title: Acquis communautaire
text: The Community acquis or acquis communautaire (; ), sometimes called the EU acquis and often shortened to acquis, is the accumulated legislation, legal acts and court decisions that constitute the body of European Union law that came into being since 1993. The term is French: acquis meaning "that which has been acquired or obtained", and communautaire meaning "of the community".
  
  Chapters
  During the process of the enlargement of the European Union, the acquis was divided into 31 chapters for the purpose of negotiation between the EU and the candidate member states for the fifth enlargement (the ten that joined in 2004 plus Romania and Bulgaria which joined in 2007). These chapters were:
  
  Free movement of goods
  Free movement of persons
  Freedom to provide services
  Free movement of capital
  Company law
  Competition policy
  Agriculture
  Fisheries
  Transport policy
  Taxation
  Economic and Monetary Union
  Statistics
  Social policy and employment
  Energy
  Industrial policy
  Small and medium-sized enterprises
  Science and research
  Education and training
  Telecommunication and information technologies
  Culture and audio-visual policy
  Regional policy and co-ordination of structural instruments
  Environment
  Consumers and health protection
  Cooperation in the field of Justice and Home Affairs
  Customs union
  External relations
  Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
  Financial control
  Financial and budgetary provisions
  Institutions
  Others
  
  For the negotiations with Croatia (which joined in 2013), Iceland, Turkey, Montenegro, Serbia and in the future, with North Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina (candidate countries), the acquis is split up into 35 chapters instead, with the purpose of better balancing between the chapters: (dividing the most difficult ones into separate chapters for easier negotiation, uniting some easier chapters, moving some policies between chapters, as well as renaming a few of them in the process)
  
  Free movement of goods
  Freedom of movement for workers
  Right of establishment and freedom to provide services
  Free movement of capital
  Public procurement
  Company law
  Intellectual property law
  Competition policy
  Financial services
  Information society and media
  Agriculture and rural development
  Food safety, veterinary and phytosanitary policy
  Fisheries
  Transport policy
  Energy
  Taxation
  Economic and monetary policy
  Statistics
  Social policy and employment (including anti-discrimination and equal opportunities for women and men)
  Enterprise and industrial policy
  Trans-European networks
  Regional policy and co-ordination of structural instruments
  Judiciary and fundamental rights
  Justice, freedom and security
  Science and research
  Education and culture
  Environment
  Consumer and health protection
  Customs union
  External relations
  Foreign, security and defence policy
  Financial control
  Financial and budgetary provisions
  Institutions
  Other issues
  
  Correspondence between chapters of the 5th and the 6th Enlargement:
  
  Such negotiations usually involved agreeing transitional periods before new member states needed to implement the laws of the European Union fully and before they and their citizens acquired full rights under the acquis.
  
  Terminology
  The term acquis is also used to describe laws adopted under the Schengen Agreement, prior to its integration into the European Union legal order by the Treaty of Amsterdam, in which case one speaks of the Schengen acquis.
  
  The term acquis has been borrowed by the World Trade Organization Appellate Body, in the case Japan – Taxes on Alcoholic Beverages, to refer to the accumulation of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and WTO law ("acquis gattien"), though this usage is not well established.
  
  It has been used to describe the achievements of the Council of Europe (an international organisation unconnected with the European Union):
  
  It has also been applied to the body of "principles, norms and commitments" of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE):
  
  The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) introduced the concept of the OECD Acquis in its "Strategy for enlargement and outreach", May 2004.
  
  See also
   Official Journal of the European Union
   Primacy of European Union law
  
  References
  
  External links
  
  EUR-Lex: European Union Law.
  JRC-Acquis, Aligned multilingual parallel corpus: 23,000 Acquis-related texts per language, available in 22 languages. Total size: 1 Billion words.
  Translation Memory of the EU-Acquis: Up to 1 Million translation units each, for 231 language pairs.
  
  European Union constitutional law