Terms of use

1. Who these terms are between

This website is operated by To confirmthe full registered name, Belfortstraße 15, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany. Full details are in our site notice.

These terms govern your use of this website. By using the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

2. What this site is

This site publishes information about our work: articles, research, submissions to courts and treaty bodies, annual reports, a podcast and information about our team. It is free to use and requires no account.

3. Nothing here is legal advice

The content of this site, including our articles, research, submissions, podcast episodes and transcripts, is published for information and public debate. It is not legal advice and must not be relied on as legal advice.

• Nothing on this site is advice about your situation, because we do not know your situation.
• Reading this site, listening to the podcast or writing to us does not create a lawyer-client relationship between you and us, and does not make us responsible for your case.
• Our publications describe the law as we understood it when we wrote them. Law changes, and a case decided after publication can make what we wrote wrong. Nothing on this site is updated as a matter of course.
• If you have a legal problem, speak to a lawyer about your own situation before you act, and pay attention to time limits, which in human rights proceedings can be short and are usually strict.

We take reasonable care over what we publish, but we do not warrant that it is complete, current or free of error.

To confirmcounsel to check this against the professional rules for any contributor acting under a professional title, under § 5(1) no. 5 DDG and the BRAO and BORA where they apply. If any contributor is a practising Rechtsanwalt, their professional-title details belong in the site notice and the wording here may need to be tighter.

4. Writing to us

Our contact page invites you to write to us, including about something that has happened to you. Please understand what that does and does not mean.

• Writing to us does not oblige us to act for you, to take your case, or to reply within any particular time, and it does not make us your lawyers.
• We cannot take responsibility for a time limit in your case. Sending us a message does not stop a deadline running.
• Ordinary email is not encrypted on its way to us. If that matters for your safety, tell us so in your first message, before you tell us anything else.
• How we handle what you send is described in our privacy policy.

To confirmthis section has to sit consistently with the confidentiality the contact page already offers, and with counsel's answers to Q1 and Q2. It must not read as taking that promise back: the intent is to be clear about scope, not to disclaim the commitment.

5. Copyright, and what you may do with our work

To confirmone of the two paragraphs below, not both. This is Q4, and it changes the footer line as well.

Option A, all rights reserved. Unless stated otherwise, the content of this site is protected by copyright and belongs to us or to our contributors. You may read it, print it and share links to it, and you may quote from it with a citation. Any other reproduction, adaptation, distribution or commercial use needs our written permission, which is usually easy to get: write to us and tell us what you would like to do.

Option B, Creative Commons. Unless stated otherwise, the content of this site is published under a To confirmthe licence, for example Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may copy, share and adapt it, including commercially, as long as you credit us and link to the licence. Photographs, logos and third-party material are excluded and stay subject to their own terms.

In either case our name and our logo are not covered, and may not be used in a way that suggests we endorse something we do not.

6. The podcast

Episodes may be listened to on this site or wherever the podcast is distributed. We publish transcripts so that the podcast is usable by people who cannot listen, or would rather not. Republishing an episode or a transcript in full is subject to section 5.

7. Donations

Donations made through this site are voluntary and fund our work. We are a registered non-profit in Heidelberg and can issue a donation receipt for German tax purposes: tell us when you give and we will send one.

Payment is handled by FundraisingBox and by the payment provider you choose, under their own terms. If a donation was made in error, write to us and we will sort it out.

To confirmwhether a donor may direct a donation to a particular project, and what happens if a project is over-funded or does not go ahead. Counsel to confirm the position on withdrawal: a donation is generally a gift rather than a consumer contract, so the statutory right of withdrawal usually does not apply, but a recurring donation may be different and the page should say how one is cancelled.

8. Links to other sites

This site links to other websites, including courts, treaty bodies and partner organisations. We do not control them and we are not responsible for what is on them. A link is not an endorsement.

9. Availability

We would like the site to be available all the time and we cannot promise that it will be. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it. Nothing here is a guarantee of availability.

10. Liability

To confirmcounsel to draft. German law limits how far liability may be excluded, in particular for injury to life, body or health and for intent and gross negligence, so a blanket exclusion copied from an English-language site would be void here and would take the rest of the clause with it.

11. Accessibility

This site is built to be usable with a keyboard, with a screen reader and at large text sizes. If you find something you cannot use, write to contact@just-access.de and tell us. We will fix it.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the foot of the page says when they last changed, and the version in force is the one published here when you use the site.

13. Governing law

To confirmcounsel to draft: German law, with the usual carve-out preserving the mandatory consumer protections of a visitor's country of residence, and a venue clause if one is wanted.