European Union Legal Materials

Commission Documents include proposals and recommendations, impact assessments and their summaries, Commission delegated and implementing acts and other types of Commission decisions, as well as minutes and agendas of the weekly College meetings.

COM documents are numbered sequentially each year and are referenced by number and date.

Example: COM(2022)243, COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT Sixth Annual Report on the Facility for Refugees in Turkey

You can search for a document by doing a keyword search, using the fields, or entering the document identifier in the "Reference" tab.

Prior to 1999, Council documents typically were kept confidential. Due to provisions in the Treaty of Amsterdam and a general policy of transparency in EU decision-making, more Council documents are being made public. Since the Treaty of Lisbon went into force in December, 2009, special transparent measures have been followed which can be found in Article 15 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). More information on Legislative Transparency can be found on the Council's website.

A Register of Council Documents is available online since January 1999. The register is searchable and some documents are available full-text.

As part of the legislative process, the European Parliament generates documents such as committee reports and floor debates that are of interest to legal researchers.

Session Documents are divided into three series:

• A Series contains committee reports which are referred to by document number such as PE DOC A ____.
• B Series contains motions tabled by MEP's and other material related to plenary sessions of the Parliament.
• C Series contains Commission proposals for legislation (COM documents referred to above) that are renumbered with European Parliament document numbers.