Datasets

Every dataset is a JSON file in data/, described by a JSON Schema and listed in datapackage.json with its official sources, licence and the date it was last checked against them.

Dataset	Records	What you'd use it for
Judicial areas	5	Which court of appeal (and labour court of appeal) hears an appeal
Arrondissements	12	Grouping courts, prosecutors and bailiffs; the unit most competence rules use
Cantons	162	Which justice of the peace is competent for an address
Municipalities	565	Joining any Belgian address or statistic to the judicial map by REFNIS code
Courts	46	Names, addresses and contact details to write to, file with or pay a court
Interest rates	2 series	Calculating late-payment interest on a claim

How the datasets fit together

Judicial area ──< Arrondissement ──< Canton >──< Municipality (REFNIS)
                        │              │
                        └──< Court ────┘  a justice of the peace links to its canton

──< reads "has many". A municipality is usually in one canton; split cities (Antwerpen, Gent, Brussel, Luik, …) are in several.

Records link to each other by id, never by name: a court has an arrondissement id, a canton lists the REFNIS codes of its municipalities. Names change spelling between sources and languages; ids don't.

Why this data is useful

Belgian legal work runs into the same lookups over and over, and the official sources are hard to use from code:

• Competence. The justice of the peace, police court and many other courts are competent by place. The law (the annex to the Judicial Code) describes those areas in prose, partly street by street. cantons.json turns that into a lookup from municipality to canton, and keeps the legal text for the split cities.
• Correct names and addresses. Writs, conclusions and letters must address the right court with its official name, such as Vredegerecht 1e kanton Gent or Ondernemingsrechtbank Gent - afdeling Brugge. formatCourtName builds them consistently (the French and German forms are being reviewed).
• Interest calculations. Claims for late payment use the legal rate or, between businesses, the commercial-transaction rate. Both change every year or semester, and the 2013–2015 transition depends on the contract date. Getting one period wrong changes the amount claimed.
• Joining other data. REFNIS codes are what Statbel, the regions and most open data use. Mapping them to cantons and arrondissements lets you put caseload, population or address data on the judicial map.

What isn't in it (yet)

See known gaps for limitations of the current data and the roadmap for datasets that are planned: prisons, houses of justice, the remaining courts, bailiffs, police zones and the cadastre and mortgage offices.

Reference data, not legal advice

The data is checked against official sources, but sources change and mistakes happen. Check the official source before relying on a value, and report anything wrong.