About the Project
ECHR Case Law Dashboard — search, analytics, and open data for human rights research
Authors
What Is This?
The ECHR Case Law Dashboard is a free, open-source tool for exploring decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. It offers paragraph-level full-text search across thousands of judgments, an interactive statistics dashboard, and comparative country analysis — all running entirely in the browser with no server required.
The project aims to make ECHR case law more accessible to researchers, legal practitioners, students, and anyone interested in the protection of human rights in Europe.
Data Sources
The dataset is assembled from public ECHR sources and enriched with structured citation-network data from the research community.
| Source | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
| HUDOC | Official database of the European Court of Human Rights. Primary source for all judgments, metadata (respondent state, articles, conclusions, importance, keywords, chamber composition), and full-text paragraphs with section tags. | Primary |
| ECTHR-PCR |
Prior Case Retrieval dataset by Rashid Haddad et al.
(TUM Legal Tech).
Provides structured citation networks mapping each case to its cited
precedents (15,729 cases). Used to enrich the
pcr_citations and pcr_cited_by fields in
our dataset, enabling precedent-graph analysis that goes beyond the
free-text strasbourg_caselaw field from HUDOC.
Reference: Haddad, R., Bayer, S. and Habernal, I. (2024). "ECHR-PCR: A Dataset for Precedent Understanding and Prior Case Retrieval in the European Court of Human Rights." Proceedings of LREC-COLING 2024. |
Enrichment |
Dataset Fields
Each case record contains the following structured data:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
case_id | Unique HUDOC identifier (e.g. 001-57516) |
case_no | Application number(s) |
title | Full case name |
judgment_date | Date of judgment |
respondent_state | Respondent country |
originating_body | Chamber, Grand Chamber, etc. |
importance | Case importance level |
article_no | Convention articles at issue |
violation / non-violation | Articles found violated or not |
conclusion | Operative conclusion text |
separate_opinion | Whether the case includes a separate opinion |
keywords | HUDOC subject keywords |
chamber_composed_of | Names of judges |
strasbourg_caselaw | Free-text citations to Strasbourg case law |
paragraphs | Full text, section-tagged at paragraph level |
pcr_citations | Structured precedent links (from ECTHR-PCR + self-resolved) |
pcr_cited_by | Cases that cite this one (from ECTHR-PCR) |
pcr_citation_count | Number of cited precedents |
pcr_cited_by_count | Influence score (how often cited) |
resolved_citations | Self-resolved citations with appno, title, and original text |
resolved_citation_count | Number of successfully resolved citations |
resolution_rate | Fraction of free-text citations that were resolved |
Methodology
Judgments are sourced from HUDOC and parsed into paragraph-level records with section tags (Facts, Legal Framework, Merits, etc.). Violation and non-violation findings are extracted from the structured HUDOC metadata where available and supplemented by text-based inference where metadata is incomplete.
Citation-network enrichment uses a two-stage pipeline:
-
Stage 1 — ECTHR-PCR merge
(
scripts/merge_ecthr_pcr.py): joins the ECTHR-PCR dataset on application number, adding structured forward and reverse citation links for 12,500+ cases. -
Stage 2 — Self-resolution
(
scripts/resolve_citations.py): parses the free-textstrasbourg_caselawfield to extract case names and application numbers, then resolves them against a lookup index built from the dataset itself. This extends citation coverage to 760+ additional cases (mostly post-2022) not in ECTHR-PCR. Validated against PCR ground truth: 94% precision, 79% recall, 86% F1.
Press releases are identified by document_type and excluded
from all judgment-related statistics (case counts, violation rates, article
breakdowns, country rankings). They are tracked separately for
completeness.
Open Source
The source code, build scripts, and dataset are available on GitHub:
github.com/lszoszk/ECHR-Dashboard
Contributions, bug reports, and suggestions are welcome.
Acknowledgements
- HUDOC — the European Court of Human Rights for making case law publicly accessible.
- ECTHR-PCR — Rashid Haddad, Sean Bayer, and Ivan Habernal (TUM Legal Tech) for the structured citation-network dataset.
- HURIDOCS — for inspiration and leadership in human rights information management.