LibGuides: Human Rights: Research Guide

Introductory Materials

GlobaLex
This website explains the procedures of the major international human rights systems. It also provides a comprehensive guide to navigating UN bodies and charters.

Examples and Explanations for International Law by Valerie Epps; Lorie Graham; Daniel Rietiker; Amy Van Zyl-Chavarro
Call Number: KZ1242 .E675 2023

ISBN: 9781543807677

Publication Date: 2023-07-11

A Practitioner’s Guide to Human Rights Monitoring, Documentation and Advocacy

Black Letter Outline on International Human Rights by Linda A. Malone
Publication Date: 2022

Reports & Documents

U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
The annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements.
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch investigates and reports on Human Rights abuses globally and then does advocacy accordingly to these findings.
Freedom House- Freedom in the World
Country and territory reports covering population, political rights (numerical rating), civil liberties (numerical rating), status (Free, Partly Free, or Not Free), and a 10-year ratings timeline.
Country Statistical Yearbooks
The International Committee of the Red Cross
Reports of the ICRC is an account of their field activities conducted worldwide.

Law Review and other general scholarly articles

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.

Google Scholar is a search engine that provides links to articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, and scholarly articles posted on the web. It also provides links to relevant published books that are found in the Google Books Project.
Many students feel comfortable starting their research using Google Scholar because of its similarity to Google's internet search engine. However, because it is a search engine and not a database, it is important to get to know some of the functionality and limitations of Google Scholar first.
Before you begin your search, you should set up library links. This allows Google Scholar to connect your search results to the holdings at Phillips Library, so that you can easily access the full text of articles made available by our institutional subscriptions.

1. From the Google Scholar Homepage, click on the dropdown menu symbol, the "hamburger" in the upper left. Select Settings.
2. Select Library links on the left side of the page.
3. Enter "Suffolk University".

4. Check the boxes below that mention Suffolk University and the “Open WorldCat” option and click Save.

The link to "SU Full Text" will take you from Google Scholar to the full-text options for an article in Spartan Search. The Open WorldCat link helps connect to any relevant books that Google Scholar finds.
Please note: If you are on campus using SU’s wifi network, you should automatically be linked to library holdings. However, setting up Library Links allow you to see full text links from off campus. To save your settings, you will need to create a Google account.
HeinOnline
HeinOnline is a premier online research platform that provides more than 199 million pages of multidisciplinary periodicals, essential government documents, international resources, case law, and much more. HeinOnline includes U.S. federal and state and international legal materials. Sources include government publications from judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government (court opinions, statutes, and administrative materials) and secondary sources such as treatises and legal periodicals, with historic and current coverage.
JSTOR
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Full-text scholarly journal issues are typically added to the database 3 to 5 years after the publication date.
Oxford Journals Online
Collection of 300 journals published by Oxford University Press.

Human Right News Sources

Podcasts

Listen as you learn! Check out these human rights-focused podcasts:

In-Depth Materials

Human Rights Regionally
This guide includes human rights resources for Americas, Asia, Africa, Middle East and Europe broken down by region
RefWorld: National Legislation
Refworld contains a vast collection of reports relating to situations in countries of origin, policy documents and positions, and documents relating to international and national legal frameworks.
Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties
A resource map to explore what Human Rights treaties have been passed in specific countries.
U.S. Dept. of State, Office of the Legal Advisor, Treaties in Force:
A List of Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of the Legal Advisor, 1929-).
International Justice Resource Center
The International Justice Resource Center (IJRC) provides advocates, civil society organizations, and victims of human rights abuses with the information and resources they need to effectively use international legal protections – including advocacy before human rights monitoring bodies and complaints before international and domestic courts – to bring about justice and accountability for human rights violations.
CRL’s Collections
Feature primary source materials ranging from the proceedings of the post-World War II war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo to the files of the Khmer Rouge Santebal police recovered from the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia.

UN Human Rights Websites & Research Guide

United Nations Treaty Collection
This collection contains the full text of international treaties, including those where the Secretary General of the United Nations is the depositary and those registered and published in accordance with Article 102 of the Charter of the United Nations.

Human Rights Research Guide
Research guide to UN materials dealing with human rights, with links to full text when available.
Human Rights by Topic
Human Rights by Country
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Jurisprudence
This database provides easy access to jurisprudence emanating from the United Nations Treaty Bodies which receive and consider complaints from individuals
Members of the UN
Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation / Interactive Map
Universal Human Rights Index (UHRI)
The UHRI allows you to explore over 170.000 observations and recommendations made by the international human rights protection system: Treaty Bodies, Universal Periodic Review, and Special Procedures.
Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council
The special procedures of the Human Rights Council are independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective. They are non-paid and elected for 3-year mandates that can be reconducted for another three years. As of October 2022, there are 45 thematic and 14 country mandates.
UN Refugee Agency (UNCHR)
International Law Commission