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International Human Rights

A guide to research sources for international human rights law created by John Bolan, Bora Laskin Law Library.

Searching the documents of UN Treaty-Based Bodies

To focus on a country:

To focus on jurisprudence:

To research the treaties (eg ratification information, current status):

To find all documents produced by treaty-based bodies:

To find more information for a treaty body:

  • The OHCHR treaty-body website provides links to the websites of all the treaty-based human rights bodies

  • The UN Library's Research Guide has an excellent overview of the bodies, their activites and the types of documents they produce and work with

Documents of the treaty-based bodies are also available in several other general UN documents databases, such as the Official Document System (ODS) and UN Digital Library, however the specialized databases above are generally more efficient for human rights research