Find it. Cite it. Check it.
Find what UN bodies and regional human rights courts actually said
Five free tools search the documents of UN human rights bodies and the judgments of regional human rights courts paragraph by paragraph, with a ready citation and the original one click away.
Transcript of the film Challenging a ban on a protest
A lawyer who challenges a ban on a peaceful assembly starts with the treaty, here Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which allows only restrictions necessary in a democratic society.
The UN Human Rights Database is the first to make all General Comments of the treaty bodies searchable paragraph by paragraph, and it also holds their jurisprudence and the thematic reports of the Special Procedures.
Here, General Comment No. 37 explains the test, one click on Jurisprudence shows how the Committee applies it, for instance, to a picket refused in Saint Petersburg (Savolaynen v. Russian Federation, 2022), and one more click copies the paragraph with its citation.
If the meaning is still unclear, UN Travaux Préparatoires shows the drafting debate, in which Eleanor Roosevelt opposed these words because of their ambiguity and René Cassin defined a democratic society as one based upon respect for human rights.
UHRI+ gathers more than 3,700 recommendations and observations on peaceful assembly from the Universal Periodic Review, the treaty bodies and the Special Procedures, and HRC Voting shows how States vote on the resolution of the Human Rights Council on peaceful protests.
In the age of AI, one may want to verify a quotation from a UN document seen in a draft or online before using it, and Check does it in a few seconds: here it finds the quotation in paragraph 40, while the draft cites paragraph 41.
Behind the four tools are three principles: no answer is generated, the paragraph is the unit, and every passage is one click from the source.
Human Rights Law as Data. Find it. Cite it. Check it.
- 320k+paragraphs of UN bodies
- 270k+recommendations to States
- 29k+judgments of the European Court
- 80k+votes by States
Start from your task
- The Committee's reading of an article Restrictions on peaceful assembly (General Comment No. 37) UN Human Rights Database
- Seeing what UN mechanisms recommend Recommendations and observations on peaceful assembly, all States UHRI+
- Litigating in Strasbourg The bans of a march in Warsaw (Bączkowski and Others v. Poland) HUDOC Researcher
- Lobbying on a resolution The vote on peaceful protests in 2014 (A/HRC/RES/25/38) HRC Voting
- What the drafters meant “In a democratic society” in the Covenant debates UN Travaux Préparatoires
- Checking a draft before it goes out Citations and quotations checked against the judgments or the drafting records HUDOC Researcher Check: citations of the European Court of Human Rights Travaux Check: citations of the UN drafting records
The UN human rights system
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UN Human Rights Database
What UN treaty bodies and Special Procedures wrote, paragraph by paragraph.
- 320k+ paragraphs
- 6,000+ UN documents
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UHRI+
Recommendations to States from the Universal Periodic Review, treaty bodies and Special Procedures.
- 270k+ recommendations
- 2006–2026
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HRC Voting
How States voted on human rights resolutions at the UN since 1946.
- 80k+ country votes
- 1946–2026
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UN Travaux Préparatoires
How the Universal Declaration and the two Covenants were drafted, speech by speech.
- 29k+ speeches
- 1946–66
UN Travaux Préparatoires in 90 seconds, with English subtitles in the picture. The film shows the counts of the day it was recorded. Read the transcript Transcript of the UN Travaux Préparatoires film
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two Covenants were drafted at the United Nations between 1946 and 1966, and the drafting records run to more than eighteen thousand pages. To find who said what, and why a provision reads as it does, one reads them page by page. UN Travaux Préparatoires, an independent resource built from the UN's own documents, divides them into speeches, each with its speaker, delegation, date, article and page.
Search opens every result in its record, at its page, with a ready citation and a link to the UN copy. Each article can be followed through the drafting: its text at every stage, the meetings that debated it, and every vote, by name where the record gives one. Ask takes a question in plain words and returns the passages closest to it in meaning, even when the delegates used other words.
Summary records paraphrase the speakers, the text is machine-read, and about one article tag in twenty is wrong: the About page gives every figure, and every passage links to the scan. AI brings new risks, such as invented quotations, and two tools answer them.
Check holds every citation and quotation in your draft against the record it names. Through the MCP server and the Claude skill, your AI assistant cites the records by symbol and page, instead of from memory. The UN document remains the authority, one click away from every speech.
Regional human rights courts
For now, HUDOC Researcher covers the European Court of Human Rights. Tools for two more regional courts are under way.
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HUDOC Researcher
Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, paragraph by paragraph, with their citation network.
- 20k+ judgments in English
- 9,000+ only in French
HUDOC Researcher in 100 seconds, with English subtitles in the picture. The film shows the counts of the day it was recorded. Read the transcript Transcript of the HUDOC Researcher film
Working with the tens of thousands of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights usually means a database search and then other tools (PDFs, spreadsheets, notes, reference managers) to organize the results by hand. HUDOC Researcher, an independent toolkit built on HUDOC data, brings that work into one place.
Every judgment is split into the Court's own paragraphs, each labelled with the part of the judgment it belongs to. Search takes keywords, phrases and Boolean operators, as in HUDOC, and a side drawer shows the paragraph in its context, with a link to the same paragraph in HUDOC and a ready OSCOLA citation. The beta holds all the judgments in English (over 20,000) and the judgments HUDOC publishes only in French (over 9,000), the most-cited also in unofficial English translation.
When you know only the facts, Semantic Search lets you describe the case in plain words (in any language), and its citation network shows which judgments the Court builds on. Statistics present the whole corpus by year, formation, State, Article and outcome. Research in the age of AI brings new risks, such as invented case names and quotations, and HUDOC Researcher answers them with three tools.
Check compares every citation and quotation in your draft with the text of the judgment. Through the MCP server and the Claude skill, your own AI assistant quotes the Court verbatim, with the case, application number and paragraph, instead of paraphrasing from memory. HUDOC remains the authoritative source, and HUDOC Researcher is built to keep it one click away from every paragraph.
Why you can rely on it
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No answer is generated
Every result is the verbatim text of the document, with its UN symbol and paragraph (or case name and §).
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The paragraph is the unit
One click copies a paragraph, a speech, a vote or a recommendation with its full citation.
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One click from the source
Each result links to the official record (UN documents, OHCHR databases or HUDOC).