What Open·Parlamento analyses.
All official, open sources. No fragile scraping where an API or a standard dump exists.
Shared identity
Every rule is a node with a stable identity: ELI for Italy, CELEX for the EU. This is what makes it possible to link an Italian decree to the European directive it implements, or a law to the code article it amends — and to integrate with external datasets without ambiguity.
Coverage & limits transparency
What is here today, what is missing and the caveats to know — so you always know what you are reading about:
- Not legal advice. It is an informational tool: always verify against the linked official source.
- Complete case law, with a depth limit. All sources are active: EU (CJEU), the Italian Constitutional Court (headnotes since 1956), administrative justice and Cassation. Cassation via the public source covers only the last ~6 years; the merits (trial courts) are not yet integrated.
- Challenged rules (pending). Beyond what has been decided, the graph flags what is currently under review by the Constitutional Court — whether an article is challenged and with how many pending cases — from the «referral orders». It is a snapshot that changes over time: always verify against the source.
- Privacy. Sources that publish already-pseudonymised rulings are preferred.
The real state of public data transparency
One thing anyone using this tool should know: public-interest data in Italy, when it exists, is often badly kept. «Open» on paper, but technically hard to use. Integrating it, source after source, we ran into barriers that should not exist:
- Doors shut to programs. The Italian Constitutional Court’s open-data portal, to a program that does not pretend to be a browser, responds with zero bytes. The data arrives in nested ZIP archives, with 1990s text encodings.
- «APIs» that aren’t there. The search for Cassation judgments has no documented public interface; and the
.giustizia.itsites have incomplete security certificates, which make standard connections fail. - Dead official engines. More than one «official» endpoint for querying the data (SPARQL) responds empty: you have to fall back on raw downloads.
- Broken links and hidden limits, even where the API exists. On the European open-data portal the links to datasets arrived truncated (an «identifier» field returned as a list) and we had to reconstruct them. ISTAT’s statistics API at first did not respond at all, then came back but limited to 5 requests per minute.
- Abandoned civic projects. Excellent initiatives now stalled: municipal budgets updated only up to 2021/22, the Open Municipio platform with no updates since 2017. Valuable data slowly becoming unusable.
It is not a technical detail: it is the reason data that should belong to everyone remains, in practice, accessible only to those with the time and skills to «tame» it. This is the work Open·Parlamento does for you: a layer that makes queryable sources that, on their own, are not — always citing the original.