UNHRDB — UN Human Rights Database

UNHRDB is an open-source research environment for finding and citing what UN human rights mechanisms actually wrote. It treats UN documents as structured, paragraph-level research material while keeping every result connected to its original document symbol and context.

• Live application: https://lszoszk.github.io/generalcomments/
• General Comments dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lszoszk/treaty-bodies-general-comments
• MCP integration: https://github.com/lszoszk/mcp-unhrdb
• Methodology: METHODOLOGY.md
• Document status audit: STATUS_AUDIT.md

Coverage

The July 2026 public build contains 320,018 searchable paragraphs across 6,081 documents:

Collection	Coverage
Treaty Body General Comments and Recommendations	187 documents
Individual-communication jurisprudence	4,334 cases from 8 mechanisms
Thematic Special Procedures reports	1,560 reports from 46 mandates

Coverage changes as the source collections are synchronised. The application publishes build dates, collection-level provenance, and known gaps alongside the data.

What it does

• Searches legal text at paragraph level with exact word forms and phrases, implicit/explicit AND, OR, grouped exclusions (A NOT B or A -B), explicit prefix wildcards, and filters. A positive term is required for exclusions so every query stays on the indexed path; negative-only searches are rejected with an explanation.
• Keeps General Comments, jurisprudence, and Special Procedures as distinct source collections rather than blending their authority or provenance.
• Opens results in a source-first document reader with paragraph identifiers, context, bookmarks, notes, and citation export.
• Reconstructs and audits document structure, OCR provenance, footnotes, and links to authoritative UN records.
• Provides an experimental extractive Ask workflow that returns verbatim Committee passages rather than generated legal answers.
• Exposes General Comments and UHRI recommendations to MCP-capable clients via the companion mcp-unhrdb server.

Run locally

The published application is static and can be served directly from docs/:

git clone https://github.com/lszoszk/generalcomments.git
cd generalcomments
python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory docs

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000. Corpus preparation and audit scripts use Python; their dependencies are listed in requirements.txt.

Data and reproducibility

The General Comments and Recommendations corpus is distributed as Parquet on Hugging Face. The repository contains the preparation, ingestion, validation, and audit code used to produce the public build. See METHODOLOGY.md, OCR_PIPELINE.md, and the public coverage information in the application for limitations and provenance.

The Hugging Face package covers General Comments and Recommendations. The jurisprudence and Special Procedures collections are not currently distributed as part of that dataset package.

Citation

For the evolving software, use the concept DOI:

Szoszkiewicz, Ł., & Kowalska, Z. (2026). UNHRDB — UN Human Rights Database (Version 2.0.1) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10495719

GitHub also exposes machine-readable citation metadata from CITATION.cff. Cite a fixed Zenodo version when an exact software snapshot is required for reproducibility.

When relying on a legal proposition or quoting a paragraph, cite the original UN document symbol and printed paragraph number, for example CRC/C/GC/25 ¶12. The database citation supplements rather than replaces the primary legal source.

Licensing

This repository contains distinct works under distinct terms:

• Software: PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0; research, education, non-profit, and personal use are permitted, while commercial use requires a separate licence. See LICENSE.
• Curated dataset and annotations: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, see LICENSE-DATA.
• Underlying UN documents: remain subject to United Nations content terms and are not re-licensed by this project.

See NOTICE for the detailed boundary between software, curation, and source documents.

Authors and contact

• Łukasz Szoszkiewicz, Adam Mickiewicz University, ORCID 0000-0001-6671-2893
• Zuzanna Kowalska, Adam Mickiewicz University

Issues, missing documents, and corrections can be reported through the GitHub issue tracker. General contact: l.szoszkiewicz@amu.edu.pl.