European Law: Legislation

Following the entry into force on 1st December 2009 of the Lisbon Treaty the previous treaties (the Treaty establishing the European Community and the former Treaty on European Union) were replaced by the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and of the Treaty on European Union.

All articles, sections, chapters, titles and parts of the previous treaties were also re-ordered and renumbered. To be able to understand the current relevance of sources from before the 1st December 2009, you will thus need to know the new numbers of old articles.

Therefore, “Tables of Equivalence” have been added at the end of the consolidated versions of the Treaty on European Union and of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which show which new article is functionally equivalent to an old article. The latest table of equivalences can be found here. It compares the numbering as established in the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam with the numbering as established in the Treaty of Lisbon.

Note that sometimes you will also come across case-law from before the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam, which means that yet another numbering of the articles applies and thus another table of equivalences (which you can find in the respective consolidated versions of the treaties). The Oxford University Press has helpfully merged the pre-Amsterdam, Amsterdam and the Lisbon tables of equivalence into one comprehensive table which can be found attached.