Judgment Accessibility | www.my-rights.info

Knowing and understanding your rights is difficult. This is a significant problem as human rights are arguably the most important legal framework that apply to a population's ordinary life. The European Court of Human Rights delivers hundreds of judgments every year that impact every individual located in the European Council's jurisdiction, yet understanding the judgments is not straightforward as they are complex, lengthy, and constantly evolving. These problems hinder effective access to legal information. To overcome these hurdles, people have to pay for legal advice or resort to overburdened non-profit organisations. These issues result in people either not knowing their rights or being unable to effectively utilise their rights for their benefit.

My Rights aims to stay close to one programming language to enable greater access to the open source aspect of the project and to create a more efficient method to develop the tool. Overall, the tool includes: a live dynamic web scraper to automatically download judgments; regular expression analysis of judgments to analyse the unstructured data; semantic search engine to enable contextual searching; and data visualization tools to allow alternative forms of search.

My Rights is currently aimed at existing users of the European Court of Human Rights’s judgment database and hopes to reach populations and organisations that have not been able to meaningfully engage with this database previously. Current users primarily include governments, non-governmental orgaisations, and researchers. The new target population includes individuals whose rights have allegedly been infringed, legal practitioners, and advocates such as journalists. Current users will hopefully see an efficiency gain as they will be able to engage with the database in a multitude of manners and will be shown information at an abstracted level. Due to the application of human-centered design, new users will be presented information in a readily accessible manner.