Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocks ECHR Case Access
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Page Blocks ECHR Case Access

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Summary

BAILII has deployed Anubis, a Proof-of-Work anti-bot system, as a verification mechanism to protect its servers against automated scraping by AI companies. Users must complete a computational challenge to access ECHR case documents. The system requires JavaScript and may conflict with privacy plugins like JShelter.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

BAILII has added Anubis, a Proof-of-Work-based anti-bot verification system, as an intermediary page before accessing ECHR case documents. The system uses computational challenges to deter mass scraping by AI companies while allowing legitimate human users through with minimal friction. The page explicitly requires modern JavaScript features and conflicts with privacy-focused browser extensions.

Affected parties seeking case law through BAILII must complete the bot verification step and may need to disable certain browser extensions. Legal researchers and practitioners relying on automated case-tracking tools may experience access disruptions until their systems are adjusted to handle the verification challenge.

Archived snapshot

Apr 21, 2026

GovPing 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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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.

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Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Branch
International
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Bot verification Legal database access
Geographic scope
European Union EU

Taxonomy

Primary area
Data Privacy
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Cybersecurity

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