UN Treaty Bodies Search
Search and analyze General Comments/Recommendations adopted by the UN Treaty Bodies
This project showcases a dynamic web application designed to facilitate the exploration and analysis of the General Comments/Recommendations adopted by the UN Treaty Bodies. Built with Flask, a Python web framework, the application provides a user-friendly interface for browsing, analyzing and exporting relevant paragraphs of the UN documents.
Why general Comments/Recommendations? UN Treaty Bodies adopted over 150 General Comments/Recommendations. They provide an authoritative interpretation of international human rights treaties. Hitherto, there was no database allowing for a search within documents. This platform allows for intuitive searches within these documents.
Features include:
- A robust search functionality that allows users to filter relevant paragraphs from the documents based on keyword, concerned groups/persons (e.g., children, women, indigenous peoples), and by the UN Treaty Bodies (e.g., Committee on the Rights of the Child, Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights).
- Advanced text processing capabilities, leveraging the Natural Language Toolkit (nltk) for word frequencies, bigram analysis, custom UN-related stopwords list, and search within search results functionality.
- An intuitive result highlighting mechanism that emphasizes search terms within the documents, improving readability and focus.
- An export feature allowing users to download Excel search results for offline analysis.
- Responsive design that allows for a seamless experience across devices (bootstrap).
- Server-side session management to maintain user search preferences.
