Owner European Union Website europa.eu Launched February 1995 | Created by European Commission Commercial No | |
Type of site Public service portal and
institutional information | ||
Europa (sometimes capitalised EUROPA) is the official Web portal of the European Union (EU). It gives basic information on how the EU works, the latest EU news and events, as well as links to websites of institutions, EU agencies, representations in EU member countries and diplomatic missions of the European Union around the World.
Contents
Europa.eu is the common domain of the EU institutions.
The European institutions' websites use a common second level domain .europa.eu. This means that all agencies and institutions have their respective name (or initials) in addition to the subdomain europa.eu as a standard Web address. For example, the address of the Institute for Security Studies is iss.europa.eu.
EUROPA was first published in February 1995 at the G7 ministerial meeting on information society in Brussels. Originally designed for that specific event, EUROPA expanded rapidly and the European Commission decided to develop it into an information resource for everyone, specialising in all matters covered by the EU Treaties and the work of the European institutions.
Languages
Laws and documents of major public interest are published in all 24 official EU languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. Documents that are not legally binding are usually published in English, French and German.
Translation controversy
In January 2007, EU commissioner Franco Frattini criticised the Web service for not translating an article about the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome into Italian, his own language.
Services
Europa also offers other services such as