HURIDOCS
HURIDOCS is an NGO committed to making human rights information more accessible to advocates. To this end, they have created the HURISearch search engine, which crawls over 5000 human rights related websites. Users can limit their searches to NGOs, academic institutions, national human rights institutions, or intergovernmental organizations. Its advanced search options include limiting a search to sites from a particular country or to a particular document format. HURISearch is a great starting point for research as it provides the user to get an instant idea of how much information is available on their topic of choice.
Department of Justice - Laws Search
The Canadian Department of Justice's Laws Search allows users to conduct "Google-style" searches for legislation. Rather than having to deal with the complicated interfaces typical of legislative websites, users can simply input keywords or an excerpt from a law's title to call up relevent results. Users can use broad (e.g. "human rights") or specific (e.g. "sexual orientation") terms to find legislation, and can limit their results to certain types of laws or by law title.
Women's Human Rights Resources Database
The Women's Human Rights Resources Database is a searchable database of documents related to women's rights law. Users can either search the whole database, or limit their search to a particular subject (e.g. marriage, armed conflict, race and gender). Each subject also has its own information page explaining the concept and offers selected articles, documents, and links for the user to browse, making it a fantastic starting point for beginning users. The site also allows users to browse for items by author, making it equally useful for more advanced users who are familiar with women's rights theorists.
UN Guide to Human Rights Research
This guide, produced by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, is a comprehensive introduction to the concept of human rights and what United Nations bodies are responsible for enforcing them. It also provides plenty of information on the availability of documents, both online and off. The site also highlights the UN Bibliographic Information System thesaurus, which can be used by searchers to find appropriate search terms to return better results. The guide is a helpful resource for anyone trying to navigate the complicated United Nations system.
UN InfoQuest (UN-I-QUE)
UN-I-QUE, also produced by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, is a Google-style search engine that provides easy access to UN materials. It focuses on recurrent documents, such as annual reports, conference reports, and statements in the General Debate. Documents are often not the most current, but because the database goes back to 1946 it is an excellent starting point when trying to locate historical UN documents.
