The official European journal in an “amateur” version

(BRUSSELS2) The setting up of the new site of the Official Journal of the EU - more beautiful, more efficient (?) - is accompanied by numerous bugs, "almost", and difficulties of consultation. Practices which are all the more serious since since last year, only the electronic version of the OJ is authentic. Internet errors are thus today so many legal errors.

An erratic update

While the official journal was regularly made available from the early hours of the day, this is no longer the case today. The provision of the Olympics of the day is spread out between 2-3 am until sometimes late in the afternoon. Which is not very serious. Moreover, for many hours – which can last several days – it is impossible to directly access the decision (witness number L 161 of May 29 which is still not available on June 3 in the morning!). You have to download the entire newspaper concerned and then go to the page concerned and find the decision. Impossible to download only the decision or the regulation concerned. It's like going back to the paper version of the beginning - before the internet - when we leafed through the entire official journal and then cut out or photocopied the text that interested us. Not very serious! Additional problem. As it is impossible to access the HTML version, the direct search of the text via search engines is generally ineffective! In fact, in the current computer age, it is as if the text had never appeared.

The modification of the anti-terrorist blacklist: inapplicable!

Finally, some decisions are downright inaccessible. Witness, the publication in the Official Journal of May 29 (L 160) of a modification of the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 583/2014 of 28 May 2014 again this morning leads to an impasse. " Document does not exist », is it indicated in a laconic way in the French version consulted. It is therefore necessary to recognize today that this decision is inapplicable today. Which is not entirely without consequence. Because it is a modification of the anti-terrorist list (the 214th modification to the Al-Qaeda list). Damage !

Google searches in 404 error

Finally, how not to notice that the migration of the OJ site, which took place a few weeks ago, has rendered most of the "Google" searches inoperative, which now lead to "error" pages or non-existent pages. Not very smart...

(Nicolas Gros-Verheyde)