Citing the European Convention on Human Rights

Hi there, I am trying to come up with the closer item type for the European Convention on Human Rights, and the only thing I can think of is under Statute. Still, I wanted an additional opinion/suggestion. Thank you!
  • Zotero is not that great for international law. You can work around some of the shortcomings. See here, for example: https://libguides.graduateinstitute.ch/zotero/law (note that they are using the European Journal of International Law style in this example). There are legal reference styles (e.g. Bluebook and OSCOLA) but it is a bit hit-or-miss given the absence of some reference types. Juris-m, a fork of Zotero, adds more reference types, including Treaty.1

    What I do is that I save treaties, UN resolutions and the like in Zotero and append a note with the proper Bluebook citation. When I need to cite it I just cut and paste it into my doc's footnotes. It won't appear in the bibliography/references cited list, but that is consistent with Chicago's instructions for legal material.
  • Thank you so much for the tip!
  • There is a CSL treaty item type that will eventually be added to Zotero. For now, you can tell the citation processor to cite an item as a treaty by adding this to Extra:

    Type: treaty

    If the citation style is written to accommodate treaties (e.g., APA style is), this will be picked up and cited correctly. If it doesn't look right for the style you are using, say what the style is and give an example of what it shows/what it should be here.
  • Thank you. To make sure I do this correctly. Adding "Type: treaty" to the extra field would automatically update the citation if Zotero adds "treaty" as a type of citation?

    I am between APA and OSCOLA. If you can show me I would really appreciate your help. Thank you.
  • @bwiernik That is welcome news about treaty being added to Zotero. Will that be in 5.1 (which is hopefully not that far away), or is it further out?

    Related to this, is there a way to exclude specific reference types from the bibliography? According to Chicago (which does not seem to handle "treaty" as a type anyway, I think), treaties and the like should be handled using Bluebook style as footnotes and not be in the references cited list.
  • @army-jag341 - just to be clear, you can just add 'Type: treaty' to the extra field, and you can use the existing OSCOLA/APA styles now to update the citation. You don't have to wait for Zotero to implement 'treaty'. And @inh3 - you can exclude specific reference types in the bibliography, depends a bit on your style. For example, in OSCOLA, I can see that there is a macro called 'treaty-catchall' which handles the treaties - removing this should remove the style. Try using Visual CSL editor (https://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/) with your style. You can upload your style and your treaty citation to find out what part of the code needs removing or editing.
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