As planned for some time EUR-Lex now has a new treaties page which gives free access to the complete collection of the original versions of the founding treaties, the accession treaties and the various protocols in addition to the consolidated versions. While recent post- 1998 texts are in PDF, TIF and HTML, the earlier texts such as the founding treaties and most of the accession treaties are in TIF only at this stage. The older texts are also only available in the languages which were the official languages at the date when they were signed. However coverage is to be extended to make them available in all the official languages and HTML versions will be added as soon as possible.

Europa's Activities Portal

Developments to the Activities page on Europa have now gone live, turning it into a proper portal to the thirty different policy areas, which are in effect mini-portals. Each of these policy areas is laid out in a standard pattern with news headlines at the top of the page, followed by the In Brief section which gives a concise outline of the topic with a link to more information. It also offers a link to further reading, usually one of the Europe on the move pamphlets.

Below that are the sections Latest Developments and Comprehensive guide to European law, subdivided respectively into Key sites and Documentation, and Summaries and Legal texts. The key sites sub-section brings together links to relevant information from the various institutions and agencies, while the summaries sub-section links to SCADPlus. Documentation lists the Bulletin, General Report and press releases. Choosing the latter automatically generates a search in the RAPID database for press releases on the policy area in question. The Legal texts sub-section collates the relevant treaty articles, legislation in force, pending legislation and recent case law.

From the portal, users will be able to access easily the level of detail that they require - from latest updates or overview, to summaries or the original legal texts. Moving around the policy areas is simple using the navigation bar on the left of the screen. The pages now bring together a range of information from different sources and organise it in a consistent way that will make it more straightforward for users to identify the information they need.