README.md

---
task_categories:
- text-classification
language:
- en
tags:
- legal
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
---

This is the **ECHR dataset**, a collection of 11.5K court cases extracted from the public database 
of the European Court of Human Rights and further annotated by human experts. The dataset was 
published along with [this paper](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1424/) (pleae cite it
accordingly!) and can be donwloaded in its original form from [this website](https://archive.org/details/ECHR-ACL2019).

Each instance in this dataset is a court case. Each court case is annotated with the following properties (the columns of the dataframe):

*   `partition`: a label indicating dataset partition this court case belongs to ("train", "dev", or "test")
*   `itemid`: a code which uniquely identifies this court case
*   `languageisocode`: an [ISO code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes) describing the language in which the case is reported
*   `respondent`: the ISO code of the party being sued or tried (respondents are nation states)
*   `branch`: the branch of the Court dealing with the case, indicating at which stage of the trial a judgement was made (it can be one out of "ADMISSIBILITY", "CHAMBER", "GRANDCHAMBER", "COMMITTEE")
*   `date`: the date of the judgement
*   `docname`: the title of the court case (for example, "ERIKSON v. ITALY")
*   `importance`: an "importance score" from 1 (key case) to 4 (unimportant), denoting a case's contribution in the development of case-law
*   `conclusion`: a short summary of the case conclusion (for example, "Inadmissible" or "Violation of Art. 6-1; No violation of Art. 10"
*   `judges`: the name of the judges
*   `text`: the facts brought to the attention of the Court
*   `binary_judgement`: a binary label indicating whether an article or protocol was (1) or wasn't (0) violated