Human Rights and Humanitarian Law

If you are not familiar with human rights law or a specific aspect of it, begin your research by consulting a secondary source. Secondary sources not only give background information and explanations but also assist in finding primary law materials like treaties, country reports, national legislation, and case law that are relevant to your topic.

Below, you will find resources on human rights law and tips for finding more resources.

Find More Resources on Human Rights Law

To locate additional books on human rights law from RWI and Lund University's collection, use the Advanced Search on LUBCAT. For greater precision, search for human rights as an exact phrase in the Subject field.  In the following line, enter one or more keywords using the default Any Field setting:

LUBsearch is a collective entry point to all the libraries’ joint resources. Through a single search field, you can find articles, journals, doctoral theses and books. If you are outside the University campus, log in with your student or Lucat account to access the full texts. You may need to download a VPN to access some resources. Find out more here. 

You will find our subject-specific databases via Databases A–Z. Through ePublications you get a collective entry point to our e-journals and e-books. You can access these resources via your student or Lucat account.

• LUBsearch
• Databases A–Z
• ePublications

When researching human rights law, journal articles can be an excellent source for learning about narrower, more specialized topics.  Articles published in law journals typically include extensive footnotes with citations, which will help you to locate relevant primary law sources, as well as additional secondary sources.
 

Finding Articles Published in Law Journals

• Journal Indexes include bibliographic information about an article, such as the title, the name of the author, and the name of the journal, as well as one or more subject descriptors.  Searching in a journal index usually yields more relevant articles because the searches are run only on the bibliographic data and the subject descriptors.  
  • Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
    Coverage includes leading law journals published in languages other than English, as well as English language law journals.
     
  • Legal Journals Index (LJI).  LJI is a Westlaw database that focuses primarily on U.K.-based journals but also includes citations to articles from English language journals published elsewhere in Europe.  Bear in mind that many of the articles indexed in LJI are not available in full text on Westlaw.
• Full-Text Journal Databases allow you to search by keyword within the entire text of an article.  Most of them also include some bibliographic information.  It is easier to run searches in full-text databases, but they tend to retrieve more irrelevant articles than journal indexes do.  The following research platforms include full-text law journal databases:
   
  • HeinOnline
  • Westlaw
  • Cambridge Core
  • Oxford Academic Journals Online

If you already have a citation to a journal article, use the resources described below to retrieve the full text.  Keep in mind that electronic access to full-text articles varies by journal.  Some journals are available on multiple electronic platforms, but the dates of coverage often vary.  If the article you are seeking falls outside the dates of coverage for electronic access, you will need to access the journal in print, if available, or request a copy of the article via Inter-Library Loan.

• Search by Article Title
  If the article, chapter, or book you are seeking is available in a print or electronic format from any Lund University Library, you should be able to quickly retrieve the full text of the article by entering the article title in LUBSearch.
• Inter-Library Loan
  If the article, chapter, or book you are seeking is not available in print or electronically from Lund University Libraries,you may request a copy of the article from another library by using the Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service.