The Cyprus Source of Legal Information

About Cylaw

Cylaw is a legal information project that was set up in February 2002 by the cyprus lawyer Laris Vrahimis to provide free access through the internet to the Cyprus legal materials that are at any time publicly available in electronic format.

The Cylaw database contains all judgments issued by the Supreme Court of Cyprus since 1997 as well as most civil appeals and first instance judgments issued by the Supreme Court in 1996.

The Supreme Court acts as the Appeal Court or Court of Second Instance from all judgments issued by any Cypriot court or tribunal (including first instance judgments of the Supreme Court itself) as well as exercises original jurisdiction in a number of other matters including, administrative cases, most admiralty cases, electoral petitions and applications for prerogative orders. Cylaw therefore includes all Cypriot judgments that are of any authoritative value that were issued from 1997 onwards. In total, the Cylaw database currently contains about 8.600 judgments.

Cylaw runs the SINO search engine written by Andrew Mowbray of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLii). Originally it was hosted by Kypros-Net, a Cypriot non-profit organization on the server run by the organization, but as of September 2005 it will be hosted by Austlii. The cgi has been prepared by Laris Vrahimis who have also set up the site and is responsible for updating the database.

The judgments are given to Cylaw on a monthly basis by the Supreme Court publications department through the Cyprus Bar Association, on cd, in microsoft word format. They are converted to html, the short title is added to each document and the documents are then loaded on the database.

Cylaw also includes the Civil Procedure rules. It includes consolidated versions of the rules from the original text to the latest amendments and the users can if they wish review all previous versions of each rule.