UN Human Rights Database
Paragraph-level search across UN Treaty Body General Comments, jurisprudence, and Special Procedures
An open-source research environment for finding and citing what UN human rights mechanisms actually wrote. It brings General Comments, Treaty Body jurisprudence, and Special Procedures reports into one paragraph-level search interface.
What it does
- Searches General Comments, individual communications, and mandate-holder reports in one interface.
- Filters by mechanism, treaty body, year, state party, affected group, article, and document status.
- Opens results in a document reader with context, citation tools, workspace notes, and exports.
- Keeps the authoritative text visible: search results point back to the original UN symbol and paragraph number.
UNHRDB is also available through MCP
mcp-unhrdb lets Claude and other MCP clients search the same corpus and resolve citations. It returns verbatim UN paragraphs rather than generated summaries, preserving the document symbol and paragraph number.
Research approach
The database treats legal documents as structured research material rather than an undifferentiated collection of PDFs. Its data pipeline reconstructs paragraph boundaries, records provenance, exposes OCR status, and keeps General Comments, jurisprudence, and Special Procedures as distinct searchable sources.
Software is released under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0; the curated dataset uses CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The underlying UN documents remain subject to United Nations content terms.
Data and citation
The General Comments and General Recommendations dataset is available in Parquet format on Hugging Face. Cite the evolving database using its Zenodo concept DOI; citations to legal propositions should still identify the original UN document symbol and paragraph number.