Push countries to ratify UN treaties

[klengbratveit]

1. Scrape https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ParticipationStatus.aspx?clang=_en
2. Make applications. For example twitter bot for anniversary ...include naming countries not still ratified

[Patechoc]

Great idea!

It didn't look to complex to implement until I looked for countries not compliant in one case, e.g. "chap.4 Human Rights". China signed it in 1949 like many countries, but ratified much later in 1983 with reservations:

"Reservation:

2. The People's Republic of China does not consider itself bound by article IX of the said Convention."

Article 9 is just about...

"Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. New York, 10 December 1984".

That makes the app a bit more challenging ;P

[klengbratveit]

We could leave out the reservations in the first solution.

[klengbratveit]

The idea is to make attention to the Treaties, not be the monitor it all...

[klengbratveit]

I have talked to head of Treaty section in UN today: UN experts: https://vimeo.com/162124950

Here is some of what he said:

• They have no formal obligation to communicate status of treaties to the general public
• Still they were one of the first UN organizations to make a website. This is made by lawyers, to solve their need.
• There is an inhouse database for Treaties, but this is also their documentation tool. There is no API availeble of their Treaty database.
• Newer documents are in full text. Old Treaties are in scanned PDFs!
• Other UN bodies would very much like to promote signing and ratification of their treaties.
• We have a need for better registering incomming data. Now states can only send paper documents.
• We are responsible for Treaty Event every year inviting states to sign / ratify new treaties. ----> Lets have a conference call with Data4Good and my technical team!!

[dhesse]

Started on the crawling code today. It's here.

[klengbratveit]

For the "Treaty-anniversary-twitter-bot" we will probably need the variables; Name of treaty, Date of treaty, Date of entry into force, Participants, with: Date of signature, Date of acceptence, Date of ratification

[klengbratveit]

Some comments:

• The titles of some of the Treaty is not self-explanatory (Leave this for now)
• Some treaties are not put in to force jet. It may be interesting to be able to analyze data to see what treaties only need one more signature, etc. I did not find a easy variable to tell how individual treaties are put into force. It is explained in the scanned pdf of the law:(
• Some odd treaties, not in force, have been signed by "remote" countries - maybe only to let the heads of state visit UN or why? Example Benin: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVIII-1&chapter=28&clang=_en

[Patechoc]

Now the project started and you can join it by contributong to this repository: https://github.com/DataForGood-Norway/ResoCrawl