Neutral citation number formatting

Our parser requires a neutral citation number (NCN) in order to register a judgment or decision. The NCN needs to be unique for each judgment/decision, it must correspond to the right court and be correctly styled.

NCNs should be styled as such:

[YEAR] COURT/TRIBUNAL number (Denomination*)


Example of a correctly formatted NCN

Derani Karthikeya, R (on the application of) v The Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 3212 (Admin)

An example of a neutral citation number that been formatted correctly
This is an example of a neutral citation that has been formatted correctly. The year is encased in square brackets, the court and denomination are right and the number is unique to this judgment.

Example an incorrectly formatted NCN

Water and Sewerage Authority of Trinidad and Tobago v Darwin Azad Sahadath and another (Trinidad and Tobago) [2022] UKPC 56

An example of an incorrectly formatted neutral citation number
This is an example of a neutral citation that has not been formatted correctly. The square brackets have been placed around the court rather than year. This caused the judgment to fail going through the parser.

Your court will have a predetermined NCN format, and will have an official mechanism to generate this. Please contact the Judgment Helpdesk team for further information on this, or if you experience any other issues in obtaining an NCN.

* Having a court denomination in round brackets is not applicable to every judgment.