Wednesday 27 June 2012

New Version of HUDOC Search Engine Launched

This week the Court launched a new version of the what is probably its key online resource: the HUDOC case-law database, which includes judgments and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, decisions and reports of the former European Commission of Human Rights and resolutions of the Committee of Ministers. The old version had, although it was still much more user-friendly than most other databases of human rights institutions, become unwieldy by the large number of results that most searches produced. The main asset of this new version is the very easy way through which search results can be narrowed down through filters, which include country, language, level of importance, Convention article, whether a violation was found or not, but even which section of the Court decided in the case or which judges were involved. As in the past, the search engine works in both English and French. For those most accustomed to the standard search functions of the old HUDOC, including searching by application number, I would recommend to click on the option 'Advanced Search'  in the upper right corner.

As the Court's President stated at the launch:
The Court attaches great importance to the effective dissemination of its case-law and we believe that this new version of HUDOC will help legal professionals throughout the Council of Europe States to search the Court’s case-law more rapidly and more efficiently. This makes a major contribution to better domestic implementation of theConvention.
HUDOC, after an extensive and ongoing translation effort in the past few years, now includes over 1500 translations of key judgments in 21 languages. These are now also easily to be found through the new interface - one can simply filter the search results by language (in the menu on the left).

An online manual and video tutorials will be released in the coming weeks. Thanks to Cyprus, Denmark, Germany and Norway who provided the funds for this new version of HUDOC. Enjoy discovering all the new possibilities!