Check any country's human rights and optional protocols treaties' ratification & accession status and reservations in the UN Treaty Collection Status of Treaties database.
See regional and individual country's ratification status of 18 human rights treaties at a glance on the OHCHR's Status of Ratification Interactive Dashboard.
Country Reports include information on the latest Universal Periodic Review and the status of the country in relation to UN Charter-based bodies and Treaty bodies.
The UN Universal Human Rights Index provides access to country and region-specific human rights information emanating from international human rights mechanisms in the United Nations system: the Treaty Bodies, the Special Procedures and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The Index allows users to access and search Treaty Body, Special Procedure and UPR recommendations through several categories: State, right, body, affected person and, for the UPR, the State that made the recommendation, the position of the State under Review, and the session. Several countries can be searched together for comparative purposes.
The UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a review of the human rights records of all UN Member States. Individual Member Country Reports can be viewed on the Documents database.
UNHCR's Refworld legal collection is primarily a tool for disseminating international law relating to refugees and asylum seekers. However, it more generally contains human rights caselaw and instruments. Included in the collection are international instruments relating to human rights and international and national legislation.
Legislationline.org is a free database of national and EU legislation. This database also gives you access to international norms and standards, framed in relation to a list of human rights topics. This database is an excellent starting point for comparative research. To compare countries, choose the topic and then select the jurisdiction you want. Jurisdictions covered are the 57 Member States of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Legislationline.org is produced by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
WARNING: the legislation is not necessarily up to date, or a complete representation of all the human rights instruments in every jurisdiction, so once you find the piece of legislation you want, locate it in its official national legislation website to ensure you have the most up to date information.
The latest Rule of Law Index from the World Justice Project provides rankings for 102 countries based on their adherence to protection of fundamental human rights. See each country's statistics and ranking here. See the full Rule of Law Index report for all countries below.
The factors taken into account in assessing protection of fundamental rights rank are those established under the Universal Declaration :
The following databases can be searched or browsed to find human rights jurisprudence in UN Committees, and regional and domestic courts.
The databases can be searched to find individual decisions, cases in a particular court or cases on a particular topic in multiple courts.
Law reports on subscription databases (available to University of Melbourne staff and students)
On Lexis + Australia (vol 1 1996 to current) is an up to date report series that includes human rights decisions from international, regional and national courts and tribunals that make a significant contribution to the way in which a particular right or freedom is interpreted or applied. It includes cases from the European Court of Human Rights as well as appeal courts from the UK, the Americas, Africa, Australia and New Zealand; the UN Human Rights Committee, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and others.
To search this resource, click on the publication button, under Guided search, which is under the main search bar, enter "human rights" in the next search box and Butterworths Human rights cases in the final search box. Then click on the search button.
On JUSTIS is an up to date report series that contains decisions of international courts and arbitrators as well as judgments of national courts.
To search Refworld's caselaw collection, choose 'caselaw' from the tab in the top menu on the Refworld home page. From here you can browse to relevant cases by continually narrowing by court, topic, country, etc.
Alternatively, you can perform an advanced search. Use the 'search tips' page for help in searching.
The CRIN Legal Database contains summaries of judgments from high-level national, regional and international courts around the world on children's rights issues. Each summary explains the background, significance, and CRIN's assessment of the decision's consistency with the CRC. Case summaries also include excerpts from relevant judicial discussions of the CRC and, where possible, links to full text decisions.
Although the focus of this database is cases on the Victorian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities 2006 (Vic), it is useful for finding selected cases in all Australian jurisdictions, in comparator foreign jurisdictions such as the UK, New Zealand, Canada, the US and India, the European Court of Human Rights and UN Committees. Cases can be searched by topic. Useful case summaries are provided.
In WorldCourts, keyword searches can be used to search a single court or several courts simultaneously.
Note that WorldCourts can only be used to search international and regional courts, not domestic courts.
LawCite will find cases citing your case in all courts in all jurisdictions that have a LII (AustLII, BAILII, SAFLII etc), whether or not your case is itself contained in a LII database.
For example, the UK case of R v Ministry of Defence, Ex p Smith [1995] EWCA Civ 22; [1996] QB 517 (available on BAILLI) has been cited in the UK, Hong Kong, Australia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the European Court of Human Rights.
The results can be sorted by jurisdiction, date, court or citation. Links are provided to the full text of the citing cases.