Dataset Summary

This dataset contains transcribed court hearings sourced from official hearings of the European Court of Human Rights (https://www.echr.coe.int/webcasts-of-hearings). The hearings are 154 selected webcasts (videos) from 2012-2022 in their original language (no interpretation). With manual annotation for language labels and automatic processing of the extracted audio with pyannote and whisper-large-v2, the resulting dataset contains 4000 speaker turns and 88920 individual lines. The dataset contains two subsets, the transcripts and the metadata with linked documents. The transcripts are additionally available as .txt or .xml.

Languages

The largest amounts in the transcripts are:

English, French

A smaller portion also contains the following languages:

Russian, Spanish, Croatian, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Dutch, Albanian, Romanian, Serbian

The collected metadata is:

English

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

Each instance in transcripts represents an entire segment of a transcript, similar to a conversation turn in a dialog.

{
 'id': 0,
 'webcast_id': '1021112_29112017',
 'segment_id': 0,
 'speaker_name': 'UNK',
 'speaker_role': 'Announcer',
 'data': {
   'begin': [12.479999542236328],
   'end': [13.359999656677246],
   'language': ['fr'],
   'text': ['La Cour!']
  }
}

Each instance in documents represents a information on a document in hudoc associated with a hearing and the metadata associated with a hearing. The actual document is linked and can also be found in hudoc with the case_id. Note: hearing_type states the type of the hearing, type states the type of the document. If the hearing is a "Grand Chamber hearing", the "CHAMBER" document refers to a different hearing.

{
  'id': 16,
  'webcast_id': '1232311_02102012',
  'hearing_title': 'Michaud v. France (nos. 12323/11)',
  'hearing_date': '2012-10-02 00:00:00',
  'hearing_type': 'Chamber hearing',
  'application_number': ['12323/11'],
  'case_id': '001-115377',
  'case_name': 'CASE OF MICHAUD v. FRANCE',
  'case_url': 'https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-115377',
  'ecli': 'ECLI:CE:ECHR:2012:1206JUD001232311',
  'type': 'CHAMBER',
  'document_date': '2012-12-06 00:00:00',
  'importance': 1,
  'articles': ['8', '8-1', '8-2', '34', '35'],
  'respondent_government': ['FRA'],
  'issue': 'Decision of the National Bar Council of 12 July 2007 “adopting regulations on internal procedures for implementing the obligation to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, and an internal supervisory mechanism to guarantee compliance with those procedures” ; Article 21-1 of the Law of 31 December 1971 ; Law no. 2004-130 of 11 February 2004 ; Monetary and Financial Code',
  'strasbourg_caselaw': 'André and Other v. France, no 18603/03, 24 July 2008;Bosphorus Hava Yollari Turizm ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi v. Ireland [GC], no 45036/98, ECHR 2005-VI;[...]',
  'external_sources': 'Directive 91/308/EEC, 10 June 1991;Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union;Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union;Articles 169, 170, 173, 175, 177, 184 and 189 of the Treaty establishing the European Community;Recommendations 12 and 16 of the financial action task  force (“FATF”) on money laundering;Council of Europe Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism  (16 May 2005)',
  'conclusion': 'Remainder inadmissible;No violation of Article 8 - Right to respect for private and family life (Article 8-1 - Respect for correspondence;Respect for private life)',
  'separate_opinion': True
  }

Data Fields

transcripts:

id: the identifier
webcast_id: the identifier for the hearing
segment_id: the identifier of the current speaker segment in the current hearing
speaker_name: the name of the speaker (not given for Applicant, Government or Third Party)
speaker_role: the role/party the speaker represents (Announcer for announcements, Judge for judges, JudgeP for judge president, Applicant for representatives of the applicant, Government for representatives of the respondent government, ThirdParty for representatives of third party interveners)
data: sequence of the following fields
- begin: the timestamp for begin of line (in seconds)
- end: the timestamp for end of line (in seconds)
- language: the language spoken (in ISO 639-1)
- text: the spoken line

documents:

id: the identifier
webcast_id: the identifier for the hearing (allows linking to transcripts)
hearing_title: the title of the hearing
hearing_date: the date of the hearing
hearing_type: the type of hearing (Grand Chamber, Chamber or Grand Chamber Judgment Hearing)
application_number: the application numbers which are associated with the hearing and case
case_id: the id of the case
case_name: the name of the case
case_url: the direct link to the document
ecli: the ECLI (European Case Law Identifier)
type: the type of the document
document_date: the date of the document
importance: the importance score of the case (1 is the highest importance, key case)
articles: the concerning articles of the Convention of Human Rights
respondent_government: the code of the respondent government(s) (in ISO-3166 Alpha-3)
issue: the references to the issue of the case
strasbourg_caselaw: the list of cases in the ECHR which are relevant to the current case
external_sources: the relevant references outside of the ECHR
conclusion: the short textual description of the conclusion
separate_opinion: the indicator if there is a separate opinion

Data Splits

The dataset is only split into a train set.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

This datasets provides partly corrected transcribed webcasts to enable the processing of hearings in legal NLP. No specific task is given.

Source Data

Data Collection

The data was collected by transcribing the publicly available webcasts of the ECHR with the help of pyannote and whisper-large-v2. The documents were sourced from the ECHR hudoc database.

Who are the source producers?

Participants in hearings before the ECHR for the audio and video material. Employees and judges of the ECHR for the documents.

Annotations

Annotation process

language identification Spoken languages were manually identified by research assistants. Disagreements were discussed to achieve the final language label.

transcript correction All parts spoken by Judge or Judge President are corrected for the languages English and French by research assistants with a high proficiency in the respective language.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The dataset contains names of judges and other participants in the hearings. Due to those names being available in the public court material, we did not remove them. The machine-generated transcripts may also contain names, which were neither checked nor removed. In case of sensitive information, we rely on the provided material to provide protection (occasionally bleeping out names which should not have been mentioned in webcasts, appropriate anonymization in the documents).

Additional Information

Download the transcripts and linked documents:

from datasets import load_dataset

lacour_transcripts = load_dataset("TrustHLT/LaCour", "transcripts") # default config
lacour_documents = load_dataset("TrustHLT/LaCour", "documents")

Formatted versions of the transcripts in .txt and .xml and more information on the collection and creation can be found on github.

Citation Information

Please cite this data using:

[tbd]