EU directive transposition as structured data: national measures, CELEX sector 7 and the graph

Structured transposition data comes from the member states themselves. When a directive is adopted, each member state must adopt national measures to reach its result and notify them to the European Commission; the Publications Office publishes those notifications on EUR-Lex, under the “National transposition” tab of each directive, and in Cellar, each with a CELEX sector 7 number such as 72016L0680FRA_263118 (a French measure notified for Directive (EU) 2016/680). Harvested as data, every notification is an edge from a national measure to the directive it was notified for: a ready-made map from EU law to national law, across 27 member states and their languages. Its limit is that a notification is the member state’s own statement, not proof that the directive was transposed completely or correctly. Arieta Data’s 2026-11 citation graph holds 66,670 transposition edges.

What is transposition?

Transposition is the process by which a member state turns an EU directive into national law. Under Article 288 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, a directive binds each member state as to the result to be achieved but leaves the choice of form and methods to national authorities. Regulations, by contrast, apply directly and need no transposition.

Every directive sets a deadline. Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright in the Digital Single Market, for example, had to be transposed by 7 June 2021 (Article 29). When the deadline passes without complete notification, the Commission can open infringement proceedings under Article 258 TFEU. In July 2021 it sent letters of formal notice to 23 member states that had not communicated complete transposition of that directive.

Failure to notify carries a specific sanction. Article 260(3) TFEU lets the Commission, when it brings a case for failure “to notify measures transposing a directive adopted under a legislative procedure”, propose a lump sum or penalty payment in the same action. That is why member states notify, and why the notification data is fairly complete for recent directives.

Where is transposition data published?

Source	What it holds	Notes
EUR-Lex, “National transposition” tab of each directive	The notified national measures: title, publication date, the directives transposed, and sometimes the text	EUR-Lex states that member states are solely responsible for the information they provide; texts appear only if member states agree
Cellar (SPARQL endpoint)	The same notifications as linked data, described in the Common Data Model (CDM) ontology	The machine-readable route; one query can list every measure for a directive
National legal portals	The national acts themselves, some with a note of the directive they implement	Coverage and markup vary by country
Single Market Scoreboard	The transposition deficit per member state	Aggregate indicator, not a per-measure dataset
Explanatory documents	Correlation tables between a directive’s provisions and national provisions	Provided under the Joint Political Declaration of 28 September 2011 where justified; not systematically public

The Scoreboard’s transposition deficit is the share of single-market directives not yet fully notified by the deadline. The European Council set a 1 percent target in 2007, later cut to 0.5 percent; for the reporting period December 2024 to November 2025 the EU average was 1.1 percent, up from 0.8 percent.

How do sector 7 CELEX numbers work?

National transposition measures have their own CELEX sector, 7. The number is built from the directive’s own CELEX number, the member state and an id:

Part	Example 72016L0680FRA_263118	Meaning
Sector	7	National transposition measure
Directive base	2016L0680	The directive’s CELEX number without its leading 3 (here Directive (EU) 2016/680, CELEX 32016L0680)
Member state	FRA	Three-letter country code
Id	_263118	Identifier of the notified measure

So the first ten characters match the directive’s CELEX number except the first, which changes from 3 to 7. That makes the link from measure to directive recoverable from the identifier alone. One directive usually has many measures per country, because member states often transpose a directive through several acts, or amend existing laws in many places. More on CELEX, and on the ELI and ECLI identifiers national measures may also carry, is in CELEX, ECLI and ELI explained.

What does a notification tell you, and what not?

A notification says that a member state considers a national measure relevant to transposing a directive. It does not say:

• that the measure transposes the directive completely: the Commission may still find gaps;
• that it transposes it correctly: conformity is assessed separately, and courts may disagree;
• which provision of the directive each national provision implements: that is what correlation tables are for, and they are not systematically published;
• that the measure is only about the directive: national acts often transpose several directives and add purely national rules (“gold-plating”).

Notifications also lag. A measure adopted shortly before or after a deadline may appear in the data weeks or months later, and older directives may have patchy records. Treat the data as a strong, official signal of the relationship, not as a legal assessment.

How is transposition data used in AI?

The edge from a directive to a national measure links two documents about the same subject in different languages, drafting styles and legal systems. That makes it unusually useful:

Use	How transposition edges help
Cross-lingual retrieval	Directive (in any EU language) as query, national measures (in the national language) as positives
Comparative legal research	“How did Germany and France implement Article 15 of this directive?” starts from the notified measures
Compliance and regulatory products	Map an EU obligation to the national rule a client must follow in each market
RAG grounding	When a user asks about national law, retrieve the directive too, and vice versa
Evaluation	The notified measures for a directive form a gold set for directive-to-national retrieval; see How to build a legal eval set from a citation graph
Change tracking	When a directive is amended, its transposition measures are the national documents likely to change next

Article-level alignment is harder than act-level linking, because notifications link acts, not provisions. Within a linked pair, embedding similarity or a model can propose provision-level matches, but those are predictions and should be labelled as such, separately from the notified edge.

How Arieta Data structures transposition

In Arieta Data’s graph dataset, a transposition edge links a national measure (the source) to the directive it was notified for or is recorded as transposing (the target), with both jurisdictions, the edge origin and the snapshot id. The origin says where the edge comes from:

Origin	Meaning
cellar-nim	A national measure a member state notified to the Commission, as recorded in Cellar
source	A national source that records the relation and names the directive by an identifier
resolver	A textual reference in a national source matched to the directive by a deterministic, unique match

There are no probabilistic edges. Where an edge comes from a national lane (source or resolver), the national measure is itself a record in the corpus, so the edge joins to its article-level text and you can move from a directive to the national provisions that implement it. Other edge types (amendment, repeal, legal basis, implementation) are described in Citation graphs as supervision signal for legal retrieval, and the national sources in National legislation datasets in Europe.

Key facts

• Directives bind member states as to the result and must be transposed by national measures (Article 288 TFEU); regulations apply directly.
• Member states notify their measures to the Commission; failure to notify can lead to a lump sum or penalty payment under Article 260(3) TFEU.
• Notified measures appear on EUR-Lex under each directive’s “National transposition” tab and in Cellar, with CELEX sector 7 numbers such as 72016L0680FRA_263118.
• A notification is the member state’s own statement; it is not a finding of complete or correct transposition.
• Arieta Data snapshot 2026-11 holds 66,670 transposition edges among 801,149 typed edges.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I find how a directive was transposed in a given country?

Open the directive on EUR-Lex and use the “National transposition” tab, or query Cellar for the sector 7 measures linked to the directive’s CELEX number. The national acts themselves are on each country’s legal portal.

Are transposition notifications reliable?

They are official and fairly complete for recent directives, but they are self-declared by member states. They do not show whether transposition is complete or correct, or which national provision implements which article of the directive.

What is a CELEX sector 7 number?

It is the identifier EUR-Lex gives a notified national transposition measure. Its first ten characters repeat the transposed directive’s CELEX number with the leading 3 replaced by 7, followed by a three-letter country code and an id.

What is the transposition deficit?

The Single Market Scoreboard’s measure of the share of single-market directives a member state has not fully notified by their deadlines. The target is 0.5 percent; the EU average was 1.1 percent for December 2024 to November 2025.

Where Arieta Data fits

Arieta Data links EU directives to national law in one typed graph, cut from the same monthly snapshot as the corpus and the version history. Snapshot 2026-11 holds 419,355 documents (EU legislation, CJEU case law and national legislation from 15 countries) and 801,149 edges, of which 66,670 are transposition edges. National case law is included, delivered with personal data masked.

Request a sample of the graph for the directives and countries you care about. We reply within one business day, and a custom cut by jurisdiction, language, date range or document type is ready within 5⁠–⁠6 business days.

Not legal advice. A transposition edge records a notification or a relation stated by a source; it is not an assessment of whether a directive was correctly transposed.