About Tri-Covenant Watch

Civil-society monitoring of Taiwan government discourse across three UN human rights covenants — CEDAW, CRC, and CRPD — with open data, reproducible methodology, and CC BY 4.0 license.

🌐 What is Tri-Covenant Watch?

Three independent NGO platforms — each focused on one UN human rights covenant — share a common evidence pipeline and cross-reference each other's data. Each platform is hosted and edited independently, but the cross-platform analytical pages (Tri-Covenant Dashboard, structural findings, executive summary, etc.) are co-produced and synced byte-for-byte across all three platforms.

The three platforms

♀ CEDAW (Women)

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Host: Taiwan National Mothers' Alliance for Family and Children (台灣全國媽媽護家護兒聯盟).
Stance: opposes interpretation expansion of CEDAW beyond biological sex protection. Tracks "framework expansion vs women's substantive rights" (Axis 4 of the platform).

☻ CRC (Children)

Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Host: Alliance for AABE (國教行動聯盟). Education-policy advocacy NGO.
Tracks state failures in child protection, education, and emerging adolescent rights issues including online safety, mental health, and adolescent SOGIESC tensions.

⚙ CRPD (Disability)

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Host: Cross-NGO collaboration (DPO + ally NGOs).
Tracks systemic implementation gaps including reasonable accommodation paradoxes, disabled women's intersectional rights, and indigenous disabled persons.

🔧 Methodology

The platform uses a reproducible four-step pipeline applied to all three covenants:

Step 1 — Crawl gov't documents: Scrape official sources (committee meeting records, NHRC monitoring reports, ministry statistics, executive yuan responses to UN Concluding Observations). Sources are documented per platform.
Step 2 — Extract main content: BeautifulSoup4 + lxml strip navigation, footer, and noise. PDF text via pdftotext (poppler), with fallback to Tesseract OCR (chi_tra+eng @ 300 DPI) for scanned PDFs.
Step 3 — Index in SQLite + FTS5: Each platform maintains its own DB with passage, policy_issue, rel_issue_passage, document, etc. Full-text search uses SQLite FTS5. Total: 102,728 segments across 3 platforms (as of 2026-05).
Step 4 — Cross-platform analysis: Common keyword regex applied across all 3 DBs to surface intersectional findings. Outputs include the structural findings dashboard, intersectional topics page, PI evidence scorecard, and monthly snapshot trends.

PI Evidence Scoring Formula

Each Policy Issue (PI) receives a 0-100 score based on five dimensions:

Grade thresholds: A ≥ 70 (advocacy-ready) · B ≥ 50 (refine + advocate) · C ≥ 30 (focused supplementation) · D ≥ 10 (foundational research) · F < 10 (FOI / fieldwork required).

📊 Open Data

📜 Citation

Suggested citation:

Tri-Covenant Watch (Taiwan). (2026). Cross-covenant monitoring of Taiwan government discourse on CEDAW / CRC / CRPD: Structural findings and PI evidence scorecard. Available at: cedaw.taiwanmommies.org · naer-tw.github.io/child-rights-watch · naer-tw.github.io/disability-rights-watch. CC BY 4.0.

For specific findings, please cite the individual PI brief or structural finding URL.

📋 License

All cross-platform analytical content (HTML pages, JSON exports, methodology documentation) is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — free to share and adapt with attribution.

The shared evidence pipeline (Python code) is open source under MIT License at github.com/naer-tw/evidence-pipeline. For replication, see the Developer / Replication Guide — step-by-step setup for a Tri-Covenant-Watch-style platform on any UN treaty.

Platform-specific NGO advocacy positions, however, remain the editorial property of the hosting NGOs and represent their respective stances, not necessarily those of the other platforms.

🤝 Cross-Platform Collaboration Model

The three NGOs share technical infrastructure (DB schema, build pipeline, cross-platform analytical pages) but maintain editorial independence:

This model demonstrates that NGOs with distinct (sometimes opposing) advocacy positions can co-produce neutral cross-cutting evidence infrastructure, surfacing shared blind spots without forcing position alignment.

📚 Audience-specific entry guide

Different audiences find different entry points. Five "30-second to key content" paths:

📰 Journalists

1. Read 📋 Executive Summary (1-page): 6 findings + 4 asks
2. Open 📰 Case studies: 6 deep-dives with key numbers, intl comparisons
3. Citation format: see "Suggested citation" in release-notes

🎓 Academic researchers

1. GitHub repo: full pipeline (MIT)
2. CHANGELOG.md: design rationale + decision log
3. 📋 Release Notes: citation-ready external reference

🌐 UN treaty body reviewers

1. 📋 Executive Summary EN: 1-page brief
2. 🔬 6 Structural Findings EN: visualization dashboard
3. 📄 Joint Brief Template: NGO joint advocacy template

🤝 Domestic NGO advocates

1. 📋 PI Evidence Scorecard: rank issues for advocacy
2. 🎯 D-grade Research TODO: 4-dim action plan for low-score issues
3. 📄 Advocacy Brief Template: A4 printable

🛠 Replicating organizations

1. DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md: 7-step bootstrap
2. AUTOMATION_README: monthly workflow
3. Fork repo → adapt to other treaties (CAT/ICCPR/ICESCR/CERD)

📅 Long-term tracking

1. RSS: feed.xml · Atom: atom.xml
2. 📅 Monthly Tracker: 6 indicators baseline → target
3. 📈 Monthly Trend: total segments + Wave milestones

📞 Contact

For platform-specific inquiries, contact the hosting NGO directly via each platform's "About" page. For cross-platform technical questions, see the evidence-pipeline GitHub repository.