History of Uwazi

In 2010, HURIDOCS partnered with Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) to develop the African Case Law Analyser . This website greatly improves access to human rights case law of African human rights regional bodies. The African Case Law Analyser addressed an enormous problem that we see in many regions – that access to human rights jurisprudence is almost impossible to obtain, hindering the work of human rights defenders. After building two Case Law Analysers, one for Africa and one for the Americas, HURIDOCS decided to invest in building an open source platform to allow any human rights project to organise and publish its own document collections.

Through consultations with human rights organisations, we learned that document collections are not helpful unless they can be connected to a bigger narrative: case documents need to be connected to judgement documents, judgement documents needs to be connected to judges, and so on. All of this information needs to be organised, in order to be understood. HURIDOCS built Uwazi to address these needs. We continue to develop new features in response to feedback from our users.

Significant funding for Uwazi development has been provided by the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL).