WorldLII’s International Courts & Tribunals Project Responding to the fragmentation of international law

Presentation by Philip Chung & Andrew Mowbray Co-Directors, AustLII & WorldLII

6th Conference on Law via the Internet

Paris, 3-5 November, 2004

Fragmentation Pre-WWII - Decisions were from a small

number of international tribunals Post-WWII - Fragmentation of international

law decisions: Regional tribunals Human rights tribunals International trade tribunals Criminal courts

Now over 30 significant ICTs

Effect of the Internet Most ICTs have put decisions on line But fragmentation has remained

30+ websites, no consolidation Often no search engine on site (30%) Often not searchable via Google (30%) Often not HTML, few navigation aids (25%)

WorldLII’s International Courts & Tribunals (ICT) Project

A response to fragmentation All final decisions of ICTs searchable together

Interim decisions not included Consistent formatting of decisions

Eg ‘Context’ links to search terms Consistent citation system

Eg McELHINNEY v. IRELAND [2001] ECHR 754

Collaborative project by LIIs ‘Decentralisation wherever practical’

Regional decisions on regional LIIs Eg ECJ is on BAILII

French language decisions on Droit Francophone

Most decisions currently located on WorldLII

Exploring methods of distributing data between LIIs

Content of the ICT project Near-complete decisions of 20 ICTs

But French, Spanish etc still being added Over 20,000 full text decisions Other content being added

Scanning text of PCIJ image decisions Other international criminal courts Database of Court statutes, rules etc

Now for a demonstration …

A few things demonstrated Scope of searches

Default is to search all decisions Popular combinations of databases provided Individual Courts or combinations can be chosen

Easy to go directly to a case (use ‘v’) Easy to ‘note up’ a case (use ‘near’) Searches can be repeated over larger

collections

Sustainability… Thanks to all the ICTs for cooperation Australian Research Council funding to

capture the backsets of decisions Ongoing funding

Requires at least one person to maintain Possible collaboration with PiCT (Project on

International Courts & Tribunals)

That was the official launch …