uitspraken

uitspraken is a simple Python program to easily load in Dutch court decision XML-files as published by the Dutch judiciary (de Rechtspraak) into a database.

How to use

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/mastaal/uitspraken.git

Create a Python environment and install all dependencies:

$ cd uitspraken
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -U -r requirements.txt

If you want to use a different database than the default SQLite database, make the appropriate changes to the DATABASES variable in uitspraken/settings.py.

Then, we can initialize the database:

$ ./manage migrate
$ ./manage create_instanties
$ ./manage create_rechtsgebieden
$ ./manage create_procedures

You are now ready to load in any XML-format uitspraken you have:

$ ./manage create_uitspraak_from_xml data/2021/ECLI_NL_RBLIM_2021_4036.xml

Note that you may supply multiple different XML files to this command, or use wildcards:

$ ./manage create_uitspraak_from_xml data/2021/ECLI_NL_HR*
$ ./manage create_uitspraak_from_xml ECLI_NL_RBLIM_2021_4036.xml ECLI_NL_RBLIM_2021_4037.xml

You may also supply one or more directories, which contain XML files in the expected format:

$ ls data
ECLI_NL_GHAMS_1922_10.xml ECLI_NL_GHAMS_1922_11.xml ECLI_NL_GHAMS_1922_12.xml ...
$ ./manage create_uitspraak_from_xml data

Note that this may take some time. Once done, you can make queries directly in your database, or in Python using the Django database-abstraction API.

Open Data Rechtspraak

Up until January 2023, the Rechtspraak periodically published an XML-dump with all uitspraken in their database. Sadly, they no longer provide this server. There is however still an API to directly query their database. For more information, see Open Data Rechtspraak (NL).

License

Copyright (c) 2023, 2024 Martijn Staal <uitspraken [a t ] martijn-staal.nl>

Available under the European Union Public License v1.2 (EUPL-1.2), or, at your option, any later version.