ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper - European Court of Human Rights PDF

Scrape judgments, decisions, and advisory opinions from the European Court of Human Rights' HUDOC database. Returns paragraph-numbered judgment text, Convention and Protocol articles invoked, per-Article violation findings, judge composition, separate/dissenting opinion authors, and just-satisfaction (Article 41) award amounts — pulled from the Court's own PDF judgments, not a summary.

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ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper Features

• Returns the full paragraph-numbered text of every judgment, in original numbering, from introduction through the operative part
• Tags each case with the Convention/Protocol articles invoked, and splits them into violation-found and no-violation lists straight from the Court's own conclusion
• Extracts the deciding judge composition and, where one exists, the author of any separate or dissenting opinion
• Picks out the just-satisfaction (Article 41) award in EUR when the judgment states one
• Filters by date, by Article, by respondent State, or by a specific list of HUDOC item IDs — four query modes, same output shape
• Covers the full HUDOC corpus: Grand Chamber and Chamber judgments, Committee decisions, advisory opinions, friendly-settlement resolutions, and communicated cases

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Who Uses ECHR Case Law?

• Human-rights NGOs — track every judgment against a State under a specific Article, Article 3 torture and Article 8 privacy being the two most litigated
• Public-law firms — build a citation bank of Grand Chamber reasoning by Article, instead of reading HUDOC's search results one PDF at a time
• Comparative-law scholars — compare how the Court's reasoning on the same Article shifts across respondent States and over time
• Domestic courts and their clerks — pull the operative text of a cited Strasbourg judgment directly, without opening the PDF
• Accountability journalists — flag newly published judgments against a State the day they're published, with the award amount already extracted

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How ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper Works

1. Pick a query mode — the newest judgments since a date, every case invoking a given Article, every case against a given State, or a specific list of HUDOC item IDs.
2. Narrow further by document type and HUDOC's own importance ranking, if you want. Leave them alone and you get judgments, decisions, and advisory opinions by default.
3. The scraper fetches the Court's own PDF for each matching case and extracts the structured fields below — paragraphs, articles, violations, judges, awards. Pagination and PDF retrieval both happen automatically; you just get the dataset.

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Input

{
  "mode": "since_date",
  "sinceDate": "2024-01-01",
  "documentTypes": ["judgment", "decision", "advisory_opinion"],
  "importanceLevels": ["1", "2"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	since_date	Primary query axis: since_date, by_article, by_state, or by_itemid.
sinceDate	string	2024-01-01	Used when mode is since_date. Documents with a judgment date on or after this date.
articleFilter	array	[]	Convention/Protocol articles (e.g. 3, 8, P1-1). Primary axis under by_article, an added filter otherwise.
stateFilter	array	[]	Respondent States, ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 (e.g. GBR, TUR). Primary axis under by_state, an added filter otherwise.
itemIds	array	[]	Specific HUDOC item IDs (e.g. 001-225454). Used when mode is by_itemid.
documentTypes	array	["judgment","decision","advisory_opinion"]	Which HUDOC document types to include. Clear every checkbox to include every document type that has a full-text PDF. Legal summaries are never returned, since each repeats an opinion or judgment already in the results.
languages	array	["ENG"]	Which HUDOC language edition(s) to return. Clear every checkbox to include every language edition, including a translation whose own PDF may not be published yet.
importanceLevels	array	[]	HUDOC's own importance ranking: 1 (key case) through 4. Leave empty for no filter.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of judgments to return. Required — each record fetches and parses a full PDF, so bound your run.

Filtering by Article:

{ "mode": "by_article", "articleFilter": ["3", "8"], "maxItems": 50 }

Filtering by respondent State:

{ "mode": "by_state", "stateFilter": ["GBR"], "maxItems": 50 }

Fetching specific cases:

{ "mode": "by_itemid", "itemIds": ["001-252750", "001-250157"] }

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ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper Output Fields

{
  "itemid": "001-252749",
  "application_no": "50141/20",
  "docname": "CASE OF OSTROLUTSKYY v. UKRAINE",
  "doctypebranch": "COMMITTEE",
  "judgement_type": "judgment",
  "respondent_state": "UKR",
  "applicant_count": 1,
  "articles_invoked": ["8", "8-1"],
  "violation_found_articles": ["8"],
  "no_violation_articles": [],
  "importance_level": 4,
  "judgment_date": "2026-10-15T00:00:00",
  "chamber": "COMMITTEE",
  "judges": ["Gilberto Felici", "Mykola Gnatovskyy", "Vahe Grigoryan"],
  "separate_opinion_authors": [],
  "language": "ENG",
  "pdf_url": "https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/?library=ECHR&id=001-252749&filename=001-252749.pdf",
  "paragraphs": ["1. The application concerns allegedly ineffective domestic proceedings...", "2. Since childhood, the applicant has been suffering from type 1 diabetes...", "..."],
  "operative_text": "FOR THESE REASONS, THE COURT, UNANIMOUSLY, 1. Declares the application admissible; 2. Holds that there has been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention; ...",
  "just_satisfaction_amount": 5000
}

Field	Type	Description
itemid	string	HUDOC item ID (e.g. 001-225454).
application_no	string	Application number(s), semicolon-separated for joined multi-applicant cases.
docname	string	Case name (CASE OF X v. Y).
doctypebranch	string	Deciding formation: CHAMBER, COMMITTEE, ADMISSIBILITY, etc.
judgement_type	string	judgment, decision, advisory_opinion, friendly_settlement, or communicated_case.
respondent_state	string	Respondent State, ISO 3166-1 alpha-3.
applicant_count	integer	Number of applications joined in this case.
articles_invoked	array	Convention/Protocol articles invoked.
violation_found_articles	array	Articles where the Court found a violation.
no_violation_articles	array	Articles where the Court found no violation.
importance_level	integer	HUDOC's own ranking: 1 = key case, 2-4 = decreasing importance.
judgment_date	string	Judgment/decision date, ISO-8601.
chamber	string	Deciding formation (same as doctypebranch).
judges	array	Judges in the deciding composition, Registrar excluded.
separate_opinion_authors	array	Judges who authored a separate/dissenting/concurring opinion. Empty when the judgment carries none.
language	string	ENG, FRE, or ALB — matches whichever edition(s) the languages input selected (default English only).
pdf_url	string	Direct URL to the Court's own PDF.
paragraphs	array	Numbered paragraphs, in order, from the introduction through the operative part.
operative_text	string	The "FOR THESE REASONS, THE COURT" operative section.
just_satisfaction_amount	number	Best-effort just-satisfaction (Article 41) award in EUR. Null when the judgment awards no money, or when a multi-applicant judgment settles amounts in an appendix table rather than a single figure.

A record is only ever saved once its PDF has real text. A judgment whose PDF has not propagated yet (same-day publishing lag, or a translation edition you deliberately included via languages) is skipped rather than billed as an empty shell — the scraper keeps paging to make up the difference toward maxItems where more results are available.

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FAQ

How do I scrape ECHR judgments?

ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper needs no account and no API key. Pick a query mode — since a date, by Article, by respondent State, or a specific list of item IDs — set maxItems, and run it. You get back paragraph-numbered judgment text, articles invoked, violation findings, and the deciding judges.

What data can I get from HUDOC?

Judgments, decisions, advisory opinions, friendly-settlement resolutions, and communicated cases across the full Court — Grand Chamber down to Committee. Every record includes the Convention articles invoked, which ones the Court found violated, the deciding judge composition, and any just-satisfaction award.

Can I filter by Article?

Yes. Set mode to by_article and list the articles you want (3, 8, P1-1, and so on) — the actor returns only cases invoking at least one of them. You can also layer an Article filter on top of any other mode.

How much does ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper cost to run?

Pricing follows Apify's standard pay-per-event model, shown on the actor's pricing tab before you run it. Each record fetches and parses a full judgment PDF, so cost scales with maxItems, not with how specific your filters are.

Does this include dissenting opinions?

Where a judgment carries one, separate_opinion_authors lists the judges who wrote it. Most Chamber and Committee judgments are unanimous and the field comes back empty — that's the actual rate, not a gap in extraction.

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Need More Features?

Need custom fields, filters, or a different target site? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use ECHR HUDOC Judgment Scraper?

• Zero prior Apify coverage — HUDOC has no structured scraper on the store today; this is the first.
• Article-level, not case-level — most case-law tools stop at the case name. This one tells you which Articles were invoked and which ones the Court actually found violated, which is the detail a filing or a literature review actually needs.
• Reads the judgment, not a summary — paragraphs, judge composition, and the operative text all come from the Court's own PDF, the same document a law firm would cite.