Project in support of Ukraine: Accessibility to International Criminal Law

[dogweather]

With the 2022 Russian invasion of 🇺🇦 Ukraine 🇺🇦 , there's been a big increase in interest in war crimes and the ICC (International Criminal Court). People them discussing and writing about them, and wanting to learn more about international law.

I've decided to put my other work on hold to support Ukraine in this small way. These open source parser/crawlers are the first step to making web sites and apps which make the laws easier for everyone to find, discuss, and read. Currently, the criminal law is "locked up" in PDFs. They're nicely formatted visually. However, the PDF format makes it impossible to e.g., link directly to a topic or make a mashup of the content.

The Readme file has examples of other open-gov crawlers.

If you speak any non-English language, please consider helping out! We're paying for those who have Python experience.

Robb Shecter
robb@public.law

[dogweather]

Update, 2022-04-02

• We have a completed English parser & spider for the Rome Statute.
• We've posted the scraped data in a new datasets repo, making the data easy for anyone to use.
• Public.Law's new International Laws site is almost ready to go live. Here's a development screenshot:

[dogweather]

Update, 2022-04-08

• The new International law site is online with The Rome Statute (English).
• There's a lot of work to do, to make this more user-friendly. Search is working, however. Example: Search for "genocide".
• Rome Statute (Russian) is now in the works. We found a relatively recent translation on the UN's web server.