About the database

This is 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, the application provides a user-friendly interface for browsing, analyzing and exporting relevant information.

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).
• The project is open-source and available on Github. Feel free to download it and develop your features/filters, etc.

Authors: Łukasz Szoszkiewicz, Zuzanna Kowalska

Contributors: Joanna Walczak, Martyna Osztynowicz

This project is the result of a collaboration born during SICSS AMU/Law 2024, a Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences that brought together 20 young scholars interested in learning how to utilize AI for the benefit of human rights.