2026-10-10Finding
The current text of a law is not where you find out what happened to the law
Reading the statute in force is the obvious way to check a rule, and in nine of the countries in this corpus it is not enough on its own. A repeal can be deleted from the act that made it, a dead section can stay printed with no marker, a regulation can cite an article that no longer exists, and a consolidation can expire and never be replaced. Each state does it differently and every one of them does it lawfully.
This site quotes instruments rather than summaries, and the assumption underneath that is simple: open the text in force and read it. Ninety per cent of the time the assumption holds. The rest of the time it fails in a way that leaves no trace in the document a reader is looking at, which is what makes it worth writing down.
The sharpest case found so far is Hungarian and it is not an accident of drafting. Act XC of 2023 replaced the act every guide to Hungarian immigration still cites - and the two sections that did the replacing cannot be read in it, because Hungarian law requires a spent amending provision to be removed from the consolidated text. To see the repeal you have to go to the gazette. The same statute book forbids a consolidated text from ever appearing in that gazette, so the authentic text and the current text are in different places by law and neither can be the other.
Across the corpus there are twenty-five records in twenty countries on this one subject. What follows is five of the mechanisms, each quoted from the instrument that creates it.
Hungary: the repeal is not in the act that made it, and for one day the old act had no contents
Section 351 of Act XC of 2023 repeals Act II of 2007 in a single line. Section 350 had already repealed sections 1 to 120 of it, item by lettered item. The commencement provision then separates them: the Act comes into force on 1 January 2024, except that section 351 comes into force on 2 January.
So for the whole of 1 January 2024 the old Act existed as a title with every section gone, and the National Legislation Database's page for it is dated for exactly that one day. It is a tidy piece of drafting and nobody would ever see it, because section 12(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 takes a spent amending provision out of the consolidated text. Sections 350 and 351 are therefore unreadable in the Act that contains them, and the only place they survive is Magyar Kozlony issue 185 of 2023.
Estonia: a permit abolished in 2012, with its three sections still printed and no marker on any of them
Sections 198 to 200 of the Valismaalaste seadus describe a residence permit for a person with sufficient legal income: granted for up to two years, extendable by ten, no right to work. They sit under their own subdivision heading in the text in force, and nothing on the page says anything is wrong with them.
The sentence that closed the permit is section 309-2, eleven chapters away in the transitional provisions, and it is one line: from 1 July 2012 a temporary residence permit shall not be granted on the ground of sufficient legal income. Subsection 2 explains why the subdivision survives - a permit granted before that date can still be extended - and the income regulation still carries a rate for section 198. An agent writing Estonia for this site was one cross-check from publishing the country as having a passive-income route.
Latvia: the act is replaced, and the regulations under it point at an article that is not there
The Imigracijas likums of 2002 lost force on 15 September 2026, repealed by the first transitional provision of a wholly new Act of the same name. Every article number in every guide written before that date is wrong: the catalogue of residence grounds moved from article 23 to article 27.
The second half is the part a careful reader would still miss. Cabinet Regulation No. 675 states its enabling provision as article 2.1(2) of the Imigracijas likums, and the state's own legal portal renders that as a link - which follows the Act's **name** to the new Act, which has no article 2.1. Transitional provision 3 keeps thirty-six such regulations applicable until 1 December 2027 in so far as they do not conflict. Two of the thirty-six were read for this corpus and both cite the dead Act; the other thirty-four were not.
Romania: the consolidation prints the day it expires, and nobody replaces the file
Romanian consolidated texts are produced by a company rather than by the state, and they say so on their own first page: the content belongs exclusively to CTCE Piatra-Neamt and is not an official document, being intended for the information of users.
They also print a validity window. The immigration inspectorate's own file, described on the site as the April 2026 version, states that it is valid from 27 April 2026 until 30 April 2026 - a four-day window that had closed five months before it was read. The free-movement ordinance's window closed on 14 March 2024. The file is still the one the agency publishes.
Greece, Suriname, Luxembourg, Venezuela: four more ways to the same place
**Greece consolidates nothing at all.** The substitute is a drafting convention: an amending act reprints the whole amended article under the words kai to arthro N diamorfonetai os exis, and article 178 of the Immigration Code repeals articles 1 to 138 of the previous one in a single sentence. Every article has to be read in the act that last touched it.
**Suriname's statute book says when it stopped.** Its own description records that all amendments were worked into the parent laws in a project in 2005, and new laws since are listed separately. A tax provision quoted from it still refers to a 1922 Act.
**Luxembourg's income test is pegged to a benefit that no longer exists.** The grand-ducal regulation measures sufficient resources against the revenu minimum garanti; the notes to the official recueil record that the law of 28 July 2018 abolished the law that created it. The regulation was not amended.
**Venezuela makes visa rules under a repealed Act.** The Ley de Extranjeria y Migracion repealed the Ley de Extranjeros of 1937 in its sole repealing provision, and the visa regime in force is still the one made under the instrument that went.
What this means for anyone checking a rule, including us
None of these states is doing anything irregular. Hungary's deletion of spent provisions keeps its consolidations readable. Estonia's transitional section is where a transitional rule belongs. Romania's validity window is more honest than no date at all. The problem is not the drafting; it is that a reader who opens one document and reads it carefully can still be wrong, and nothing in the document tells them so.
What follows for this corpus is a method rather than a conclusion. Every record here names the instrument, the article and the date of the text it was read in, and where a consolidation is informative rather than authentic the publisher entry says so and says what it may not be cited for. Where a figure lives in a fourth instrument that was not read, the rule is published and the number is not. It is slower, and it is the only way the question can be answered honestly: not what does the law say, but which document says it, on what date, and what else would have to be read to be sure.
What this rests on
Nine countries are named here out of twenty that carry a record on this subject, and twenty-five records in all. The five mechanisms are chosen because each is different; this is not a survey of how common the problem is, and nothing here measures that.
Two of the thirty-six Latvian regulations preserved by transitional provision 3 were read. The claim about stale enabling citations is made about those two and not about the other thirty-four.
The Hungarian one-day gap is a reading of three provisions of one Act - sections 350, 351 and 285 - and of the database's own date for the repealed Act. No Hungarian authority was asked whether anything turned on it, and nothing here says anything did.
Every quotation is from the instrument named beside it, read on the date recorded on the citation. Where a text is a commercial consolidation rather than a state one, the citation says so.
What the instruments say
«285. § (1) Ez a törvény – a (2)–(5) bekezdésben foglalt kivétellel – 2024. január 1-jén lép hatályba. (2) A 328. § b) pontja, a 351. §, a 218. alcím és a 398. § 2024. január 2-án lép hatályba.»Our translation - not official
Section 285 (1) This Act - with the exceptions set out in paragraphs (2) to (5) - enters into force on 1 January 2024. (2) Section 328(b), section 351, subtitle 218 and section 398 enter into force on 2 January 2024.
The commencement provision that separates the two repeals by a day.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official journal of Hungary, and the only authentic text of Hungarian legislation. Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 provides that it is issued by publication as an electronic document on the government portal and that its text shall be regarded as authentic; section 25/A(1) has the responsible editor sign each issue with a qualified electronic signature and a time stamp, and section 25/A(4) forbids a published issue from being removed from the portal. Section 26(1) requires every statute except a local government decree to be promulgated in it. An issue is a single PDF containing everything promulgated that day: Magyar Kozlony 2023. evi 185. szam of 21 December 2023 runs to 1.7 million characters and carries the twelfth amendment of the Fundamental Law, Act XC of 2023 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals across pages 10447 to 10578, and twenty-odd other Acts. Issues are downloaded from magyarkozlony.hu through an opaque per-document path ending in /letoltes rather than by a readable number, so the address has to be found from the issue listing and cannot be constructed.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It is the text as enacted and never the text in force.** Section 25(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 forbids a consolidated text from being published here at all, so an issue is evidence of what a provision said on the day it was promulgated and of nothing after that. The guest investor programme is the case that shows why both publishers are needed: this journal carries the 500,000 EUR residential property option and the two-year visa that the Parliament passed, and both were replaced within a year. **Read it for repeals, commencement rules and original wording; read the National Legislation Database for what the law says today.** It is also an awkward document to quote from: a single issue is a very long PDF of many unrelated Acts, so a short quotation is likely to occur in more than one of them, and the page furniture of the running head interrupts sentences at every page break. It cannot be cited for anything not promulgated in it - local government decrees go elsewhere under section 26(1), and ministerial communications of the kind the 2023 immigration Act relies on for the annual permit number and the excluded occupations are not statutes at all.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
«350. § Hatályát veszti a harmadik országbeli állampolgárok beutazásáról és tartózkodásáról szóló 2007. évi II. törvény a) 1–86. §-a, b) 86/A. §-a, c) 86/B–86/D. §-a, d) 86/E. §-a, e) 86/F–86/H. §-a, f) 86/I. §-a, g) 86/J. §-a, h) 86/K. §-a, i) 86/L. §-a, j) 86/M. §-a, k) 86/N–86/R. §-a, l) 87. §-a, m) 87/A–87/K. §-a, n) 87/L. §-a, o) 87/M. §-a, p) 87/N. § (1) bekezdése, q) 87/N. § (2)–(10) bekezdése, r) 87/O–120. §-a.»Our translation - not official
Section 350 The following lose force in Act II of 2007 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals: a) sections 1 to 86, b) section 86/A, c) sections 86/B to 86/D, d) section 86/E, e) sections 86/F to 86/H, f) section 86/I, g) section 86/J, h) section 86/K, i) section 86/L, j) section 86/M, k) sections 86/N to 86/R, l) section 87, m) sections 87/A to 87/K, n) section 87/L, o) section 87/M, p) section 87/N(1), q) section 87/N(2) to (10), r) sections 87/O to 120.
Sections 1 to 120 of the old Act, repealed item by lettered item on 1 January.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official journal of Hungary, and the only authentic text of Hungarian legislation. Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 provides that it is issued by publication as an electronic document on the government portal and that its text shall be regarded as authentic; section 25/A(1) has the responsible editor sign each issue with a qualified electronic signature and a time stamp, and section 25/A(4) forbids a published issue from being removed from the portal. Section 26(1) requires every statute except a local government decree to be promulgated in it. An issue is a single PDF containing everything promulgated that day: Magyar Kozlony 2023. evi 185. szam of 21 December 2023 runs to 1.7 million characters and carries the twelfth amendment of the Fundamental Law, Act XC of 2023 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals across pages 10447 to 10578, and twenty-odd other Acts. Issues are downloaded from magyarkozlony.hu through an opaque per-document path ending in /letoltes rather than by a readable number, so the address has to be found from the issue listing and cannot be constructed.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It is the text as enacted and never the text in force.** Section 25(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 forbids a consolidated text from being published here at all, so an issue is evidence of what a provision said on the day it was promulgated and of nothing after that. The guest investor programme is the case that shows why both publishers are needed: this journal carries the 500,000 EUR residential property option and the two-year visa that the Parliament passed, and both were replaced within a year. **Read it for repeals, commencement rules and original wording; read the National Legislation Database for what the law says today.** It is also an awkward document to quote from: a single issue is a very long PDF of many unrelated Acts, so a short quotation is likely to occur in more than one of them, and the page furniture of the running head interrupts sentences at every page break. It cannot be cited for anything not promulgated in it - local government decrees go elsewhere under section 26(1), and ministerial communications of the kind the 2023 immigration Act relies on for the annual permit number and the excluded occupations are not statutes at all.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
«351. § Hatályát veszti a harmadik országbeli állampolgárok beutazásáról és tartózkodásáról szóló 2007. évi II. törvény.»Our translation - not official
Section 351 Act II of 2007 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals loses force.
The Act itself, repealed on 2 January. Readable only in the gazette: a spent amending provision is removed from the consolidated text.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official journal of Hungary, and the only authentic text of Hungarian legislation. Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 provides that it is issued by publication as an electronic document on the government portal and that its text shall be regarded as authentic; section 25/A(1) has the responsible editor sign each issue with a qualified electronic signature and a time stamp, and section 25/A(4) forbids a published issue from being removed from the portal. Section 26(1) requires every statute except a local government decree to be promulgated in it. An issue is a single PDF containing everything promulgated that day: Magyar Kozlony 2023. evi 185. szam of 21 December 2023 runs to 1.7 million characters and carries the twelfth amendment of the Fundamental Law, Act XC of 2023 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals across pages 10447 to 10578, and twenty-odd other Acts. Issues are downloaded from magyarkozlony.hu through an opaque per-document path ending in /letoltes rather than by a readable number, so the address has to be found from the issue listing and cannot be constructed.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It is the text as enacted and never the text in force.** Section 25(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 forbids a consolidated text from being published here at all, so an issue is evidence of what a provision said on the day it was promulgated and of nothing after that. The guest investor programme is the case that shows why both publishers are needed: this journal carries the 500,000 EUR residential property option and the two-year visa that the Parliament passed, and both were replaced within a year. **Read it for repeals, commencement rules and original wording; read the National Legislation Database for what the law says today.** It is also an awkward document to quote from: a single issue is a very long PDF of many unrelated Acts, so a short quotation is likely to occur in more than one of them, and the page furniture of the running head interrupts sentences at every page break. It cannot be cited for anything not promulgated in it - local government decrees go elsewhere under section 26(1), and ministerial communications of the kind the 2023 immigration Act relies on for the annual permit number and the excluded occupations are not statutes at all.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
«25. § (1)58 Magyarország hivatalos lapja a Magyar Közlöny. A Magyar Közlönyt a kormányzati portálon történő elektronikus dokumentumként való közzététellel kell kiadni, melynek szövegét hitelesnek kell tekinteni. (2) Jogszabálynak a módosított, illetve a hatályukat vesztett rendelkezéseivel egységes szerkezetbe foglalt szövege (a továbbiakban: egységes szerkezetű szöveg) a Magyar Közlönyben nem tehető közzé.»Our translation - not official
Section 25 (1) The official journal of Hungary is the Magyar Kozlony. The Magyar Kozlony shall be issued by publication as an electronic document on the government portal, the text of which shall be regarded as authentic. (2) A text of a statute consolidated with its amended and repealed provisions (hereinafter: consolidated text) may not be published in the Magyar Kozlony.
The authentic text is the gazette, and a consolidated text may not be published in it.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Hungarian state's own electronic collection of legislation, operated for the Minister of Justice by Magyar Kozlony Lap- es Konyvkiado Kft. under a public service contract, and the only place a consolidated Hungarian statute is published at all. Section 29(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 defines it; Government Decree No 338/2011. (XII. 29.) sets the duties. Section 2(1) of the decree requires every statute in force to appear in consolidated form with all of its past time-states back to 1 January 2010 and its next three; section 2(3) requires the consolidation within three working days of promulgation. **Read the host carefully: section 8(1) of the decree still names www.njt.hu and the service that answers is njt.jog.gov.hu.** The address shape is njt.jog.gov.hu/jogszabaly/{YEAR}-{NUMBER}-00-00 for an Act, using the Act's Roman numeral converted to Arabic - Act XC of 2023 is 2023-90-00-00, Act LV of 1993 is 1993-55-00-00, Act CXVII of 1995 is 1995-117-00-00 - and njt.jog.gov.hu/jogszabaly/{YEAR}-{NUMBER}-20-22 for a government decree, so Government Decree No 35/2024. (II. 29.) is 2024-35-20-22. The decisive thing on every page is the line under the title: Hatalyos: 2026. 10. 01. - 2026. 12. 31. By the definition of a time-state in section 1 of the decree, the closing date is the day before the text changes, so a page with a closing date is telling the reader that the law will be different on the day after it, and Nem ismert means no change is yet scheduled. Footnotes at the foot of the text name, for every amended paragraph, the Act or decree that put the current words there, which is the only machine-readable amendment history in the corpus.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **Nothing published here is the authentic text and Hungarian law says so in terms.** Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 confers authenticity on the Magyar Kozlony and section 25(2) forbids a consolidated text from being published in the Magyar Kozlony at all, so the authentic text and the current text are in two different places by design and the consolidation is never the authentic one. Neither Act CXXX of 2010 nor Government Decree No 338/2011. (XII. 29.) uses the word hiteles of this database anywhere. The practical limitation that follows is narrower than it sounds and bites hard in one place: **an amending provision disappears from here once it has done its work.** Section 12(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 makes an amending provision lose force the day after it takes effect, and the consolidated text of the amending Act then prints only a footnote saying so, stripping the subtitle headings with it. Act XC of 2023 as served here therefore contains neither section 350 nor section 351, the two provisions that repealed the statute it replaced; Act LXXXIV of 2024 as served here contains neither section 135, which removed the 500,000 EUR property option from the guest investor programme, nor the subtitle that would say which commencement date applied to it. **For what was enacted, and for when, read the Magyar Kozlony issue.** It also cannot be cited for anything kept outside the statute book, and the 2023 immigration Act pushes a great deal out there: the government decree naming which nationalities may hold a guest worker permit or a National Card, the ministerial communication fixing the annual permit number under sections 28(4) and 30(4), the communication listing excluded occupations, the communication fixing the EU Blue Card salary under section 48(7) of Government Decree No 35/2024. (II. 29.), and the registers of preferential employers and qualified temporary-work agencies. Nor is it the place to read a figure a statute re-indexes: section 25(3) of Act CXXX of 2019 prints a health service contribution of 7,710 forints set in 2020 and in the same breath provides that the rate in force is published each year by the National Tax and Customs Administration on its own website.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(1) Alates 2012. aasta 1. juulist tähtajalist elamisluba piisava legaalse sissetuleku olemasolu korral ei anta.»Our translation - not official
From 1 July 2012, a temporary residence permit in the case of sufficient legal income is not granted.
One line, eleven chapters away from the three sections it closed, which are still printed with no marker.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Estonia's state gazette, published by the Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs, and unusual in this corpus because its consolidated texts are official by statute rather than by convention. Section 1(1) of the Riigi Teataja seadus makes it the official online publication of the Republic of Estonia; section 2(1) says acts are published in it as official original texts; and section 3(1) says that alongside the original text it publishes the official consolidated texts - ametlikud terviktekstid - of Acts, presidential decrees, government, ministerial and Bank of Estonia regulations, Riigikogu resolutions, government orders and local authority regulations. Section 3(2) requires the publisher to add validity-period data to each consolidated text, which is why every act page here carries a line of the form 'Kehtiv sõnastus 30.09.2026 - 30.12.2026': the wording in force, with the day it took effect and the day a later redaktsioon replaces it. That makes the cut-off a published fact rather than an inference, and it also makes future law visible in advance, because a redaktsioon that starts in 2027 already exists at its own address. Each act is addressed as /akt/<id>, where the id is the publication date and sequence number of the redaktsioon, so a cited address is pinned to one wording rather than redirecting to whatever is current. The site also runs an abbreviation index at /api/v1/akt/lyhendid mapping each statute's Estonian abbreviation to its current redaktsioon id, and a full-text search at /api/v1/otsing/tervik-tekst, both of which were used to find instruments for this country.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The English translations are not the instrument and must never be quoted as one. Section 6 of the Riigi Teataja seadus provides only that the Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs arranges translation 'to the extent determined by the minister responsible for the area', that translations are made available in Riigi Teataja, and that a sworn translator is competent to translate an Act into a foreign language; nowhere does the Act call a translation official, which is the contrast with sections 2(1) and 3(1), where it does use that word of the Estonian texts. Translations carry their own cut-offs and lag the Estonian redaktsioon. Two further traps. First, a subdivision of an Act can outlive the ground that created it: sections 198 to 200 of the Välismaalaste seadus still describe a residence permit for sufficient legal income, with no repeal marker and with amendments dated 2013 and 2017, although section 309-2(1) stopped the permit being granted on 1 July 2012 - so a repealed ground shows only as a bracketed note against a point number in the list of grounds, eleven chapters away from the sections that describe it. Second, the site is an Angular single-page application behind Cloudflare: a plain fetch returns a 62 kB shell and no law at all, so a reading must be taken through a renderer. It cannot be cited for anything that is not published in Riigi Teataja - agency practice, application procedures, money figures the agency publishes on its own pages - and it is not a source for what any instrument means.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Ar šā likuma spēkā stāšanos spēku zaudē Imigrācijas likums»Our translation - not official
On the coming into force of this Act, the Imigrācijas likums loses force
The repeal of the Act every guide still cites.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The systematisation service of Latvia's official publisher. The state joint-stock company Latvijas Vēstnesis issues the official gazette at vestnesis.lv and separately runs likumi.lv, where every instrument is kept as a series of point-in-time versions. An instrument is addressed by a numeric document id, as /ta/id/370622-imigracijas-likums or simply /ta/id/370622, and the slug is decorative: the bare id answers. Each page carries a version selector showing the redaction in force and the date range it covers - Attēlotā redakcija, 15.09.2026.-30.12.2027. Spēkā esošā - and, where an amendment has been adopted but has not yet taken effect, a future redaction with its own date. The page footer carries the act's identity card: issuing body, date adopted, date in force, and the Latvijas Vēstnesis issue and OP number of the official publication. A repealed instrument keeps its address and gains a banner naming its successor, which is how the replacement of the Imigrācijas likums on 15 September 2026 is discoverable at all. Firecrawl reads the site without a proxy or a warm-up.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **Nothing here is the official text.** Every page carries, in its own words, "Sistematizēti tiesību akti ir informatīvi. Pretrunu gadījumā vadās pēc oficiālās publikācijas" - systematised legal acts are informative, and in case of contradiction the official publication governs. The official publication is the gazette at vestnesis.lv, identified by issue number and OP number, and a point that turns on an exact wording should be checked there. **The hyperlinks in a consolidated text follow a name rather than an instrument, and they move silently.** Cabinet regulations issued under the Imigrācijas likums still cite the repealed 2002 Act's article numbers on their face, and likumi.lv now renders those references as links to the 2026 Act: Regulation No. 675 reads "Izdoti saskaņā ar Imigrācijas likuma 2.1 panta otro daļu" linking to an Act that has no article 2.1, and Regulation No. 225 does the same for articles 4(1)(5) and 4.2(3). Nothing on either page says the reference has moved. **A statute's body is served inside an HTML table and extracts with literal `<br>` between every paragraph and every numbered point.** A quotation that crosses one carries the tag, so quotations must be taken within a single point. **The version date is the date the redaction took effect, not a sweep date**, so the cut-off recorded from it says what has been incorporated and not when the editors last looked. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the sector average wages that Cabinet Regulation No. 225 point 5.3 measures a work visa against, which the Central Statistical Bureau publishes; the needy-person income level that Cabinet Regulation No. 675 measures a Union citizen's means against; the average payment-account fee that caps the basic account, which the Finance Latvia Association publishes quarterly; the list of states Latvia has a bilateral visa-waiver treaty or a driving-licence treaty with, which appears in no instrument read here; and the practice of the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, which publishes at pmlp.gov.lv and is a different publisher.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Izdoti saskaņā ar Imigrācijas likuma 2.1 panta otro daļu»Our translation - not official
Issued under the second paragraph of article 2.1 of the Immigration Law
A regulation stating its enabling provision as an article the Act in force does not have.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The systematisation service of Latvia's official publisher. The state joint-stock company Latvijas Vēstnesis issues the official gazette at vestnesis.lv and separately runs likumi.lv, where every instrument is kept as a series of point-in-time versions. An instrument is addressed by a numeric document id, as /ta/id/370622-imigracijas-likums or simply /ta/id/370622, and the slug is decorative: the bare id answers. Each page carries a version selector showing the redaction in force and the date range it covers - Attēlotā redakcija, 15.09.2026.-30.12.2027. Spēkā esošā - and, where an amendment has been adopted but has not yet taken effect, a future redaction with its own date. The page footer carries the act's identity card: issuing body, date adopted, date in force, and the Latvijas Vēstnesis issue and OP number of the official publication. A repealed instrument keeps its address and gains a banner naming its successor, which is how the replacement of the Imigrācijas likums on 15 September 2026 is discoverable at all. Firecrawl reads the site without a proxy or a warm-up.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **Nothing here is the official text.** Every page carries, in its own words, "Sistematizēti tiesību akti ir informatīvi. Pretrunu gadījumā vadās pēc oficiālās publikācijas" - systematised legal acts are informative, and in case of contradiction the official publication governs. The official publication is the gazette at vestnesis.lv, identified by issue number and OP number, and a point that turns on an exact wording should be checked there. **The hyperlinks in a consolidated text follow a name rather than an instrument, and they move silently.** Cabinet regulations issued under the Imigrācijas likums still cite the repealed 2002 Act's article numbers on their face, and likumi.lv now renders those references as links to the 2026 Act: Regulation No. 675 reads "Izdoti saskaņā ar Imigrācijas likuma 2.1 panta otro daļu" linking to an Act that has no article 2.1, and Regulation No. 225 does the same for articles 4(1)(5) and 4.2(3). Nothing on either page says the reference has moved. **A statute's body is served inside an HTML table and extracts with literal `<br>` between every paragraph and every numbered point.** A quotation that crosses one carries the tag, so quotations must be taken within a single point. **The version date is the date the redaction took effect, not a sweep date**, so the cut-off recorded from it says what has been incorporated and not when the editors last looked. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the sector average wages that Cabinet Regulation No. 225 point 5.3 measures a work visa against, which the Central Statistical Bureau publishes; the needy-person income level that Cabinet Regulation No. 675 measures a Union citizen's means against; the average payment-account fee that caps the basic account, which the Finance Latvia Association publishes quarterly; the list of states Latvia has a bilateral visa-waiver treaty or a driving-licence treaty with, which appears in no instrument read here; and the practice of the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, which publishes at pmlp.gov.lv and is a different publisher.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Conţinutul acestui act aparţine exclusiv S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ şi nu este un document cu caracter oficial, fiind destinat informării utilizatorilor.»Our translation - not official
The content of this act belongs exclusively to S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ and is not a document of an official character, being intended for the information of users.
Printed above article 1 of the file the immigration inspectorate publishes.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Romanian immigration authority, a structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, created by Emergency Ordinance 55/2007 out of the Authority for Foreigners and the National Office for Refugees. It administers the regime of foreigners and decides visas, residence extensions and long-term residence. Its Legislaţie page is also, in practice, the most reliable public source of the immigration statutes themselves: it serves consolidated PDFs of Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 on the regime of foreigners, Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 on free movement of Union, EEA and Swiss citizens, Ordinance 25/2014 on employment and secondment, Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 on access to the labour market, Law 122/2006 on asylum and the implementing decisions, at stable wp-content/uploads addresses. These are the only consolidated Romanian immigration texts reachable from outside the country, because the Ministry of Justice's legislative portal answers nothing.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It is not the publisher of record and the files say so. Every consolidated PDF it serves is produced by S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ and carries that company's disclaimer above the first article: the content belongs exclusively to CTCE and is not a document of an official character, being intended for the information of users. The official text is the Monitorul Oficial al României, Partea I, issue cited in each amendment annotation. Each file also prints a validity window with an end date, and the Inspectorate does not replace the file when the window closes: the Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 copy read on 10 October 2026 states its validity as running from 27 April 2026 until 30 April 2026, and the Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 copy states 8 to 14 March 2024. It cannot be cited for anything outside the regime of foreigners - not for tax, not for health insurance, not for road traffic, not for citizenship, which is the National Citizenship Authority's - and it cannot be cited for administrative practice: fee schedules, the Shortage Occupations List and the annual labour contingent are ministerial orders and Government decisions published elsewhere.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Formă consolidată valabilă la data 30-04-2026 Prezenta formă consolidată este valabilă începând cu data de 27-04-2026 până la data de 30-04-2026»Our translation - not official
Consolidated form valid at the date 30-04-2026. This consolidated form is valid from the date 27-04-2026 until the date 30-04-2026.
A four-day validity window that had closed five months before the file was read.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Romanian immigration authority, a structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, created by Emergency Ordinance 55/2007 out of the Authority for Foreigners and the National Office for Refugees. It administers the regime of foreigners and decides visas, residence extensions and long-term residence. Its Legislaţie page is also, in practice, the most reliable public source of the immigration statutes themselves: it serves consolidated PDFs of Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 on the regime of foreigners, Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 on free movement of Union, EEA and Swiss citizens, Ordinance 25/2014 on employment and secondment, Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 on access to the labour market, Law 122/2006 on asylum and the implementing decisions, at stable wp-content/uploads addresses. These are the only consolidated Romanian immigration texts reachable from outside the country, because the Ministry of Justice's legislative portal answers nothing.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It is not the publisher of record and the files say so. Every consolidated PDF it serves is produced by S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ and carries that company's disclaimer above the first article: the content belongs exclusively to CTCE and is not a document of an official character, being intended for the information of users. The official text is the Monitorul Oficial al României, Partea I, issue cited in each amendment annotation. Each file also prints a validity window with an end date, and the Inspectorate does not replace the file when the window closes: the Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 copy read on 10 October 2026 states its validity as running from 27 April 2026 until 30 April 2026, and the Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 copy states 8 to 14 March 2024. It cannot be cited for anything outside the regime of foreigners - not for tax, not for health insurance, not for road traffic, not for citizenship, which is the National Citizenship Authority's - and it cannot be cited for administrative practice: fee schedules, the Shortage Occupations List and the annual labour contingent are ministerial orders and Government decisions published elsewhere.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Από την έναρξη ισχύος του παρόντος καταργούνται τα άρθρα 1 έως 138 του ν. 4251/2014 (Α’ 80).»One sentence repealing a hundred and thirty-eight articles, in a country that consolidates nothing.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Alle wijzigingen zijn verwerkt in de moederwetten. Dit is gedaan in een projekt in 2005. De nieuwe wetten en wetswijzigingen zijn daarna niet opgenomen in de geldende tekst.»Our translation - not official
All amendments have been worked into the parent laws. This was done in a project in 2005. The new laws and amendments to laws have not since been included in the text in force.
The statute book recording the year it stopped being maintained.
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The National Assembly's legislation portal, and the only public collection of Surinamese law we found. Four collections, divided by one date. `Geldende teksten t/m 2005` holds consolidated texts: amendments were worked into the parent Acts in a project in 2005. `Wetten na 2005`, `Wijzigingen na 2005` and `Overeenkomsten/verdragen` hold the Acts, amending Acts and treaty-approval Acts published since, each as a facsimile of the page of the Staatsblad van de Republiek Suriname in which it was promulgated. Together about five hundred instruments. It also publishes `Naturalisatie wetten`, because in Suriname naturalisation is granted by an Act of Parliament.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The consolidation stops in 2005 and the portal says so on its own index page: "De nieuwe wetten en wetswijzigingen zijn daarna niet opgenomen in de geldende tekst." So a text from the first collection shows the law as the 2005 project left it and nothing more - the Income Tax Act's consolidated text carries amendments only to S.B. 2003 no. 30, prints its rate table in a currency withdrawn in 2004, and has ten later amending entries in the portal's own list. Every money figure in that collection is in Surinamese guilders. Instruments in the other three collections are as enacted and carry no cut-off, but they are scans with no text layer, so they are readings of a picture. The collection carries Acts, amendments, treaties, naturalisation Acts and budgets, and does NOT carry staatsbesluiten, ministeriële beschikkingen or resoluties - which is where much of Surinamese immigration practice lives, so the absence of a measure here is never evidence that it was not made. It also does not always carry the parent Act: the Rijwet 1971 and the Wet Tarief van Invoerrechten 1996 appear only through instruments amending them, and the 1989 Act amending the Rijwet has a page with no document attached.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«La loi du 28 juillet 2018 relative au revenu d’inclusion sociale (JO, Mém. A 630 du 30 juillet 2018) a abrogé la loi modifiée du 29 avril 1999 portant création d’un droit à un revenu minimum garanti. Dans tous les textes légaux et réglementaires utilisant les termes « revenu minimum garanti » il y a lieu de lire « revenu d’inclusion sociale ».»The notes to the official recueil, recording that the benefit the income test is measured against was abolished.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Luxembourg's official legal publisher, run by the Service central de législation. It issues the Journal officiel and, separately, textes coordonnés. Everything is addressed by ELI, and the address that matters is on the data host rather than the site: legilux.public.lu is an Angular single-page application that answers every address with the same 2,118-byte shell, while data.legilux.public.lu serves the documents. The live forms are data.legilux.public.lu/eli/<type>/<yyyy>/<mm>/<dd>/<id>/jo/fr/{html,pdf} for an act as published and .../consolide/<YYYYMMDD>/fr/{html,pdf} for a consolidation, where the date must be an exact consolidation date - any other date answers 404. Codes are addressed differently again, as /eli/etat/leg/code/<name>/<YYYYMMDD>/fr/pdf. The same host answers an Accept: application/rdf+xml request for any ELI with the record's metadata, and there is a SPARQL endpoint at data.legilux.public.lu/sparqlendpoint which is how a consolidation date is found rather than guessed: ?v jolux:isMemberOf <work ELI> ; jolux:dateApplicability ?d returns every consolidation of an act.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The consolidations are documentary. The Journal officiel as published is what has legal force, and the Code de la sécurité sociale prints that on its own notes page. The two manifestations of one consolidation are not the same document: the HTML carries the change markers and the amending-act headings - 'Art. 78. (L du 21 avril 2023)' - and breaks sentences with marker digits like '145 > quinze heures 145 <', while the PDF prints clean article text and drops both the markers and the headings. A quotation has to be taken from whichever one the sentence survives in. The consolidations also carry defects of their own: article 33 of the Act of 29 August 2008 is printed twice over in both manifestations, once as the original single sentence and once again as paragraph (1) with the same words. It cannot be cited for the income tax Act at all - it holds consolidation metadata for the Act of 4 December 1967 up to 1 February 2026 but serves no document for any consolidation after 2011, so the only current coordinated text of it is the tax administration's. Code recueils are PDF-only, and two of them set the publisher's own apparatus inside the text column: the Code de la sécurité sociale prints source references like 'L. 27.7.92' mid-sentence, and the Code de la route prints case-law annotations frozen at 2 September 2013 alongside articles consolidated to 2026. The Legilux record of the loi d'adaptation fiscale of 16 October 1934 tags its expression as French while the text it serves is German from beginning to end.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Quedan derogadas la Ley de Extranjeros, publicada en la Gaceta Oficial de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela Nº 19.329 de fecha 3 de agosto de 1937»Our translation - not official
The Ley de Extranjeros, published in the Official Gazette of the United States of Venezuela No. 19,329 of 3 August 1937, is repealed.
The repeal, beside a visa regime still made under what it repealed.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The OAS legal portal republishes the constitutions and some statutes of member states. It carries the Constitution of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines as Chapter 2 of the Laws of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Revised Edition 1990, printing United Kingdom S.I. 1979 No. 916 as amended by Act 21 of 1986 and Act 15 of 1988 - the only copy of the Vincentian Constitution with a text layer that we could reach, the House of Assembly's own copy being an imageless scan.
Standing: Reports, establishes nothing
Cannot be cited for: It is a republisher and must never be cited for currency: the file is the 1990 edition, while Saint Vincent's own Acts now cite the Revised Edition 2009, in which chapter numbers have moved. The PDF is a two-up optical recognition of a printed book and its text layer carries recognition errors, so every quotation taken from it must be declared as a recognition and must be left with its errors intact. It must not be cited for any instrument other than the one it reproduces.
We re-read it every 365 days. More about this source
- issuesMagyar Kozlony 2023. evi 185. szam, 2023. evi XC. torveny
Magyar Kozlony, Magyar Kozlony Lap- es Konyvkiado Kft.
About this source
The official journal of Hungary, and the only authentic text of Hungarian legislation. Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 provides that it is issued by publication as an electronic document on the government portal and that its text shall be regarded as authentic; section 25/A(1) has the responsible editor sign each issue with a qualified electronic signature and a time stamp, and section 25/A(4) forbids a published issue from being removed from the portal. Section 26(1) requires every statute except a local government decree to be promulgated in it. An issue is a single PDF containing everything promulgated that day: Magyar Kozlony 2023. evi 185. szam of 21 December 2023 runs to 1.7 million characters and carries the twelfth amendment of the Fundamental Law, Act XC of 2023 on the entry and residence of third-country nationals across pages 10447 to 10578, and twenty-odd other Acts. Issues are downloaded from magyarkozlony.hu through an opaque per-document path ending in /letoltes rather than by a readable number, so the address has to be found from the issue listing and cannot be constructed.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It is the text as enacted and never the text in force.** Section 25(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 forbids a consolidated text from being published here at all, so an issue is evidence of what a provision said on the day it was promulgated and of nothing after that. The guest investor programme is the case that shows why both publishers are needed: this journal carries the 500,000 EUR residential property option and the two-year visa that the Parliament passed, and both were replaced within a year. **Read it for repeals, commencement rules and original wording; read the National Legislation Database for what the law says today.** It is also an awkward document to quote from: a single issue is a very long PDF of many unrelated Acts, so a short quotation is likely to occur in more than one of them, and the page furniture of the running head interrupts sentences at every page break. It cannot be cited for anything not promulgated in it - local government decrees go elsewhere under section 26(1), and ministerial communications of the kind the 2023 immigration Act relies on for the annual permit number and the excluded occupations are not statutes at all.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
- consolidatesImigrācijas likums (2026)
Likumi.lv - VSIA "Latvijas Vēstnesis" · consolidated to 2026-09-15
About this source
The systematisation service of Latvia's official publisher. The state joint-stock company Latvijas Vēstnesis issues the official gazette at vestnesis.lv and separately runs likumi.lv, where every instrument is kept as a series of point-in-time versions. An instrument is addressed by a numeric document id, as /ta/id/370622-imigracijas-likums or simply /ta/id/370622, and the slug is decorative: the bare id answers. Each page carries a version selector showing the redaction in force and the date range it covers - Attēlotā redakcija, 15.09.2026.-30.12.2027. Spēkā esošā - and, where an amendment has been adopted but has not yet taken effect, a future redaction with its own date. The page footer carries the act's identity card: issuing body, date adopted, date in force, and the Latvijas Vēstnesis issue and OP number of the official publication. A repealed instrument keeps its address and gains a banner naming its successor, which is how the replacement of the Imigrācijas likums on 15 September 2026 is discoverable at all. Firecrawl reads the site without a proxy or a warm-up.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **Nothing here is the official text.** Every page carries, in its own words, "Sistematizēti tiesību akti ir informatīvi. Pretrunu gadījumā vadās pēc oficiālās publikācijas" - systematised legal acts are informative, and in case of contradiction the official publication governs. The official publication is the gazette at vestnesis.lv, identified by issue number and OP number, and a point that turns on an exact wording should be checked there. **The hyperlinks in a consolidated text follow a name rather than an instrument, and they move silently.** Cabinet regulations issued under the Imigrācijas likums still cite the repealed 2002 Act's article numbers on their face, and likumi.lv now renders those references as links to the 2026 Act: Regulation No. 675 reads "Izdoti saskaņā ar Imigrācijas likuma 2.1 panta otro daļu" linking to an Act that has no article 2.1, and Regulation No. 225 does the same for articles 4(1)(5) and 4.2(3). Nothing on either page says the reference has moved. **A statute's body is served inside an HTML table and extracts with literal `<br>` between every paragraph and every numbered point.** A quotation that crosses one carries the tag, so quotations must be taken within a single point. **The version date is the date the redaction took effect, not a sweep date**, so the cut-off recorded from it says what has been incorporated and not when the editors last looked. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the sector average wages that Cabinet Regulation No. 225 point 5.3 measures a work visa against, which the Central Statistical Bureau publishes; the needy-person income level that Cabinet Regulation No. 675 measures a Union citizen's means against; the average payment-account fee that caps the basic account, which the Finance Latvia Association publishes quarterly; the list of states Latvia has a bilateral visa-waiver treaty or a driving-licence treaty with, which appears in no instrument read here; and the practice of the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, which publishes at pmlp.gov.lv and is a different publisher.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- administersOrdonanţa de urgenţă a Guvernului nr. 194/2002 privind regimul străinilor în România, formă consolidată
Inspectoratul General pentru Imigrări · consolidated to 2026-04-30
About this source
The Romanian immigration authority, a structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, created by Emergency Ordinance 55/2007 out of the Authority for Foreigners and the National Office for Refugees. It administers the regime of foreigners and decides visas, residence extensions and long-term residence. Its Legislaţie page is also, in practice, the most reliable public source of the immigration statutes themselves: it serves consolidated PDFs of Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 on the regime of foreigners, Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 on free movement of Union, EEA and Swiss citizens, Ordinance 25/2014 on employment and secondment, Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 on access to the labour market, Law 122/2006 on asylum and the implementing decisions, at stable wp-content/uploads addresses. These are the only consolidated Romanian immigration texts reachable from outside the country, because the Ministry of Justice's legislative portal answers nothing.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It is not the publisher of record and the files say so. Every consolidated PDF it serves is produced by S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ and carries that company's disclaimer above the first article: the content belongs exclusively to CTCE and is not a document of an official character, being intended for the information of users. The official text is the Monitorul Oficial al României, Partea I, issue cited in each amendment annotation. Each file also prints a validity window with an end date, and the Inspectorate does not replace the file when the window closes: the Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 copy read on 10 October 2026 states its validity as running from 27 April 2026 until 30 April 2026, and the Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 copy states 8 to 14 March 2024. It cannot be cited for anything outside the regime of foreigners - not for tax, not for health insurance, not for road traffic, not for citizenship, which is the National Citizenship Authority's - and it cannot be cited for administrative practice: fee schedules, the Shortage Occupations List and the annual labour contingent are ministerial orders and Government decisions published elsewhere.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source