Nl Rechtspraak MCP Server

@pipeworx/nl-rechtspraak

Dutch court decisions (uitspraken en conclusies): search by court, legal domain and decision date, resolve by ECLI, and read the full original Dutch text. Separate from @pipeworx/nl-wetten, which covers statutes — this pack is case law.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1819+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• nl_rechtspraak_search(query?, court?, subject?, type?, date_from?, date_to?, offset?, limit?) — search Dutch court decisions by court, legal domain (rechtsgebied), document type and decision-date range, paged. query is a client-side substring match against each candidate's title and published abstract (summary) only — the source has no full-text search API — scanned across at most 200 of the most recently modified metadata-matching candidates; the response says plainly when that scan was partial. Returns ECLIs that nl_rechtspraak_get_decision resolves to the full text.
• nl_rechtspraak_get_decision(ecli) — one decision's full original Dutch text, court, decision date, publication date and last-modified date as three separate fields, procedure, rechtsgebied(en), formal relations to other ECLIs (e.g. the earlier instance this is an appeal of), and any BWB statute ids the source formally links (cited_bwb_ids — often empty; see Notes) for chaining to nl_wetten_get_law / nl_wetten_get_article.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• Raad voor de Rechtspraak, Open Data van de Rechtspraak — every Dutch court decision that has been assigned an ECLI (European Case Law Identifier), with its full text where published.

Notes

• Search is metadata, not full-text. The source's search service filters by court, legal domain, document type and date — confirmed by probing several candidate free-text parameter names against it; none changed the result count. query is Pipeworx's own client-side filter over the title and published abstract of the metadata-matching candidates, not a search of the complete decision body. A term that only appears deep in the court's reasoning will not match.
• Three dates, never collapsed: decision_date (uitspraakdatum — when the court decided), publication_date (issued — when rechtspraak.nl published it, which can be years later or never for older cases) and last_modified (the record's own last metadata/text change) are three separate fields in the source and three separate fields here.
• BWB statute citations are rarely structured. The source schema has a documented field for linking a decision to the specific law it cites (dcterms:references, with a bwb: identifier prefix), but sampling recent Hoge Raad decisions found it populated in none of them — courts cite legislation by name in the prose, not as a machine-linked identifier. cited_bwb_ids reads that field when present and falls back to scanning the raw document for a literal BWB id string; an empty result means the source did not formally link a statute, not that the decision cites none. Look the law up by name with nl_wetten_search instead, then chain to nl_wetten_get_article.
• court and subject take a name or the exact source identifier URI. The underlying API only accepts the full OWMS/PSI identifier URI for both parameters — "Hoge Raad" alone is rejected by the upstream. This pack resolves the ~26 currently sitting Dutch courts and the full rechtsgebied taxonomy by name (e.g. "HR", "Rechtbank Amsterdam", "Civiel recht", "Arbeidsrecht"); a discontinued court (of the 261 the source has ever issued decisions under) still works if you pass its identifier URI directly.
• Search titles come back from the source as one fixed-shape string (ECLI, court, DD-MM-YYYY, case number(s)); this pack parses court, date and case number out of it into separate fields. The rare entry that doesn't match that shape comes back with title_parsed: false and the raw title only — never a silently wrong date.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nl-rechtspraak": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nl-rechtspraak/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nl-rechtspraak/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1819+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nl_rechtspraak_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"court":"HR","subject":"Civiel recht","date_from":"2019-12-19","date_to":"2019-12-21","query":"klimaat"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nl_rechtspraak_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nl-rechtspraak": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-nl-rechtspraak"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-nl-rechtspraak

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Nl Rechtspraak data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT