belgica

Belgian legal reference data for Python: every court with its registries' contacts, prisons, houses of justice, judicial cantons and arrondissements, municipalities and their postal codes, and the legal and commercial interest rates. Every record says where it comes from, and the scraped data is rebuilt from the official sources every week.

The same data and helpers as the belgica npm package, with the same version number. The tests check that both give the same answers.

pip install belgica

Python 3.11 or later, no dependencies. Documentation: https://pieterjanscheir.github.io/belgica/guide/python

It's reference data, not legal advice: check the official sources before relying on it.

from belgica import (
    find_arrondissements_at,
    find_cantons_at,
    find_competent_courts,
    find_courts,
    find_courts_for_postal_code,
    get_cantons_for_municipality,
    get_contact,
    get_court,
    get_court_location,
    get_interest_rate,
    get_justice_of_the_peace,
)

get_court('court-of-appeal-brussel')['name']  # {'nl': 'Hof van Beroep Brussel', 'fr': "Cour d'appel de Bruxelles"}
get_contact(get_court('court-of-appeal-liege'), 'email', 'Greffe pénal')  # 'liege.ca.greffepenal@just.fgov.be'
find_courts(type='enterprise-court', arrondissement='west-vlaanderen')

[canton] = get_cantons_for_municipality('44088')  # merelbeke-melle
get_justice_of_the_peace(canton['id'])['address']  # where to file
get_cantons_for_municipality('44021', on='2025-09-15')  # Gent 1–5 on that day: a split city
find_cantons_at(3.7268, 51.053)  # [gent-1]: the canton of a point
find_arrondissements_at(3.7268, 51.053)  # [oost-vlaanderen]: and its arrondissement
get_court_location('justice-of-the-peace-gent-1')['geometry']  # the court on the map, a GeoJSON Point
find_competent_courts('23088', 'police-court')  # [police-court-vilvoorde]: which court, by REFNIS code
find_courts_for_postal_code('1040', 'police-court')  # per municipality: Brussel and Etterbeek share the code

get_interest_rate('2024-06-15', 'legal')  # InterestRateResult(rate=5.75, period_from='2024-01-01', period_to='2024-12-31')

The records are the dicts from the JSON files, with their keys as in the JSON (validFrom, postalCode), typed with the TypedDicts in belgica.types. Each data file is read on first use; the canton boundaries (22 MB) only by find_cantons_at and get_canton_boundary, the arrondissement boundaries only by find_arrondissements_at and get_arrondissement_boundary.

Lookups take on, a day as a datetime.date or 'YYYY-MM-DD', and answer for today without it. A day before a dataset's coverage raises a ValueError rather than answer with today's data.

Licence

Code MIT. Data CC BY 4.0: municipality, province, region and postal-code data © Statbel, canton and arrondissement boundaries and court locations © National Geographic Institute (NGI). See the repository for the sources of every dataset.