The general consensus at the City Legal Information Group's conference on the Human Rights Act and online resources is that if you are not specialising in human rights law, it is unnecessary to pay for one of the specialist subscription services. This is due to the wealth of free information that is available both on the Internet and already incorporated into the many services which individuals and firms already subscribe to.

The seminar was held at Bristows solicitors and the specialist panel included Henrietta Hill, Barrister from Doughty Street Chambers, who gave an overview of the Human Rights Act and what it has to date achieved. Henrietta was followed by Kay Hart, the research manager at Lovells, who gave an overview of the resources that are available freely over the Internet. Anna Edmundson, the Legal Information Manager at Matrix Chambers weighed up the pros and the cons of the main online human rights subscription services. Alison Gerry, the Human Rights Co-ordinator at Doughty Street Chambers, gave a demonstration of the subscription services covered by Anna, which she uses in her daily work.

Henrietta Hill in her overview of the Human Rights Act pinpointed four main areas that she felt practitioners and researchers should be aware of when dealing with a case from the HUDOC (Human Rights Documentation) pages of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) website. This is a comprehensive site, which contains judgments of the Court and admissibility decisions of both the Court and the Commission (prior to its dissolution). The site is regularly updated with the latest judgments of the Court and its press releases and, as was discussed later, it tends to be more up to date with developments than any of the subscription services.

Kay also recommended the use of a number of other free resources on the Internet. These included:

· The Council of Europe's website - (http://www.coe.int);
· Lexicon - this is a free service which Butterworths have been involved with. It was described as good and clear with easy to use links (http://www.courtservice.gov.uk/lexicon/);
· Hieros Gamos - which is divided into areas of human rights practice, and includes a list of country links (http://www.hg.org/);
· Lawlinks - (http://library.ukc.ac.uk/library/lawlinks/);
· Delia Venables' site - (http://www.venables.co.uk/);
· Lord Chancellor's Department site - (http://www.lcd.gov.uk/);
· Doughty Street Chambers website - which contains a comprehensive links section (http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/);
· Law Direct - which is still free and which can provide personalised updates (http://macdonald.butterworths.co.uk/) and;
· Beagle - which Kay described as a card index of cases (http://www.beagle.org.uk/hra/newindex.htm).

Anna Edmundson, the Legal Information Manager at Matrix Chambers, then provided an overview of the available subscription services and evaluated them in her personal opinion. The two main factors that she looks for in a subscription service are up to date information and a comprehensive commentary of the law. Anna began by looking at Butterworths Human Rights Direct. She felt that there is a good range of case materials available with a full set of Butterworths Human Rights Cases (BHRC), European cases from 1960 and the Law Reports of the Commonwealth, with a next day digest service and case commentary from Doughty Street Chambers. However, there is often a month delay in reporting European Court decisions and five months delay for the BHRC reports. There is also no comprehensive coverage of the European Commission decisions. It has the text of two Human Rights texts on line but contains no journals. It has the full text of the Human Rights Act and relevant Statutory Instruments, with a daily e-mail alerter. Anna also felt it was easy to navigate and user friendly but finds that the searching can sometimes be erratic with the service missing key words.

Next she considered the service provided by Context. It has the ECHR case law from 1960 and the text of the Decision and Reports Series. It is updated weekly but the materials tend to be a month out of date. There is no UK human rights case law post the Human Rights Act and no commentary is provided. It contains the full text of ECHR and its protocols, the Human Rights Act and the text of many of the Council of Europe Treaties. There is no daily alerter service. It is user friendly with a powerful search engine, yet the reports can be slow to download. Also it must be remembered that the HUDOC site, available free of charge, also contains all ECHR case law from 1960 onwards.

Lawtel's Human Rights Interactive. As with the other subscription services mentioned the European Court decisions are available from 1960 to date. Updates, cases and reports are available from a wide number of UK courts and specialist case commentary is provided by Crown Office Row. An articles index with abstracts is provided but no full text articles are available. The full text of the ECHR and Human Rights Act is available along with the relevant directions under the Civil Procedure Rules. A number of United Nations and Council of Europe Treaties are also available. Both daily and weekly updates are available and a specialist commentary is provided by Rosalind English. It was described as good value for money for a huge range of materials.

Westlaw UK also provide a human rights service. The European Human Rights Reoprts in electronic form is available, as are a number of unreported European Court decisions. The UK Human Rights Law Reports are provided but this coverage has been described as limited. The full text of the European Human Rights Law Review is available, the full text of Simor and Emmerson's loose-leaf "Human Rights Practice" is provided as is the relevant human rights section of the Legal Journals Index. The full text of the European Convention and Human Rights Act is available and a daily e-mail alert service can be requested. The case locator is useful and a huge range of secondary materials is available.

Lexis does not provide a specific human rights service but the area is already covered. There is good coverage of the European Court decisions and domestic cases from a range of services and a number of materials from other countries is provided. The coverage from 1988 to (about) four months ago is very good, but the service does tend to be patchy before this. A number of secondary sources are available but no texts specific to human rights. There is no daily alerter service available. The search engine is powerful and the coverage of other jurisdictions is unparalleled in the other subscription services. However, as it is not human rights specific material is located in a number of places and can be hard to find.

Anna also considered the new services provided by Jordans and Lawbytes, from the College of Law. However, she felt that these were both skeletal services with room for development.

Alison Gerry, then demonstrated the use of Westlaw, Butterworths and Justis, searching on the terms "media" and "privacy". On the whole she found that the three services found comparatively similar results. All three returned the cases which she felt to be the most important. With regard to the UK cases, Westlaw found 7 that Butterworths did not and Butterworths found 18 that Westlaw did not. Context's Justis service does not include UK case law. When looking at the European case law she found again that all three returned very much the same results, Butterworths and Justis found three cases, not returned by Westlaw, and Westlaw and Justis returned two cases not found by Butterworths.

In other jurisdictions Butterworths found a total of 19 cases. However, neither Westlaw nor Justis search these databases.

Alison also discussed the Human Rights Unit at Doughty Street Chambers and the services and newsletters that they provide. The Human Rights Unit can be called upon by practitioners for advice, which will be given over the phone. Alison also tries to write a newsletter fortnightly with up to date information on recent developments in the law. The newsletter is available to solicitors' firms upon request to Alison. To be included on the e-mail distribution list please write to Alison at a.gerry@doughtystreet.co.uk.

Alison, Anna and Kay all agreed that in practice they preferred to use Butterworths. However, they agreed that much of the information required could often be found on the free services that were provided and that their first point of call for European case law was frequently the HUDOC website provided by the Court itself.