POL3020: Comparative Rights: Web Resources on Rights

Amnesty International is a worldwide human rights organization run by its members. It is independent of all governments and all financial players. It is also independent of political convictions and religious faiths. Amnesty International uncovers the facts about violations and breaches of human rights. The website contains numerous reports on the state of human rights in countries around the world.

The annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, also known as the Human Rights Reports, cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements.

Links to selected free online resources on human rights maintained by the Cornell University Law Library.

Freedom in the World is an annual global report on political rights and civil liberties, composed of numerical ratings and descriptive texts for each country and a select group of territories. The 2023 edition covers developments in 195 countries and 15 territories from January 1, 2022, through December 31, 2022.

On this page, you can find data, visualizations, and writing on how the protection of human rights has changed over time, how it differs across countries, and how it varies between people of different genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. Additional topic pages related to people’s economic and social rights, such as on food, health, and education, are also available.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative is part of a global movement building a world where all people can flourish. It tracks the human rights progress of countries, producing robust data that anyone can use to push for improvements in how governments treat people. It is independent and non-profit.

Human Rights Watch conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses around the world and produces reports on its findings. At any given time it is actively researching, reporting, and advocating for change in more than 90 countries.

This project provides English translations of and other textual material related to constitutional documents. It cross-references those documents for quick comparison of constitutional provisions. All translations and ICL-Editions of publicly available translations are in American English to simplify comparative research. However, British English is used for documents officially published in that language. Paragraphs are numbered, unofficial titles put in square brackets to be included into the table of contents. News and background information is fact oriented.

The office of the high commissioner for human rights is the leading united nations entity in the field of human rights, with a unique mandate to promote and protect all human rights for all people. its website contains numerous resources on human rights topics, including civic space and democracy, development and living in dignity, equality and non-discrimination, justice and the rule of law, peace, and security.

The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library houses one of the largest collections of more than sixty thousand core human rights documents, including several hundred human rights treaties and other primary international human rights instruments. The site also provides access to more than four thousands links and a unique search device for multiple human rights sites.

This database features 880 multilateral conventions on Environmental Law, Human Rights, Humanitarian Law and Law of the Sea, Can be used for comparing different countries.

A free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility developed collaboratively by, and including information from, legal information institutes and other organizations. Also contains 15,000+ links to law-related web sites.