The method
How this site is made
One rule governs everything else: no right is displayed without the extract of the official text it rests on. A checking tool refuses to build the site when that rule is broken.
The six rules of manufacture
- 01
The official text first
Every right is harvested from EUR-Lex, the official journal of Union law, or from Your Europe, the official information portal. The extract is copied, never summarised from memory. The harvested texts are kept in plain text inside the project folder, so that a review can reread them offline.
- 02
Regulations before Directives
A Regulation applies identically in all 27 countries: it is the ideal raw material. A Directive is only taught at its minimum baseline, and the wording says so: everywhere in the Union, at a minimum. Never a national variant.
- 03
Amounts and time limits are copied out
€250, €400, €600, fourteen days, two years, two months: not one of these numbers is written from memory. They are taken from the text, with the sentence that carries them. A number whose sentence cannot be found does not get displayed.
- 04
Doubt removes the right
When a text is ambiguous, when two official sources do not say the same thing, or when a source cannot be read cleanly, the right is set aside and flagged rather than guessed. A house precedent: on another project, a first-aid gesture was removed because no public source wrote it down in black and white.
- 05
Legalese is translated, never served bare
A legal text is never displayed on its own. The official sentence always comes with its plain-language translation, right beside it, on the same card. That is the reading contract: at fifteen, you have to understand both.
- 06
The check is automatic, then human
A validation tool blocks the build if a verdict has no source, if a cited source does not exist in the file, if an amount appears without its extract, or if a schema field is missing. Before publication, a reviewer who wrote none of it checks every extract against its source.
The six-monthly review
EU law moves: a Regulation gets replaced, an official page gets rewritten, a redress body changes address. The whole site is therefore reviewed from end to end every six months, text by text and link by link. Every situation carries the date it was checked, visible in its open data.
If a mistake caught your eye before it caught ours, the report link in the footer lands straight in the project's inbox.