Open Law Standards

Every decision carries two deterministically linked identifiers: cli:ch as the canonical Swiss form and ECLI as a lossy projection for European interoperability.

cli:ch makes five properties of Swiss case law first-class that ECLI flattens:

• Trilingualism — DE/FR/IT versions of a BGE are legally equivalent authentic texts (Art. 14 PublA). cli:ch treats language as a first axis via ?lang=.
• Cantonal sovereignty — 26 independent judicial systems remain visible (cli:ch:zh:…, cli:ch:ti:…), not collapsed into an opaque court code.
• Pinpoint addressing — consideration level first-class via #e-4.1 (Swiss citation convention).
• Chamber granularity — Cantonal High Court, Administrative Court, Social Insurance Court etc. remain explicitly named instead of vanishing into a 3-letter code.
• Versioning — @YYYY-MM-DD addresses a specific anonymisation version; rare, but legally relevant when needed.

cli:ch:bge:140-III-86
cli:ch:bge:140-III-86?lang=fr             (französische Fassung desselben BGE)
cli:ch:bge:140-III-86#e-4.1               (Pinpoint auf Erwägung 4.1)
cli:ch:bger:6B_1234/2025
cli:ch:bvger:A-1234/2024
cli:ch:zh:obergericht:LB230012            (Kanton Zürich, Obergericht)
cli:ch:ti:tribunale-appello:34.2025.27    (Kanton Tessin, Tribunale d'appello)
cli:ch:finma:2024-12345                   (FINMA-Verfügung)

Form: cli:ch:<court>[:<chamber>]:<docket>[@<version>][?lang=<l>][#<pinpoint>]. Federal courts without a canton prefix, cantonal courts with an ISO-3166-2 canton code plus the court's own designation. The identifier model parallels the FRBR layers of Akoma Ntoso (Work / Expression / Manifestation) — we do not invent, we apply an established model with Swiss labelling.

ECLI as projection for European resolvers: from every cli:ch an ECLI is derived deterministically (pure function cli_ch_to_ecli). The projection is many-to-one — language, pinpoint, version and chamber detail are lost.

cli:ch:bge:140-III-86             →  ECLI:CH:BGE:2014:140.III.86
cli:ch:bger:6B_1234/2025          →  ECLI:CH:BGER:2025:6B_1234.2025
cli:ch:zh:obergericht:LB230012    →  ECLI:CH:ZHO:2023:LB230012

Why a Swiss form of its own in the first place? Because Swiss case law has properties — trilingualism as equivalent authentic texts, 26 sovereign cantonal judicial systems, pinpoint citation at consideration level — that, in a general European scheme, necessarily collapse onto a flat axis. cli:ch makes them first-class; ECLI ensures European connectivity. The two together are more than the choice of one.

Existing internal identifiers (case numbers, file numbers) remain unchanged — cli:ch and ECLI are additional, standardised layers.

Reference implementation: cli_ch.py mints cli:ch URIs deterministically; cli_ch_to_ecli() projects onto ECLI. cli_ch.py on GitHub · ecli.py on GitHub.

Every decision web page carries in the <head> a Schema.org/LegalCase block as JSON-LD with both identifiers (cli:ch + ECLI), court, date, language, regeste, outgoing case and legislation citations.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LegalCase",
  "identifier": [
    {
      "@type": "PropertyValue",
      "propertyID": "cli:ch",
      "value": "cli:ch:bge:140-III-86"
    },
    {
      "@type": "PropertyValue",
      "propertyID": "ECLI",
      "value": "ECLI:CH:BGE:2014:140.III.86"
    }
  ],
  "name": "BGE 140 III 86",
  "datePublished": "2014-04-15",
  "inLanguage": "de",
  "court": {"@type": "GovernmentOrganization", "name": "Bundesgericht"},
  "citation": [...],          // ausgehende Fall-Zitationen
  "legislationCited": [...]   // ausgehende Gesetzeszitate
}

This achieves two things: search engines index the decision with rich-result support, and AI agents receive a machine-readable record without web scraping.

Reference: every decision page under opencaselaw.ch/entscheid/<id> delivers this block. Implementation in seo_pages.py.

When an XML representation of the decision is required, then per Akoma Ntoso 3.0 (UN/OASIS standard for legislative and judicial documents). Facts, considerations, dispositive and regeste in the designated elements — do not invent your own XML language.

Akoma Ntoso is clearly the least painful path: already in use in Italy, Brazil, the European Union and the UN. Swiss specifics (Swiss citation, cantonal case numbers, multilingualism) can be embedded as optional metadata attributes without bending the core schema.

Status: partly in production in OpenCaseLaw (Materialien v0.2 uses Akoma Ntoso for federal messages). Full XML output for court decisions is a roadmap item for 2026 Q3.

For the machine-readable full-text representation: Markdown with HTML anchors on every consideration, named after the Swiss citation (E. 4.1 → #e-4-1).

# BGE 140 III 86

## Sachverhalt {#sachverhalt}
...

## Erwägungen
### E. 2 {#e-2}
...
### E. 4.1 {#e-4-1}
Die zentrale Aussage steht hier...

## Dispositiv {#dispositiv}
1. Die Beschwerde wird abgewiesen.

This allows pinpoint-precise linking to every consideration — the lifeblood of legal citation practice. Tools can cite and verify considerations individually, without reparsing the entire decision.

Reference: opencaselaw.ch/entscheid/bge_BGE_140_III_86#e-4-1 jumps directly to consideration 4.1.

Every citation of another decision or statute article is resolved: not only as a plain-text string, but linked to a concrete cli:ch (case, primary — ECLI available as a projection) or ELI URI (statute). Bidirectional — both outgoing (what this decision cites) and incoming (who cites this decision).

The Swiss citation graph thus becomes the shared substrate for doctrine tracking, leading-case detection, appeal-chain tracing. Exactly the material AI tools need to verify what is cited — instead of hallucinating.

Reference: OpenCaseLaw currently resolves 6.46 M case-citation edges and 11.3 M legislation citations, re-verified daily. Available via the MCP tools find_citations, find_appeal_chain, find_leading_cases.

At every publish of the corpus, an RFC-6962 Merkle tree is computed over all decisions. Each leaf commits to (decision_id, cli:ch, ECLI, content_hash, decision_date). The root is

• committed to the public Git repository (docs/integrity/<YYYY-MM-DD>.{root,json}) — daily, ~700 bytes per publish,
• anchored on the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps (.root.ots file, ~945 bytes per publish, free, upgraded in ~1 Bitcoin block).
• available as an inclusion proof path per decision via the API (roadmap).

This means every quoted decision statement can be verified bit-exact against the publication root — without trusting opencaselaw.ch. Hallucinations are not prevented by promises but proven by mathematics.

Status: live from 2026-05-21. The hashing convention (RFC 6962, same as Certificate Transparency) and the leaf schema are documented at opencaselaw.ch/integrity/. This is the only one of the six standards that does not profile an existing schema — the convention is to be consolidated publicly at openlawstandards.ch.