Case names and citations

The Court of Justice of the European Union has a specific method of citing its case-law. This method revolves around ensuring the accessibility, neutrality and precision of the citations. It makes use of two key systems: unique identifiers for distinguishing legal decisions, and fictitious names for anonymised cases.

How case names are composed

The case number

Cases all have unique numbers.

This is composed of

  • a letter designating the Court hearing the case:
    • “C” for the Court of Justice
    • “T” for the General Court (from “Tribunal” the French name of the General Court)
    • “F” for the Civil Service Tribunal, which operated from 2005 to 2016 (from “Fonction publique”, French for “Civil Service”).
  • a hyphen
  • a number which designates the number of the case that year in that Court
  • a slash
  • two numbers denoting the year of the case

The case C-250/25 is therefore the 250th case received by the Court of Justice in 2025.

Suffixes designating specific procedures

Some specific procedures are identified by a letter directly after the number. The most common are

  • P – an appeal (from the French pourvoi)
  • PPU – an urgent preliminary ruling procedure (from the French for this procedure procédure préjudicielle d’urgence)
  • AJ – a legal aid application (from the French aide juridictionnelle)
  • R – an application for interim measures (from the French procédure de référé)
  • DEP – a procedure relating to costs (from the French dépens)

A full list of these designations can be found in Annex I of the Practice Rules for the Implementation of the Rules of Procedure of the General Court of 10 July 2024.

Case Name

The number is followed by the case name. In direct actions and appeals this is the names of the parties, unless a request has been made to anonymise the case or omit personal data.

In references for preliminary rulings, the Court now applies a system of fictitious names in cases involving individuals. This system has been in place since January 2023.

This initiative aims to make it easier to identify anonymised cases, to remember the names of cases and to cite them in case-law and other references.

Fictitious names are assigned to

  • cases involving proceedings between natural persons (whose names have been replaced with initials since 1 July 2018 for data protection reasons)
  • cases involving proceedings between natural persons and legal entities, such as companies, without a distinctive name

They are not assigned to references for preliminary rulings where the legal person’s name is distinctive enough. Here, the legal person’s name serves as the case name.

Fictitious names are non-existent names. They do not correspond to the parties’ real names. They are suggested by a computerised automatic name generator that splits words into syllables and combines them randomly.

Citing case-law of the EU courts

The Court’s method of citing case-law includes

  • the date of the decision
  • the name of the case
  • the case number assigned by the Court
  • ECLI (see below)

This method

  • improves the accessibility of judicial decisions: each citation contains all the information necessary to identify a decision
  • provides greater linguistic neutrality: the format is consistent across languages, meaning that fewer elements need to be translated
  • allows hyperlinks to be automatically added to the ECLI of the decision and to the relevant paragraph of the decision

ECLI

The Court uses the European Case-Law Identifier (“ECLI”) when citing its judgments. The Court has assigned an ECLI to all decisions delivered by the EU courts since 1954, including Advocate General Opinions.

The ECLI system provides clear and consistent references for both national and European case-law. It makes it easier to consult and cite legal decisions across the EU.

The ECLI contains the “ECLI” prefix, plus four mandatory elements:

  1. Jurisdiction code: the Member State of the court or tribunal concerned, or the EU where an EU court is concerned.
  2. Court abbreviation: the court or tribunal that issued the decision.
  3. Year: the year the decision was delivered.
  4. Ordinal number: a unique identifier with up to 25 alphanumeric characters, formatted by each Member State or EU court.

The different components of the ECLI are separated by a colon (“:”).

Take the judgment of the Court of Justice of 12 July 2005 in Schempp (C-403/03). Its ECLI is EU:C:2005:446. Breaking this down:

  1. “EU” ­= decision delivered by one of the EU courts
  2. “C” = decision delivered by the Court of Justice
  3. “2005” = decision delivered in 2005
  4. “446” = this is the 446th ECLI assigned in the year in question

When citing decisions of the Court of Justice, General Court or Civil Service Tribunal, the ECLI prefix before these 4 elements can be left out.