Open Knowledge

Legislation / 2014 50% open (avg.)

Ranked #4 against other datasets in the Index (avg.)
The Index average ranking for Legislation is no change from #4 in 2013

About

This data category requires all national laws and statutes available to be available online, although it is not a requirement that information on legislative behaviour e.g. voting records is available. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

  • Content of the law / status
  • If applicable, all relevant amendments to the law
  • Date of last amendments
  • Data should be updated at least on quarterly

Rank Place Breakdown Location (URL) Format Info Prev. Score
1 United Kingdom
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http://www.legislation.gov.uk/... XHTML, ... #6  90% 100%
1 United Kingdom

A comprehensive database of UK legislation is maintained online by The National Archives, an agency of the Ministry of Justice. The information is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. -- update after asking National Archives and checking online --- A variety of machine readable formats are available through the API - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats (amended machine-readable to yes and updated formats). Currently the database is not downloadable in bulk. Initially the target was to provide this by end-March 2014

Update on Bulk Download: We received the following response following a request for an update on the progress that has been made towards offering bulk download: " We have made some progress on bulk downloads and there is currently a project underway to make bulk downloads of all legislation.gov.uk data publicly available. Some data is already available at http://leggovuk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ in XML and HTML formats. However it should be noted that this is a trial site that is expected to change. New legislation is published on a daily basis as are amendments to existing legislation. The download site is currently still in development so is not being regularly updated with new content at the present time. At the moment there are no bulk downloads available for PDFs. The data on legislation.gov.uk has been collated over a number of years from a variety of sources and is not all in the same base format. We plan to make available a dataset of original print PDFs - these are versions of the original hardcopy documents as published. However, we do not hold all legislation in this format so this will not contain all the legislation on the website."


1 United States
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http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkd... XML #1  100% 100%
1 United States

The link provided is to bulk XML data for United States Code provided by Office of the Law Revision Counsel for US House of Representatives. Data made available since July 2013 (see this announce http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/opengov-house-representatives-makes-us-code-available-bulk-xml).

Regarding open licensing we assume that the US Code is public domain. In addition no copyright assertion is mentioned on the site and the congress.gov site is run by the Library of Congress and one would anticipate is subject to standard public domain provisions (though there is a legal section whose copyright portion is unfortunately rather unenlightening - http://beta.congress.gov/legal/#copyright).

There is a variety of additional (machine-readable) data from a variety of sources not least the new Congress.gov website (which will be completely replacing http://thomas.loc.gov/ from November 2013). Other resources include: - Bulk data from the GPO in XML format including Congressional Bills, Commerce Business Daily etc. (Does not seem to be updated since Jan 2013). Announced Jan 10 2013 - see http://www.gpo.gov/pdfs/news-media/press/13news01.pdf - The full US Code on the GPO at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collectionUScode.action?collectionCode=USCODE (PDF) - The Federal Register https://www.federalregister.gov/ which includes "Regulations are issued by federal agencies, boards, or commissions [which] explain how [an] agency intends to carry out a law." (Data is provided in HTML, CSV and JSON and there is a full API - see https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1 and https://www.federalregister.gov/blog/learn/developers) - Resources listed on http://speaker.gov/open including http://docs.house.gov/ (which includes XML versions of laws being considered) and House floor activities at http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor-download.aspx In addition it is worth noting various unofficial sites that provide excellent material such as: - https://www.govtrack.us/ - http://opencongress.org/ It may also be interesting to read how expensive some of this material once was, see e.g. Carl Malamud's comments in http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/bulk-data-downloads-government-transparency-breakthrough.html


1 India
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http://data.gov.in/catalogs?qu... CSV, Excel #26  45% 100%
1 India

Under NDSAP policy National portal of India shares data on Legislation. The NDSAP policy was implemented by Govt of India to help data users and data solicitors to facilitate access completely open govt data and information. The Parliament of India comprises of Rajya Sabha & Lok Sabha, the upper house and lower house. The detail data in open format is readily available in data.gov.in.(http://data.gov.in/catalogs/ministry_department/lok-sabha-secretariat and http://data.gov.in/catalogs/ministry_department/rajya-sabha). Data contains all bills.


1 Germany
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http://www.gesetze-im-internet... HTML, ... #6  90% 100%
1 Germany

Laws are not subject to copyright as per §5 UrhG (German copyright act). According to the homepage of gesetze-im-internet.de and to govdata.de, the data can be used free of charge. "Die bereitgestellten Rechtsnormen sind in allen zur Verfügung gestellten Formaten zur freien Nutzung und Weiterverwendung zugänglich gemacht". The table of contents of gesetze-im-internet.de is available in bulk from https://www.govdata.de/suchen/-/details/gesetze-im-internet as one XML-file. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gii-toc.xml Not all laws are provided timely, see https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gesetze-im-internet.de+%22noch+nicht+ber%C3%BCcksichtigt%22&espv=213&es_sm=93&biw=1920&bih=1043&ei=N6KEUqXBM8mYtAbP74G4DQ&start=0&sa=N


1 New Zealand
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http://www.legislation.govt.nz... HTML,PD ... #1  100% 100%
1 New Zealand

Legislation is available in machine readable format (XML) and in bulk (all publicly available legislation) here: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/subscribe


6 Cyprus
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http://www.cyprus.gov.cy/porta... PDF, ... #64  0% 90%
6 Cyprus

Found a page on the government website that shows Cypriot legislations and Government legal documents, sorted into thematic categories. Not sure the information provided is up to date.


6 Austria
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https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/defa... HTML, ... #6  90% 90%
6 Austria

Federal laws, regional laws, some regulation issued by municipalities, decisions of several regulators and governmental agencies and decisions of high-level courts are available at https://www.ris.bka.gv.at in HTML, PDF and Word format.

Aggregate data for bulk download of all federal law is made available through the government's open data portal: RIS - Bundesrecht konsolidiert. However, this archive is now several months behind the latest laws available on the RIS website, which is under Copyright and charges fees on some data extracts.


6 Kenya
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http://www.kenyalaw.org:8181/e... XML, ... #1  100% 90%
6 Kenya

The primary format is XML. Acts and other pieces of legislation can be downloaded for free in different formats including PDF and DOC. Another viable and good source is the Kenya Parliament website: http://www.parliament.go.ke/ in pdf formats too. [According to Ahmed Maawy - No changes from 2013]


6 Italy
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http://www.normattiva.it/ XML #25  50% 90%
6 Italy

The official repository of the law is Gazzetta Ufficiale but this is content format. An access in data format is available at Normattiva The web site offer the laws in xml format. There is no directly reference for a license, but, the owner of the service is "Istituto Poligrafico Zecca dello Stato" and this is in the list of the PAs.

Therefore, because in the terms of the code of civil administration (CAD), if a PA publishes a dataset without reference to any license, this is considered open data by default. The kind of license is specified on the guidelines for the public sector information made by the digital agency for italy (AgID). The default license is "cc-by 4.0"


6 Netherlands
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https://data.overheid.nl/data/... Webserv ... #1  100% 90%
6 Netherlands

Although the data download page at data.overheid.nl states the date of the data set is Nov 2012, in reality if you download the metdata XML file, it will have a generation date of today. The data is updated daily. Only a dump of metadata is available in bulk, the actual legislative documents must be requested one-by-one. No historical revisions are available, only the latest consolidation.

Laws are also available through a web interface at http://wetten.overheid.nl/zoeken/


6 Chile
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http://datos.bcn.cl/ HTML, ... n/a 90%
6 Chile

The information about all the national laws and statutes can easily be find in http://www.leychile.cl/Consulta


12 Taiwan
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http://law.moj.gov.tw/ n/a n/a #10  75% 75%
12 Indonesia
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http://ditjenpp.kemenkumham.go... n/a #6  90% 75%
12 Indonesia

Data is not in Machine readable format, but in PDF or HTML.


12 Colombia
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http://www.camara.gov.co/porta... n/a n/a 75%
12 Colombia

Data is only available in HTML which is not machine readable.


12 Japan
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http://law.e-gov.go.jp/cgi-bin... n/a #51  35% 75%
12 Japan

Seems no restriction for its use but not clear, but unified big data seems not available (you have to download them one by one). English translation of those laws are also available (http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/) but not always up-to-date.


12 Kosovo
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http://gzk.rks-gov.net/default... n/a n/a n/a 75%
12 Spain
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https://www.boe.es/legislacion... n/a #26  45% 75%
12 Spain

Reuse is allowed under minimal conditions.


12 Argentina
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http://www.hcdn.gov.ar/ n/a n/a 75%
12 Argentina

The website for the National Congress contains up-to-date information about all legislative activity in different formats and different sections.

A local citizen initiative Congreso Interactivo is publishing a machine readable dataset: http://www.congresointeractivo.org/dataset-todas-las-votaciones-del-congreso-2001-2013/

And an API: http://billit.congresointeractivo.org


19 Finland
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http://www.ldf.fi/semantic-fin... RDF #14  70% 70%
19 Finland

No changes since 2013

The up-to-date legislation is available in web portal, but it was not not possible to download. See discussion (in Finnish) http://avoindata.net/210/saako-lainsaadannon-eli-finlexin-avoimena

Now it has been published as linked data. The semantic structure is still work in progress but data is now there and fully open.

OM on ollut viime vuodesta lähtien mukana Aalto-yliopiston Linked Data Finland - hankkeessa. Yhtenä hankkeen osana on lainsäädännön koneluettavan aineiston tuottaminen ja verkkopalvelun valmistelu. Hankkeen rahoitus ei ollut riittävä koko Finlexin uudistetun palvelun tuottamiseen, minkä vuoksi meillä on parhaillaan lisärahoitusta koskeva selvittely meneillään VM:n Avoimen hallinnon toimintaohjelman kanssa. Jotain on jo saatu julkiseen verkkoon ikäänkuin näyteaineistona. Viime viikon lopussa julkaistiin lainsäädäntö- ja oikeuskäytäntöaineistoista ensimmäinen aineistopaketti Linked Data Finland -hankkeen verkkosivuilla www.ldf.fi - osion nimi on hienosti Semantic Finlex ja sen tarkka osoite on http://www.ldf.fi/semantic-finlex.html Semanttista Finlexiä on siis tarkoitus viimeistellä lähikuukausien aikana.


19 France
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https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/da... XML #14  70% 70%
19 France

Data are now available online and for free. Regarding the license, it is now openly licensed but still subject to the 2002-1064 decree which, in theory, authorize the data owner to refuse to grant the license to a reuser. See http://rip.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/index.php/pages/juridiques


21 Denmark
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https://www.retsinformation.dk... metadat ... #1  100% 60%
21 Denmark

The site contains no "term and conditions" and are therefore not open, however you should be able to safely reuse it.

When you perform a search through Retsinformation.dk you can chose the option "Eksporter søgeresultatet" which gives you the search result in CSV - you can search for all documents to get a full CSV bulk download of the metadata of all legislation (although with 77,000 entries this sometimes over-stresses the server - if so make several queries).

The section on the Lex Dania project (https://www.retsinformation.dk/Forms/R0500.aspx?page=5) outlines that all legislative is available in XML format as of 2007. So, data can be considered machine readable.


21 Ireland
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http://irishstatutebook.ie HTML, PDF #51  35% 60%
21 Ireland

YES - MACHINE READABLE, the data are available in PDF format and also html.

UNSURE: AVAILABLE IN BULK I have sent them a question, they now have mobile apps, which means it may possible via some sort of API? I have sent them a question. isb@propylon.com

NO: Open Licence, I have sent them a question, in the footer of the site the following is indicated "© Government of Ireland. Oireachtas Copyright Material is reproduced with the permission of the Houses of the Oireachtas". There is no licence information on the site.


21 Philippines
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http://www.congress.gov.ph/leg... TXT n/a 60%
21 Philippines

There is a query system database of Legislative Information System


21 Canada
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http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca... XML, ... #17  60% 60%
21 Canada

The data from the cited website is available in a good variety of formats including machine-readable XML but is not available in bulk (you cannot download the entire code at once easily). In terms of open licensing the Terms and Conditions at http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/terms-avis/index.html indicate that non-commercial use is permitted but commercial use is not (you must apply for specific permission).

There is also the Parliamentary website at http://www.parl.gc.ca/LegisInfo/ which contains HTML and XML on legislation before Parliament. This material is not openly licensed - the Copyright's Page http://www.parl.gc.ca/ImportantNotices.aspx?Language=E states "The contents of this Web site are covered by the provisions of the Copyright Act and related regulations and international agreements. Permission to reproduce in whole or in part or otherwise use content on this Web site may be sought from the appropriate source." It also links in turn to Speaker Permission page http://www.parl.gc.ca/SpeakerPermission.aspx?Language=E which states "Reproduction of the proceedings of the House of Commons and its Committees, in whole or in part and in any medium, is hereby permitted provided that the reproduction is accurate and is not presented as official. This permission does not extend to reproduction, distribution or use for commercial purpose of financial gain".


25 Korea, Republic of
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http://open.law.go.kr/index.js... XML, ... #50  40% 55%
25 Korea, Republic of

  • Name: Korean laws and policy
  • Coverage: Present and past laws and regulations of the Republic of Korea

25 Bulgaria
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http://parliament.bg/bg/bills n/a #17  60% 55%
25 Bulgaria

The complete legislation is available mostly via a free web interface to proprietary legal information systems.

The State gazette provides pdfs (and some htmls) to the newly promulgated and amended laws and state ordinances. Also, RTF is an available format most of the time.

The laws are not subject to copyright in Bulgaria but the website does not carry a clear mention, thus preferrably error by stringency -- the data was considered non-open.


25 Greece
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http://www.et.gr/ n/a #20  55% 55%
25 Greece

According to Law 3861/2010, article 7 /τ.Α΄112 -13.7.2010 all laws, Ministerial Decrees, Presidential Decrees and other regulation of Greece become available online for free through the website of the National Printing Office.


25 China
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http://www.gov.cn/flfg/index.h... HTML #20  55% 55%
25 China

nothing changed in 2014


25 Burkina Faso
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http://assembleenationale.bf/s... HTML n/a #26  45% 55%
25 Nigeria
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http://www.nassnig.org/nass/le... n/a #60  30% 55%
25 Nigeria

The data is available for free as you can download it from their website, likewise it is now available via a legislative databank at http://www.legislativedatabank.nassnig.org/


25 Tanzania, United Republic of
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http://www.parliament.go.tz/in... n/a n/a n/a 55%
25 Turkey
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http://mevzuat.basbakanlik.gov... n/a n/a n/a 55%
33 Moldova, Republic of
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http://lex.justice.md/ n/a n/a #17  60% 45%
33 Slovakia
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http://jaspi.justice.gov.sk/ HTML #26  45% 45%
33 Slovakia

Legally binding is only paper version of statute. Data can be easily scraped from web page. There is a copyright notice so "no" is filled for open license.


33 Mexico
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http://www.diputados.gob.mx PDF, HTML #26  45% 45%
33 Mexico

Both Legislative Chambers, Diputados (http://www.diputados.gob.mx) and the Senate (http://www.senado.gob.mx) don't have machine readable and bulk data. Nonetheless, outside websites have built APIs and other scrapping-based information flows in order to gather and publish information in sites such as www.curul501.org and apps such as https://itunes.apple.com/mx/app/id625548107?mt=8. Other internal data standards, such as law taxonomy are either not public or don't exist. No license could be found which makes the data not open.

No change from 2013.


33 Romania
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http://legislatie.just.ro/Publ... PDF #63  25% 45%
33 Romania

On November, 12th, 2014, the Ministry of Justice launched a new legislative portal, which offers free online access to all legislation. The access is possible through the web interface only.

The data are under Copyright © 2014 - Ministerul Justiției. Toate drepturile rezervate. - Termeni și Condiții


33 Brazil
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http://www.lexml.gov.br html #26  45% 45%
33 Brazil

Has metadata about legislation (federal, state and municipal level - even though levels other than federal depend on agreements being made and few are present yet) and also court decision. Users can browse and filter content according to this metadata. Links to the full text are provided, when available, often with multiple sources (eg. the same law on the Presidency's and both Parliament's websites).


33 Oman
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http://www.mola.gov.om/ n/a n/a 45%
33 Oman

The data is available through a search engine in the Arabic language. Alternatively, the most recent laws can be accessed from the website of the Ministry of Legal Affairs of Oman at http://www.mola.gov.om/ Legal texts can be read in a PDF format, and can be accessed for free.

Laws in Oman are exempt from copyright protection, the second bullet point in the terms and conditions page confirm this.

Reviewer: I was not able to identify a precise mention of open licensing on the Ministry's website. Even if exemption from copyright is stated (where?), this does not mean that the conditions of the Open Definition apply. I have thus marked this indicator as 'no' given how confusing the whole status is.


33 Zambia
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http://www.mibs.gov.zm/?q=cons... n/a n/a n/a 45%
33 Russian Federation
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http://pravo.gov.ru HTML, PDF #26  45% 45%
33 Russian Federation

Brief Description: All Russian laws and other official documents that came from government ministries, agencies and federal services published using a few government websites. Base website is http://pravo.gov.ru - this project is being maintained by Federal Security Service (FSS) and this website is keystone for Russian laws disclosure. A few serious issues exists with Russian laws: 1. No machine readable data 2. No bulk download 3. No open licenses for laws 4. Government websites not integrated with pravo.gov.ru instead they provide links to the commercial providers of laws information like Russian companies "Consultant" (http://consultant.ru) and "Garant" (http://www.garant.ru). 5. Laws published on many of government websites available as "high quality scanned images". Step by step explanation 1. Does the data exist? Yes, at http://pravo.gov.ru

  1. Is data in digital form? Yes, data available via website pravo.gov.ru

  2. Publicly available? Yes, this data is publicly available. We don't need FOI request to get it.

  3. Is the data available for free? Yes, this data is available for free. No payment is required.

  4. Is the data available online? Yes. Data available at http://pravo.gov.ru

  5. Is the data machine readable? No, it's only HTML pages.

  6. Available in bulk? No, data is not available for bulk download

  7. Openly licensed? No, this data is public domain data but no open license available.

  8. Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes, this information updated frequently, on daily basis.

Comment: No updates since 2013 year


33 Guatemala
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http://www.congreso.gob.gt/ind... n/a n/a 45%
33 Guatemala

Unable to tell if open - not clearly licensed


33 Lithuania
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http://www3.lrs.lt/dokpaieska/... n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Lithuania

The legislation is available, however, mostly in .doc format


33 Slovenia
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http://www.pisrs.si/Pis.web/ HTML, PDF #26  45% 45%
33 Slovenia

Update to previous site :

"We hereby inform you that the contents of the website zakonodaja.gov.si 15 April 2014, became an integral part of the revised Site Legal Information System of the Republic of Slovenia ( PIS ) . ISP offers free access to legislative and other public documents of state bodies and statutory authorities in the Republic of Slovenia and the documents issued by the institutions of the European Union and the Council of Europe"

The previous site eventually points to the Slovenian Official Gazette as at (for example) http://www.uradni-list.si/1/objava.jsp?urlid=200670&stevilka=2999 . This is in HTML and there is no download facility. The licensing conditions at http://www.uradni-list.si/0/legal include (article 14, Google Translate) "All rights to the home page and all subpages Site-official list.si reserved. The information and materials on this website are protected by intellectual property rights upravljavca.Informacije and materials displayed on the Site may be downloaded for your personal use, however, do not change copyright and other notices relating to intellectual property rights or other rights notices. It is permitted to download and print information and materials for viewing and reading for non-commercial purposes. Any other copying, distribution, reproduction, modification information and materials on this site or send them by mail or distribute in any other way without prior written permission is prohibited. It is also prohibited to use any element of own-list.si for any purpose other than personal, non-commercial use. Restrictions on use of materials not subject to the Official Journal of the Republic of Slovenia, and it posted content." Therefore this site is not Open, not machine readable and no bulk downloadable.
The legal registry at http://pisrs.si is newer and most of the sites at the original url redirect there. However, it is mostly a usability enhancement.


33 Belgium
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http://www.belgielex.be n/a #51  35% 45%
33 Belgium

Structure of laws / law books could be improved: most legislation is available in HTML, but it misses semantic markup. Jurisprudence can be searched / viewed in a flash-based application.


33 Jamaica
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http://moj.gov.jm/laws n/a n/a 45%
33 Jamaica

Legislation that has been passed by the Houses of Parliament and brought into effect prior to 2010 is hosted by the Ministry of Justice. Acts of Parliament 2009-2014 are available on the Jamaica Parliament website.

All documents are PDFs of scanned paper documents and therefore not easily machine readable.


33 Czech Republic
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http://portal.gov.cz/app/zakon... txt, pdf n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Switzerland
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http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/as/in... PDF #20  55% 45%
33 Switzerland

Reproduction requires prior written consent, as per Terms and Conditions of the Federal Authorities.


33 Sweden
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http://62.95.69.15/sfs/sfst_fo... n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Sweden

Unstructured text data for now. Plans to release linked open data has been around for years but not turned into practice.


33 South Africa
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http://www.gov.za/documents/ac... PDF #26  45% 45%
33 South Africa

Several emerging private and not-for-profit aggregators of legislation data emerging. Data generally made available in HTML and PDF formats. See http://www.acts.co.za/index.html, http://www.lawsofsouthafrica.up.ac.za/, http://www.saflii.org/za/legis/num_act/


33 Serbia
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http://www.parlament.gov.rs/ak... PDF, DOC #20  55% 45%
33 Serbia

All national legislation enacted since 2001 can be retrieved by metadata and browsed by volume and number. The data is not machine readable (it is available in PDF and DOC format). No licence is visible (although the legislation should be in the public domain).

More comprehensive legislation set is available at http://pravno-informacioni-sistem.rs and http://bpp.uzzpro.gov.rs, but it also isn't machine readable.


33 Croatia
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http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/de... html #10  75% 45%
33 Croatia

No consolidated texts of the laws. Some consolidated and purified texts are available on unofficial site zakon.hr.

In the terms of use of the website of the Narodne novine company it is stated that datasets are copyrighted by the Narodne novine and may be used only under the conditions prescribed by law.


33 Senegal
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http://www.jo.gouv.sn/ n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Senegal

Only a small part is available in digital format.


33 Hungary
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https://kereses.magyarorszag.h... n/a n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Uruguay
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https://www.impo.com.uy/cgi-bi... HTML n/a 45%
33 Uruguay

Registration needed. There is a limit of 250 requests for free.


33 Hong Kong
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http://www.legislation.gov.hk/... HTML; PDF n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of
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http://www.justice.gov.mk/LDBI... n/a n/a 45%
33 Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of

The Ministry of Justice maintains a data base of all the legal documents: http://www.justice.gov.mk/LDBISReader/SearchLawRegulation.aspx Users can perform a search. Unfortunately, only the first 30 results are shown (currently there are 33 949 documents in the database). There is no bulk download available.


33 Latvia
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http://likumi.lv n/a n/a 45%
33 Latvia

Likumi.lv is a legislation website ensuring free access to systematized (consolidated) legislation of the Republic of Latvia. Its operation is regulated by the Law on Official Publications and Legal Information. - http://likumi.lv/about.php

  • likumi.lv is for systematized, consolidated laws and other legislative acts (complete texts) while https://www.vestnesis.lv/ publishes official decisions which are incremental (you may have separate publications for the initial law and tens of amendments. - if there are any inconsistencies between these two sources, what was published in Latvijas Vēstnesis is the official version. That's why the law states that Latvijas Vēstnesis is the official publication and likumi.lv is for "informative purposes".

The official publisher Latvijas Vestnesis does not receive budget funding for maintenance of Likumi.lv. It is maintained from the earnings of Latvijas Vestnesis (the costs are covered from the charge for the official publication paid by the information submitter, unless otherwise provided by a law or Cabinet Regulations).

Regarding information reuse Likumi.lv points to the legislation that determines how this information can be reused and sets the fee for reuse (however, it is not clear what is meant by reuse and if, e.g., publishing law excerpts on a website requires paying the fee or not):

See also:


33 Portugal
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http://dre.pt/index.html PDF #26  45% 45%
33 Portugal

The new DRE portal, published in 2014, has the same limitations as the previous one. Access to text versions (not PDF) and full-text search are only available through a paid subscription.


33 Pakistan
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http://www.punjablaws.gov.pk/ HTML, PDF n/a 45%
33 Pakistan

The data is provided by Provincial Government instead of Federal Government of Pakistan.


33 Thailand
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http://www.ratchakitcha.soc.go... n/a n/a 45%
33 Thailand

Thailand's Legislation will be announce on the Royal Gazette (ราชกิจจุนุเบกษา) which can be accessible through The Secretariat of The Cabinet's website.


33 Australia
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http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ HTML, ... #26  45% 45%
33 Australia

Not openly licensed as license according to http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Content/Copyright#licensed) is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence Australia v3.0 (which is not open). Data is not machine-readable as data is either PDF or (poorly structured HTML) and is not bulk as you can only access on item at a time. Date available is date of new licensing.


33 Bermuda
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http://www.bermudalaws.bm/defa... n/a #26  45% 45%
33 Bermuda

Seemingly no changes since 2013 submission.


33 Rwanda
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http://www.primature.gov.rw/pu... n/a n/a 45%
33 Rwanda

All new laws passed by the Rwandan parliament are 'gazetted' and then published on the website of the Office of the Prime Minister in PDF form. Unfortunately the gazettes can each contain several laws passed on a single date so this can make it more complicated to find the correct law that you are looking for as they are indexed by the date of the gazette rather than by the title of the legislation.

Rwandan legislation is published in all three of the official national languages: English, French and Kinyarwanda.


33 Nepal
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http://www.dop.gov.np/download... pdf #51  35% 45%
33 Nepal

Ministry of Law, Justice, Constituent Assembly and Parliamentary Affairs are responsive to these data.


33 Georgia
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https://matsne.gov.ge/ n/a n/a 45%
33 Georgia

The legislation of Georgia is made available online by the Legislative Herald of Georgia, a "Legal Entity of Public Law" which is subordinate to the Ministry of Justice.

Laws and other legal documents are available via a search interface. The format of the documents is HTML; there is also a PDF download link. Neither of these qualifies as machine-readable because they would need to be scraped in order to extract the text of laws.

An offline version of the data is available for download, but only for paying users; therefore, this does not qualify as making the information available in bulk. Likewise, this downloadable version could potentially be disassembled to extract machine-readable versions of the documents, but this also doesn't qualify as machine-readable.

All government-generated information in Georgia is legally in the public domain, but the Legislative Herald Website specifies "All Rights Reserved" which could lead uneducated users to believe that the information was copyrighted. Thus, I marked this dataset as not openly licensed.

The data is updated regularly and frequently; the site is a valuable resource used by practicing lawyers in Georgia in the course of their work.


33 Paraguay
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http://digesto.senado.gov.py/i... HTML, ... n/a 45%
33 Paraguay

The Quality of the data is very well in respect of Content, because you can find the documents with a high level of granularity, this is, who proposed the law, when did it, the content of the documents, etc. About the structure, there are no structure of the data, there are not tabular format at all. There is another link where the data is placed with more information about the actual status of the documents that are processed for subsequent enactment: http://silpy.congreso.gov.py/main.pmf

Information about technical and administrative contact: Name: Marcelo Ferreira Email: jmferreira@senado.gov.py Phone number: (595) 21 414 5817

Another contacts: Email: silpy@diputados.gov.py, asilva@senado.gov.py Phone number: (595) 21 414 4122, (595) 21 414.5901, (595) 21 414.5905


67 Isle of Man
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n/a n/a #20  55% 40%
67 Isle of Man

All primary legislation is uploaded by the HM Attorney General's department (cloud hosted open source system as per Jersey) and all secondary legislation is uploaded by the IT department at the Isle of Man Parliament (cloud hosted Microsoft Sharepoint). All "live" primary legislation is available free online. All secondary legislation from 2000 is available free online and all earlier secondary legislation is available free by email (typically within 1 hour) -- all earlier secondary legislation will be uploaded in 2014 Q4.

Since some of the legislation is not available online, we are marking it as 'unsure'. Bulk download of all legislations is also not present. And the Open Government License is unfortunately not the one linked as the Terms of Use of the Legislation Web Site.


68 Ghana
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n/a n/a n/a 35%
68 Ghana

Ghana has a bill archive on the Parliament website - http://www.parliament.gh/publications/36/page/60

However, this archive doesn't contains all laws, but only bills from 2010 onward.


68 Bosnia and Herzegovina
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http://www.sllist.ba/pretraga_... n/a n/a 35%
68 Bosnia and Herzegovina

The data (actually, PDF files) does not seem available on a timely basis: indeed, the website seems to provide legislative texts for 2013 latest. The website does not have a clearly stated intellectual property framework, therefore the informaiton is not considered openly licensed.


68 Zimbabwe
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http://www.parlzim.gov.zw/inde... n/a n/a 35%
68 Zimbabwe

The Zimbabwean Parliament has a webpage with bills that are in discussion in this specific parliament, and not all the bills that exist. Bill statues are prepared by the Ministry of justice and are published on the website. It seems that it is not updated on a regular basis.


68 Tunisia
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http://www.iort.gov.tn/WD120AW... HTML; PDF #51  35% 35%
68 Tunisia

Data is available on the Tunisian Official Gazette website. Also, since 2012, recent laws projects are published in the Constituent Assembly's official website: http://www.anc.tn/site/main/AR/docs/projets/liste_projets.jsp On this website, documents are available in PDF formats.


68 Virgin Islands, U.S.
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http://www.legvi.org/vilegsear... n/a n/a 35%
68 Virgin Islands, U.S.

The U.S. Virgin Islands are an insular area of the United States of America and as such are subject to federal legislation. However the U.S. Virgin Islands have a legislative authority similar to the states of the U.S.A and the legislation of that legislative body: http://www.legvi.org is what is used as basis, not the United States of America legislation.


68 Cameroon
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http://www.spm.gov.cm/document... n/a n/a 35%
68 Cameroon

The last piece of legislation published is from 15.06.2011


68 Iceland
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http://www.althingi.is/vefur/l... HTML #16  65% 35%
68 Iceland

Legislation by law is exempt from copyright but that is not explicitly stated and therefore it cannot be considered openly licensed. Statutes are not available in bulk nor can be accessed easily. The bulk version of the legislation is only updated 2-3 times a year.

Statutes are available at http://reglugerd.is


68 Panama
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http://infojuridica.procuradur... n/a n/a 35%
68 Panama

Most statues, resolutions and regulations are available either from government websites such as Infojurídica or third parties. The problem lies in the quality of the documents, which for some reason are sometimes printed, then scanned into PDFs and uploaded, rendering them unsearchable (document quality is also sometimes an issue).


68 El Salvador
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http://www.jurisprudencia.gob.... n/a n/a 35%
68 El Salvador

It is not allowed to use the data of the website for commercial uses. The legislation is available in PDF format


68 Haiti
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http://www.sdn.mefhaiti.gouv.h... n/a n/a 35%
68 Haiti

The data does not include all national laws and statutes, but a selection of them (especially none after 2008). But each law is up to date, meaning that amendments are indicated in the initial law itself.


68 Mali
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http://www.sgg.gov.ml/?p=L&... n/a n/a 35%
68 Mali

Only data between 1994 and 2004 available.


68 Botswana
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http://www.elaws.gov.bw/ n/a n/a 35%
68 Botswana

Reviewer's comment: Submission seems largely correct, but I've changed a couple of markings: Machine readable changed from 'Unsure' to 'No' (because it's mainly pdf format). Bulk changed to 'No', since download requires accessing each law separately.


68 Cambodia
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http://en.national-assembly.or... PDF n/a 35%
68 Cambodia

The directory is divided by each mandate. But not all laws are published, esp. the recent ones.


68 Bangladesh
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http://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/al... html #51  35% 35%
68 Bangladesh

No mention of licensing, can't see option for bulk download nor of the data in anything apart from PDF or viewable on website (so, not machine readable)


68 Lesotho
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http://www.lesotholii.org/sear... n/a n/a 35%
68 Lesotho

This information is not necessarily comprehensive, complete, accurate or up to date; sometimes linked to external sites over which LesLII has no control and for which LesLII assumes no responsibility; not professional or legal advice (if you need specific advice, you should always consult a suitably qualified professional).


68 Morocco
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http://www.sgg.gov.ma/L%C3%A9g... n/a n/a 35%
68 Morocco

The General Secretariat of the Govt has several texts of existing/promulgated laws (The Constitution, Financial and Budget laws, Labour law, Family law, etc.) and many more of draft bills ("Projets de textes diffusés aux membres du gouvernement", http://www.sgg.gov.ma/Projetsdetextesl%C3%A9gislatifsetr%C3%A9glementaires.aspx ).

I was not able to identify such documentation on the Ministry of Justice website (www.justice.gov.ma ), yet the ADALA (http://adala.justice.gov.ma/AR/home.aspx) database seems to be the focal point where legislation content is published.

The legislative documents do not seem published on a timely basis: many of the recently adopted laws are not featured on any of these websites. This is for ex. the case for the widely discussed "rape law" (the Penal Code provision which used to allow the aggressor to marry the victim in order to avoid jail sentence) which was amended in January 2014 (http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2014/01/22/97001-20140122FILWWW00619-maroc-loi-sur-le-viol-amendee.php).


68 Costa Rica
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http://www.pgrweb.go.cr/scij/m... n/a #51  35% 35%
68 Costa Rica

All information of laws and other valid legislation is avalilable there. Lawyers use this information daily.


85 Egypt
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n/a PDF #51  35% 30%
85 Egypt

The website for the Egyptian Government Services Portal ( http://www.egypt.gov.eg/english/laws/default.aspx ) has a handful of laws available for download, but there is no apparent way for accessing all the laws in Egypt.

Final reviewer: the data exists, its online publication just suffers various issues. As aforementioned, the Govt Services Portal hosts few legal texts; the Egyptian Legislative and Jurisprudence Database (http://www.arablegalportal.org/egyptverdicts/About.aspx), an initiave by the Ministry of Justice, hosts a chunk of legislation and jurisprudence texts. The data was marked as publicly available because these websites are accessible by anyone. Since it is difficult to appreciate what proportion of the data is availble online, the respective indicator was marked as 'unsure'. Lastly, the Official Gazette does not seem to publish legal texts online (http://www.alamiria.com/a/index.html).


85 Norway
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http://lovdata.no n/a #60  30% 30%
85 Norway

Editor: For private use, the data is available free of charge. However, commercial use requires a angreement ( read: subscription ) http://www.lovdata.no/info/lovavtale.html

No changes since 2013.

Reviewer-note 2014: Lovdata mentions an API on their webpage: https://lovdata.no/info/api Plans for the future?


85 Ecuador
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http://www.registroficial.gob.... n/a #60  30% 30%
85 Ecuador

Subscription to Registro Oficial currently costs USD 280 per year for the digital version and USD 504 for the printed version. It includes all laws, statutes and regulations since 2009. Many laws are available online for free, but only Registro Oficial includes all published and valid laws, regulations from every government office.


88 Israel
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n/a n/a #51  35% 20%
88 Israel

Some of the data is available, but in a non-systematic means of publication. Only laws from the 2002 onwards can be found via the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) website. Furthermore, the data is not publicly licensed. At the moment a complete set of all Israeli bills can be found through private companies.

A historic repository of legislation, since the inauguration of Israel and up until 2001, can be found [in this legislation database, yet it is not working for the past couple of years.[1]. Basic and special interest laws can also be read in English and in Russian.


89 Lebanon
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n/a n/a n/a 10%
89 Lebanon

Webpage in Arabic at http://www.justice.gov.lb/CP/HTML_iFrameTree.aspx?id=975&language=1


90 Côte d'Ivoire
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n/a n/a n/a 5%
90 Côte d'Ivoire

The National Assembly website does have a "Travaux Parlementiares" tab under which it would appear, national legislation is suppose to be published. Unfortunately, most links are either dead or do not navigate to anything.

Important texts and legislation can be found:


90 Sierra Leone
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n/a n/a n/a 5%
90 Sierra Leone

The government committed itself to release 20% of gazetted legislation data as open data as part of its Open Government Partnership's Action Plan.


92 Guinea
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n/a n/a n/a n/a 0%
92 Benin
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n/a n/a n/a 0%
92 Benin

No evidence.