EU Quiet Laws

What it measures

For each new EU law, it counts the English-language news articles about it in the months around the day it was signed. Then it ranks the laws from least coverage to most. The point is not to say which laws matter. It is to show which ones passed without most people hearing about them.

Step 1. The laws

The laws come from EUR-Lex, the EU's official database of legal texts, through the public data service of the EU Publications Office. The page takes every regulation and directive adopted by the European Parliament and the Council together in the last 12 months, which now means since 7 Oct 2025.

These are the EU's main laws, the ones that go through a vote in Parliament. The thousands of smaller rules that the Commission adopts each year, such as approving a pesticide or registering a cheese name, are left out. So are codifications, which gather earlier changes into one text without changing the rules.

The date used is the date the law was signed. A law is labelled as a change to an existing law when its official title starts with "amending".

The short description on each law comes from its official title, with the legal references taken out. It is not a summary of the law. The link to EUR-Lex goes to the full text.

Step 2. The news

The news comes from GDELT, a project that reads news websites in most countries and records what each article is about. Every day, the page keeps the address of every English-language article that names an EU institution: the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Commission or the Council. That is about a thousand articles a day.

The news on file starts on 2 Jul 2025 and runs to 6 Oct 2026.

Step 3. Search words for each law

Law titles are long and legal. To search the news, each title is turned into up to four search words. Common legal words like "regulation", "amending" or "measures" are removed first. From what is left, the page keeps the words that score best on three things:

• The word is used in EU news at all. A word no journalist writes, like "surfactants", is no help.
• The word is not everywhere. "Market" appears in too many articles to point to one law.
• The word comes early in the title, where the main subject usually is.

When a law gives itself a short name in its title, such as "Digital Omnibus on AI", that name is searched too. Many laws only change an earlier law, and their title only says what changes, like "certain obligations of operators and traders". For these, the page also reads the title of the earlier law and adds its words and short name to the search, after the law's own words. A short name like "General Data Protection Regulation" is also searched as its initials, GDPR. Every law on the page shows the words it was searched with, so you can judge the match yourself.

In a few cases the automatic words were clearly wrong, and they were replaced by hand. These are all of them:

• Regulation 2026/995: searched for external, action, guarantee. 'Guarantee' alone matched unrelated articles.
• Regulation 2026/261: searched for russian, gas, imports, phase. The title's first words, 'phasing out', are not how the news describes it.
• Regulation 2025/2650: searched for deforestation, forest, operators, traders, and deforestation or eudr on its own. This changes the EU deforestation law, which the title never names. News about it says 'deforestation', so that word counts on its own.

Step 4. Counting the coverage

An article counts for a law when its web address contains at least two of the law's search words, or the law's full short name or its initials, or one of the hand-set words listed above that count on their own. Most news sites put the headline in the address, so this works as a headline search. Words are matched on their first six letters, so "passenger" also finds "passengers".

The count covers the 90 days before the law was signed and the 30 days after. The window starts early on purpose: the news about a law usually comes when Parliament votes on it, weeks or months before it is signed. A law signed less than 30 days ago is shown as still being measured, and is not part of the totals.

What the numbers cannot tell you

• English only. A law can be big news in German or Polish and still score low here. The ranking is about coverage in English-language news.
• Matching by words makes mistakes both ways. An article about a different EU topic that uses the same words is counted by mistake. An article whose address has no headline in it, or that describes the law in different words, is missed. Treat a single count as a rough size, and the ranking as the finding.
• Coverage is not importance. A quiet law can still change a lot. A loud one can change little. This page shows only how much was written.
• GDELT is not all of the news. It reads a very large set of websites, but not every outlet, and not print, radio or television.

How it updates

Every morning a job on GitHub Actions asks EUR-Lex for new laws, downloads the newest GDELT daily file, recounts the coverage of every law, and publishes the site again. Nobody edits the results by hand.

Get the data

Download everything on the findings page as JSON, including the search words and example articles for each law.