Terms of Use
These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of the VATcodex website (the “Service”). By using the Service you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Service.
1. Who operates this Service
The Service is operated by the Operator (the “Operator”), acting in a personal capacity and established in Spain. Contact: contact.
2. What the Service is, and what it is not
VATcodex is a search tool over publicly available European Union VAT case law and legislation. It helps you find and triage material. It is not a legal or tax advisory service, it does not create a professional relationship of any kind, and nothing in it constitutes legal, tax or financial advice.
You should not rely on the Service for any decision without verifying the position against the authoritative sources and, where appropriate, taking qualified professional advice.
3. The sources, and which version is authentic
Judgments, opinions and orders are reproduced from CURIA and EUR-Lex; legislation from EUR-Lex. The authentic version of any judgment or legislative text is the one published in the Official Journal of the European Union or by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and a link to that source is offered with every document. Where a document is held here only in a language other than English, the interface says so.
The corpus is assembled from those sources and may be incomplete or lag behind publication. Absence of a case from the Service does not mean the case does not exist.
4. AI-generated summaries and unofficial translations
Most cases carry a summary produced with the assistance of an automated language model, always labelled as such in the interface. These summaries are provided for orientation only. Despite reasonable care in how they are produced, automated summaries can be incomplete, can omit material qualifications, and can contain errors. They are not a substitute for reading the judgment, and should never be cited as authority.
A small number of documents that the Court does not publish in English carry an unofficial translation, shown on a separate tab, marked as unofficial and never replacing the original. It has no legal value. Where a decision corrects an earlier judgment, the corrected wording is kept in the language of the case and is not translated, because that wording is the authentic text.
5. Non-binding material: VAT Committee guidelines and Commission Explanatory Notes
The compendium reproduces, alongside each article, guidelines agreed in the VAT Committee and sections of the European Commission’s Explanatory Notes. Neither is binding, on the Member States or on the Court, and the interface says so where they are read. Guidelines that the Commission records as overtaken are marked as such. Explanatory Notes are revised by the Commission from time to time; the authentic version is the PDF published on the Commission’s own site, which is linked from every extract.
6. The hearing calendar
Forthcoming judgments, opinions and hearings are taken from the judicial calendar published by the Court of Justice. Listings change without notice and the Court may reschedule at any time. Always confirm a date against the Court’s own calendar before relying on it.
7. Accounts
Reading the Service needs no account. To take part in the discussion you create one with an email address and a password. You must give an address you control, keep your password confidential, and not share or transfer your account. You are responsible for what is posted from it.
You may delete your account at any time from your profile page, in one click. You may choose to have your posts anonymised rather than deleted, so that replies by other people are not broken.
8. The discussion: what you may post
The discussion exists so that practitioners can annotate case law with things no official source publishes, above all how a ruling is actually applied in a given Member State. When you post, you must not publish:
- content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, discriminatory or threatening;
- confidential or privileged information, or personal data about identifiable third parties, including anything about a client or a case you are advising on;
- advertising, promotional material or spam;
- content that infringes intellectual property or breaches an obligation of professional secrecy that binds you.
Posts are contributions to a professional discussion, not advice to anyone. Nobody posting here is advising you, and you should not treat a post as advice or act on it without your own verification.
9. Moderation, automated screening, removal and suspension
Posts appear immediately. Every post is screened automatically as soon as it is published, using a language model operated by a third-party provider, which classifies it and takes down what is clearly unacceptable. The screening is a filter on content, not a decision about you as a person; see the Privacy Policy for what this involves.
The Operator may remove or hide any content that breaches these Terms, and may suspend an account that does so repeatedly or seriously. Where content is removed, the author is not deprived of the ability to contest it: write to the contact address and the decision will be reconsidered by a human being.
10. Reporting content
Any signed-in user can report a post with the report button. Reports are read by the Operator. This is the notice mechanism required by Article 16 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), and a complaint about a decision taken on a report can be sent to the contact address, which serves as the internal complaint-handling channel.
11. Your content, and the licence you grant
You keep the rights in what you write. By posting you grant the Operator a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and display that content within the Service, for as long as it remains published there, so that it can be shown to other users. The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for copies that must be retained to handle a complaint or to comply with a legal obligation.
12. No warranty
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, currency, availability, or fitness for a particular purpose.
13. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the Operator shall not be liable for any loss or damage, including loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or any indirect or consequential loss, arising out of or in connection with the use of, or inability to use, the Service, or reliance on any content within it, including content posted by other users.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability where such exclusion or limitation is not permitted by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you use the Service as a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights are unaffected.
14. Intellectual property
Case law is reproduced from CURIA and EUR-Lex and remains © European Union; its reuse is permitted subject to acknowledgement of source. Legislative texts are reproduced from EUR-Lex under Decision 2011/833/EU (CC BY 4.0). VAT Committee guidelines and Explanatory Notes are documents of the European Commission and are linked to their official publication.
The software, interface design, the structure, selection and arrangement of the compilation, and the generated summaries are © 2026 the Operator. You may use the Service for your own professional or private research. You may not scrape, bulk-download, resell, sublicense or redistribute the Service or its compiled datasets without prior written permission.
15. Acceptable use
You agree not to use the Service in any way that is unlawful, that interferes with its normal operation or security, that places an unreasonable load on the infrastructure (including automated mass retrieval), or that infringes the rights of others.
16. Availability and changes
The Service is provided free of charge and may be modified, suspended or discontinued at any time without notice. These Terms may be updated; the version in force is the one published on this page, with the date shown above. If a change materially affects people with accounts, it will be signalled in the interface.
17. Governing law and jurisdiction
These Terms are governed by Spanish law. Any dispute shall be submitted to the competent courts of Spain. If you use the Service as a consumer resident in the European Union, you retain the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence and may bring proceedings before the courts of that country.
18. Contact
Questions about these Terms: contact.