What is the Crossroads Bank for legislation?

The outcome of a cooperation agreement between several federal, community and regional institutions, the Central Legislation Databank is designed to offer a portal site citizens can use to gain access to Belgian legislation and case-law.

Launched on 8 March 2005, the portal site features the following domain names: www.belgielex.be, www.belgiquelex.be, www.belgienlex.be, www.belgiumlex.be.

The project is based on a two-stage process.

During the initial stage the present one the databanks of the participating institutions may be accessed via one portal site. This stage involves a) the creation of an access point to these databanks and b) establishing links from each institution's databanks to the databanks of other institutions.

The databanks are broken down into three categories in the light of the type of information on offer: preparatory parliamentary proceedings, legislation and case-law. A fact sheet that is available describes the characteristics and content of each databank.

The second phase involves linking the various databanks with each other so as to create a fully-fledged network, while developing a specific application to allow all the databanks to be consulted with a single search operation. The timetable for implementing this stage has yet to be decided upon.