Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EUECJ Case
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) returned a bot verification page instead of the expected EUECJ case T58924. The website has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-scraping protection system, to prevent AI companies from aggressively harvesting content. Users must complete a proof-of-work challenge to access the actual legal document.
What changed
The BAILII Europe Recent Decisions database returned a bot verification challenge page rather than the requested EUECJ/2026/T58924 case. The Anubis system implements Hashcash-style proof-of-work to deter automated scraping by AI companies. Legitimate users must execute JavaScript-based proof-of-work computations before accessing legal content.\n\nFor compliance officers and legal professionals seeking case law, this means additional friction when retrieving EU court decisions. Users with privacy-focused browser extensions like JShelter will need to temporarily whitelist the domain. The system is described as a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.
What to do next
- Complete proof-of-work challenge to access content
- Disable JShelter or similar JavaScript-blocking extensions for this domain
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!
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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.
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