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 jurisdiction rules use
Cantons	162	Which justice of the peace has jurisdiction over an address
Canton boundaries	162	The canton of a point in a split city; the cantons on a map (GeoJSON)
Arrondissement boundaries	12	The arrondissements on a map (GeoJSON)
Municipalities	565	Joining any Belgian address or statistic to the judicial map by REFNIS code
Regions	3	The region of a municipality, by REFNIS code, named in three languages
Provinces	10	The province of a municipality (none in Brussels), with its region
Postal codes	1 152	From an address's postal code to its municipality, and on to its cantons and courts
Courts	347	Names, addresses and registries' contacts to write to, file with or pay any court
Court locations	139	The justices of the peace on a map (GeoJSON points)
Prisons	39	Addresses and contacts of every prison and detention house
Houses of justice	27	Probation, victim support and social studies for the family courts
Interest rates	2 series	Calculating late-payment interest on a claim
Public holidays	10 rules	Moving the last day of a deadline to the next working day (art. 53 Ger.W.)

How the datasets fit together

Judicial area ──< Arrondissement ──< Canton >──< Municipality (REFNIS) ──< Postal code
      │                 │              │  │
      │                 │              │  └── Canton boundary   the canton's geometry (NGI)
      └───────────── Court ────────────┘  a justice of the peace links to its canton,
                        │                 and every court's address to its municipality
                        └──< Division      a division links to its court

──< reads "has many". A municipality is usually in one canton; split cities (Antwerpen, Gent, Brussel, Luik, …) are in several. On the administrative side, Region ──< Province ──< Municipality, except that the Brussels-Capital Region has no province and holds its 19 municipalities directly.

Records link to each other by id, never by name: a court has a judicialArea id and, when its area is one arrondissement, an arrondissement id; a canton lists the REFNIS codes of its municipalities; a postal code and a court's address carry the REFNIS code of their municipality. 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:

• Jurisdiction. The justice of the peace, police court and many other courts have jurisdiction 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; canton-boundaries.json adds the NGI's geometry, so a point in a split city finds its canton.
• Correct names and addresses. Writs, conclusions and letters must address the right court as it names itself, such as Vredegerecht Gent 1 or Ondernemingsrechtbank Gent - afdeling Brugge, and reach the right registry. The names are taken from the courts' own pages, in every language they publish in.
• 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: the highest courts, history, 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.