The sister Web site of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (Bailii) is to launch a complete collection of legal judgments by international courts and tribunals.

The WorldLII site will provide an on-line, fully searchable resource containing more than 20,000 international judicial decisions.


Professor Graham Greenleaf, a professor of law at the University of New South Wales and co-director and co-founder of the WorldLII, said: 'We have created for the first time a single searchable location for what is almost the complete set of decisions for international jurisdictions.


'It will be possible to search in any combination, for example, just European decisions, just African decisions or any human rights decisions.'


Content may be searched for several key words, with the user able to specify whether the words should appear within, for example, 50 words of each other for the document to be brought up in the search.


Going on to praise the success of the Bailii Web site since its inception five years ago, Prof Greenleaf added: 'We have never had a formal copyright agreement with the Crown, but the Bailii initiative was made possible by the co-operation we received from the Crown in providing data.'


Ronan Keane, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ireland, said: 'It is extraordinary that a not-for-profit organisation such as Bailii has done so well... Now that the courts have to deal with a large range of crime, the expansion of judicial review and as family law becomes inevitably more complex, in all of this Bailii plays an immensely important role in making sure judicial decisions are available on-line.'


Bailii is a charitable organisation founded by Lord Justice Brooke in 1999. It is dedicated to providing legislation and caselaw for free over the Internet. As of last month, Bailii had 46 databases covering seven jurisdictions and provided access to 400,000 searchable documents.


LINK: www.worldlii.org