Anubis Bot Verification Blocks Access to ECHR Case 2026/62
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a Proof-of-Work bot verification system, as a protective measure against automated scraping of European legal databases. The system requires users to solve computational challenges to access case content, with legitimate users experiencing minimal delay while mass scrapers face significantly increased operational costs.
What changed
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a bot protection system using Proof-of-Work challenges in the Hashcash tradition, to restrict automated access to European legal case databases. The measure targets AI companies and aggressive scrapers that cause server downtime, adding computational cost to mass scraping operations while imposing negligible delay on individual users.
Legal professionals and researchers accessing BAILII databases may need to disable JavaScript-blocking browser extensions like JShelter to complete verification. This is an operational/access matter rather than a regulatory compliance requirement.
What to do next
- Monitor for updates
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
Loading...
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
Related changes
Get daily alerts for BAILII Europe Recent Decisions
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when BAILII Europe Recent Decisions publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.