Human Rights Law as Data

About the tools

Three principles

  1. No answer is generated

    Every result is the verbatim text of the document, with its UN symbol and paragraph (or the case name and §). Search by meaning (Ask in the UN Human Rights Database and in UN Travaux Préparatoires, Semantic Search in HUDOC Researcher) uses a model only to find and order passages, and it writes nothing. This principle covers the tools themselves, while an AI assistant connected to them writes its own answer, which is why that answer should go through Check. AI helped to write the software and to prepare the data (see the colophon), and some of the data is read or tagged by machine (e.g., the scans of 1946–66 and the article tags in UN Travaux Préparatoires). In such cases the tool says so (UN Travaux Préparatoires links every passage to its scan and gives the measured error on its About page), and a machine translation (e.g., of the judgments HUDOC publishes only in French) is labelled as such.

  2. The paragraph is the unit

    The tools search and show the smallest citable unit (a paragraph, a speech, a vote or a recommendation), and one click copies it with its full citation. Paragraph numbers are the ones the source itself uses, so a citation taken from a tool can be found in the original document.

  3. One click from the source

    Each result links to the authoritative record: the Official Document System and the UN Digital Library, the databases of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) or, for the European Court, HUDOC. A legal argument should cite that record, since the tools are independent research resources, not affiliated with the United Nations or the Council of Europe, and they are not legal advice. Moreover, the code is on GitHub, the curated datasets are on Hugging Face and Zenodo with DOIs, and each tool gives the date or the version of its data on its own pages (e.g., in its About page or in the citation it suggests).

Data and code

How to cite

Cite the document you quote by its own reference (for instance, E/C.12/1999/10, para. 13, or Ponomaryovi v. Bulgaria, no. 5335/05, § 63), and the tool you used by its Zenodo DOI, with the version or the date of access. The Zenodo page of each tool exports the reference in BibTeX and other formats.

Who built it

Human Rights Law as Data gathers the research tools built by Łukasz Szoszkiewicz at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (the General Comments in the UN Human Rights Database together with Zuzanna Kowalska, and HUDOC Researcher together with Sebastian Marcisz).

Colophon

The site is plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript, without a framework or external fonts, hosted on GitHub Pages. The tools and this site were built by Łukasz Szoszkiewicz with the help of AI coding assistants (mainly Claude Code), while the choice of sources, the way they are divided and cited and the checks of the data are his. The films were made in the same way, from real screenshots of the tools, with a synthetic voice (ElevenLabs) and burned-in subtitles.

Accessibility

This site aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA. Its three pages were checked on 8 November 2026 with the keyboard alone, at phone and desktop widths, for colour contrast and with an automated test. The films have burned-in English subtitles and a transcript, and the narration describes what is shown on the screen. However, some parts are not ready yet (the films on three tools, on the connectors and in the hero), and the five tools are separate applications with their own level of accessibility. If something on this site does not work for you, please write to l.szoszkiewicz@amu.edu.pl.

Privacy

The site counts visits with GoatCounter, an open-source counter that sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, which is why there is no cookie banner. It sends the address of the page (without any query), the site you came from, the size of your screen, the label of a button or the domain of a link you click and how long the page stays open (1, 5, 15 or 45 minutes). Moreover, it does not run when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.