SUMMA is an online database that offers access to cases heard by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights. It was developed by the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) with support from HURIDOCS.
Presentations, submissions, hearings, orders and judgments are displayed in a timeline, providing a complete overview of each case. You can search for documents, provisional measures, and information about judges and commissioners, as well as filter results in several ways, including:
- date
- country
- right violated
- case status
The database is available in three languages: Spanish, English and Portuguese.
Improving access to human rights jurisprudence
Case law is an important part of every legal system, and it is essential for human rights lawyers to be able to find the right jurisprudence quickly in order to give the appropriate advice to clients and make the best arguments in court.
For CEJIL and its network of human rights lawyers, members of academia, and national and international human rights organisations, it was previously difficult to find relevant information coming out of the Inter-American Court and Commission. Both bodies regularly make decisions on the same cases, but these decisions were found in two different databases with different indexing standards.
In 2015, HURIDOCS partnered with CEJIL to build the SUMMA database and address this lack of accessible information. Today, we continue to work closely with CEJIL to make improvements to the case law collection.