de-eli-mcp

An MCP server for NeuRIS (rechtsinformationen.bund.de), Germany's official federal legal information portal. It searches and retrieves legislation (Gesetze, Verordnungen) with verifiable ELI identifiers and German citations.

Part of the MateMatic eu-legal-mcp production line: the German counterpart of the Polish sejm-eli-mcp, built on the same architecture and citation contract against the German source.

Beta source. NeuRIS is an official but beta service; its dataset is not yet complete. Every response carries a dataset_note saying so. For exhaustive research, cross-check gesetze-im-internet.de / rechtsprechung-im-internet.de.

Licence. German official works - statutes, ordinances, court decisions and official headnotes - are outside copyright under § 5 UrhG (gemeinfrei), which is the standard basis for reusing German legal data. NeuRIS is operated by the BMJV / DigitalService GmbH and publishes no separate API terms or key requirement. This connector only relays that public-domain content, with attribution and a source_url. Caveat: NeuRIS is in test phase; re-check the terms at general availability. (This is a practitioner's read, not formal legal advice.)

The five tools

Every response carries the contract: eli_uri (e.g. eli/bund/bgbl-1/2017/s2097/2025-01-01/1/deu), human_readable_citation (e.g. BDSG (BGBl I, 2017 2097)), and source_url.

Related MCP server: German Legal MCP Server

Install

cd de-eli-mcp
pip install -e .

Configure (Claude Code / any MCP client)

Copy .mcp.json.example and adjust if needed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "de-eli-mcp": { "command": "de-eli-mcp" }
  }
}

Environment:

• DE_ELI_BASE_URL - default https://testphase.rechtsinformationen.bund.de

• DE_ELI_CACHE_DIR - default ~/.matematic/cache/de-eli

• DE_ELI_AUDIT_DIR - default ~/.matematic/audit

No API key. NeuRIS is keyless.

Governance

• Public data only - read-only against NeuRIS; no client data leaves the machine beyond search parameters.

• Audit log - every tool call appends one JSON line to ~/.matematic/audit/de-eli-mcp.jsonl.

• Vendor-neutral - the server talks only to NeuRIS and the local filesystem; no LLM provider, no telemetry.

• Verifiable citations - every response is independently checkable via source_url.

See CONSTITUTION.md (the binding rules) and DISCOVERY.md (the NeuRIS API map).

Tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/test_instructions_drift.py -v   # offline
pytest tests/test_smoke.py -v                # hits live NeuRIS

Licence

Apache-2.0. © Matematic Solutions / Wieslaw Mazur.