New Website: Universal Human Rights Index of United Nations Documents

The universal Human Rights Index of United Nations Documents provides with instant access to the observations and recommendations of the expert bodies:

 the new Human Rights Council (since 2006)
 the seven Treaty Bodies which monitor the implementation of the core international human rights treaties, including the work of all the special rapporteurs, working groups and international experts (since 2001)

You can also search all of these recommendations and observations combining the following fields:

 both by region and by country
 by right: right to life, right to work, etc.
 by cluster or rights: administration of justice, cultural rights, etc.
 by body: CAT, CRC, CEDAW. etc.
 by type of affected persons: internally displaced, rural women, street children, etc.

One of the major advantages of this tool is that is makes it very easy to see what the expert bodies have been saying to a particular country, making it easier for civil society to monitor what exactly this country is doing to improve its respect for human rights of its inhabitants.

One of the main added values of the tool is to considerably accelerate access to official UN documents. All countries are covered and all rights as well as cross-cutting issues such as human rights and counter-terrorism or human rights and structural adjustment.

The Index comes from independent international bodies and experts that are independent, and it is classified by rights, strictly following the legal approach of the experts.The Index can serve as a basis for discussion on the human rights situation in the world, for instance in the debates of the Human Rights Council.

You can do all kinds of useful searches:

 a very simple search, for example retrieve all the recommendations which concern your country, and view them on the same page
 a more complex search: all the recommendations concerning street children in Asia, made by the CRC.

UHRI was developed by the University of Bern, Switzerland (Institute of Public Law) and the University of Montreal (LexUM).

Source: Human Rights Tools