be-eli-mcp

An MCP server for Belgian legislation via [Moniteur Belge / Belgisch Staatsblad] (https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be), the official gazette of the Belgian Federal Public Service Justice. It fetches act metadata and full text by ELI coordinates, with verifiable citations. Part of the eu-legal-mcp line of national legal connectors by MateMatic.

Belgian legislation is addressed by ELI coordinates - type / year / month / day / numac (the Belgian legislative numbering system) - at https://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/eli/{type}/{yyyy}/{mm}/{dd}/{numac}/justel. Every response carries a native eli_uri, a human_readable_citation and a source_url.

Read-only. The server only queries ejustice.just.fgov.be and writes a local audit log. It never modifies official text.

Belgium is trilingual (French / Dutch / German). human_readable_citation defaults to the French form by LDH convention; use be_get_text(language=...) for Dutch (Belgisch Staatsblad) or German. See CONSTITUTION.md Art. 4 for the full caveat.

Tools

There is no free-text search: ejustice.just.fgov.be exposes no keyword-search API. Discover acts by ELI coordinates (from a citation you already hold) or by browsing be_list_year.

Configuration

ejustice.just.fgov.be is keyless. Configuration is optional:

Copy .mcp.json.example to your MCP client config.

Install

py -3.13 -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install -e ".[dev]"   # Windows
# or: python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"                  # POSIX

Windows 11 with Smart App Control

Smart App Control blocks unsigned executables, which covers uvx.exe, pip.exe and the be-eli-mcp.exe launcher that pip writes at install time. The python.exe and py.exe from the python.org installer are signed by the Python Software Foundation, so running the module through the interpreter works:

python -m pip install be-eli-mcp
python -m be_eli_mcp

pip.exe is blocked for the same reason, so install with python -m pip, not pip install. If python is not on PATH, use the Windows launcher: py -3 -m be_eli_mcp.

{ "mcpServers": { "be-eli-mcp": { "command": "python", "args": ["-m", "be_eli_mcp"] } } }

Do not turn Smart App Control off to work around this - it cannot be re-enabled without reinstalling Windows.

Tests

pytest tests/test_instructions_drift.py tests/test_parse.py   # offline
pytest tests/test_smoke.py -v                                 # live, hits ejustice.just.fgov.be

Licence

Apache-2.0. Moniteur Belge / Belgisch Staatsblad content is © the Belgian federal state; this software only retrieves and cites it. See CONSTITUTION.md Art. 1 for a note on the licence status of the source data (widely described as CC0 by third-party catalogs; not independently re-verified against ejustice.just.fgov.be's own terms page in this project).