A Bilingual Infrastructure for an Informed Society

First impressions

When we at the Institute for Human Rights at Åbo Akademi University first joined the LAWPOL project, we knew we were stepping into an ambitious undertaking. However, it was not until we began deep-diving into the material that we fully recognized its richness and transformative potential. What initially appeared as a technical task – bringing Swedish-language materials and international sources into a research infrastructure – soon revealed itself as something larger: a critical contribution to democratic resilience, equal access to justice and information, and sustainable growth in a digital society.

The project started off with clear objectives. It aimed to support interdisciplinary research, foster new methods for analysing vast legal data, strengthen Nordic cooperation, and contribute to the pedagogical mission of universities. These abstract goals represented a real opportunity to reshape how people, including students, researchers, lawyers, journalists, or basically any citizen, could engage with law and politics in Finland.

From Vision to Reality: Creating Equal Access in Two Languages

A central impact objective was to ensure that the research infrastructure (RI) would be equally accessible in both national languages, Finnish and Swedish. For us, that meant building Lagradarn: the Swedish-language version of Lakitutka. We entered that work knowing that bilingual access was guaranteed by law. In practice, however, we soon discovered that legal equality did not translate simply into digital equality. Some government bills had never been published in Swedish; others existed in scattered locations, far from the reach of a unified platform. The task of retrieving and bringing together Swedish-language legislative documents became not only a technical challenge but also a revelation of deeper structural issues. There were moments when the work felt endless. Yet, piece by piece, we gathered and mapped the necessary materials, documented the process, and tested our beta version together with students and researchers in a hands-on workshop. That feedback refined the platform significantly, and in February 2025, Lagradarn was launched. The platform now stands as a bilingual gateway to Finland’s legislative processes. Its existence strengthens the role of Campus Åboensis as an interdisciplinary research hub and supports both education and communication between universities and civil society. But just as importantly, it plants the seeds for a deeper societal outcome: cultivating a bilingual public space where both language groups can access the same political and legal information.

Behind the platform’s simple interface lies a complex backstory. Finding many of the documents required detective work across databases and official repositories. That process changed us. We got to experience firsthand that equal availability does not simply happen but must be actively shaped. Even today, the collection remains incomplete, as some documents simply cannot be located. Instead of stopping there, we decided to document the gaps, and we intend to use the resulting data as the basis for an academic article reflecting on the de facto inequality between national languages in Finnish legal processes. It is a small but necessary step toward systemic change.

While Lagradarn was taking shape, we were also focused on another important objective: connecting Finland’s domestic legal processes to the wider world. We have mapped EU documents and case-law, as well as international treaties relevant to Finnish legislation. The result is a curated body of international materials that is ready to be integrated into the platform. The integration is not yet complete, but the groundwork is solid.

Learning Through Co-Creation

Building the platform has not been a solitary undertaking. Researchers across working groups have collaborated closely, each contributing from their own areas of strength – whether in law, programming, digital document analysis, or outreach. Together, we have participated in communications tasks, translated and produced Swedish-language materials, written blog posts, and supported the development and testing of digital tools. Collaboration and shared effort have been central to advancing the project. 

This close-knit cooperation reflects one of LAWPOL’s education-related ambitions: to cultivate active citizens and support the interrelation between research and teaching. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration, LAWPOL is already used in many university courses and thesis work, and has been actively introduced to journalists and young citizens in upper secondary schools and at the university level. The larger the audience LAWPOL reaches, the more fluent and critical the next generation will be in working with legal and political data.

Indeed, the promise of this infrastructure lies not in its code or its interface, but in how it is used. When a student analyses preparatory works with structured metadata, or a journalist tracks legislative references across policy areas, that is where impact lives. These are daily possibilities now, thanks to a platform that brings together materials that were once fragmented and often inaccessible. LAWPOL supports researchers, lawyers, and educators, as well as all other citizens interested in legal or political questions, fostering democratic literacy. All of these effects are deeply intertwined with sustainability: fostering democratic participation, trust in institutions, transparency, and shared understanding.

The future impact of the research infrastructure depends on adoption, visibility, and ongoing development. The platform needs to be used regularly, cited in research, integrated into classrooms, explored by citizens, and referenced by journalists. It needs to generate action, dialogue, and participation. Policy support will also matter. Digital open-access goods cannot fully flourish without stable funding and strategic prioritization. If these conditions are met, the impact could spread northward and outward. Already, we have mapped other legal infrastructures across the Nordic region. None of the existing research infrastructures mirrors LAWPOL’s scope. That means this platform could become a model for others: a best practice in multilingual accessibility and transparent governance.

Reflections From the Journey

Looking back, we see how building this infrastructure has brought into focus how fundamental access to legal and political information is for a modern democracy. Transparency and fairness depend not only on laws themselves, but on citizens’ ability to understand how laws are made, what they contain, and how they relate to international obligations. In this sense, developing the RI has been as much about exposing gaps as filling them, reminding us that while equal access is a core legal principle, it is not always realised in practice.

By streamlining access to legislative materials and linking them across domestic, regional, and international levels, the infrastructure makes the foundations of governance visible and navigable. What we have helped create is a resource for specialists as well as an inclusive tool that supports a more open and resilient society.

One of the clearest gaps revealed by the project concerns the realisation of Swedish speakers’ rights, particularly in terms of access to information. Building on these findings, a new SLS-funded project will extend the work to the analysis of parliamentary debates, examining attitudes toward the Swedish language and Swedish-speaking communities. To enable this shift from improving access to explaining underlying dynamics, the LAWPOL infrastructure will be further developed through the creation of analytical tools designed specifically for the analysis of political texts.

The Path Ahead: Anna and the Next Generation

While the research infrastructure creates the foundation, the ultimate measure of its impact is how it transforms the lives and work of individuals.

To illustrate the far-reaching potential of this work, we share a glimpse into the future. Anna’s story is a fictional, future-focused scenario that captures what this transformation could look like for a new generation of legal professionals. Her journey reflects LAWPOL’s deepest promise: that the new infrastructure can make understanding the law as natural as speaking it.

Anna’s Story: A Fictional Scenario of Future Impact

When Anna began her studies in the master’s programme in International Law and Human Rights at Åbo Akademi University in 2023, she often found herself wandering through a labyrinth of databases. Each question – from how a Finnish law had evolved to how it reflected international treaties – meant hours of searching through scattered systems. For a Swedish-speaking student, the path was even steeper, since not all preparatory documents or translations were within easy reach.

Then, in 2024, during her second year, Anna was invited to test a new tool, Lakitutka, a multilingual research infrastructure built within the LAWPOL project. For the first time, she could trace the path of lawmaking on a single interface, from parliamentary debates to preparatory documents to government bills, many of which were available in both Finnish and Swedish. What she held in her hands was an early glimpse of something far bigger: a foundation for a system that, one day, would connect national laws with EU documents, international treaties, and even court decisions from Finland and the EU region.

In 2025, Anna began writing her master’s thesis, “The Influence of International Human Rights Conventions on Finnish Criminal Law Reforms.” Using Lagradarn, the Swedish version of LAWPOL Lakitutka, she quickly found government bills, committee statements, and parliamentary debates relevant to her topic. Bilingual access made it easier to locate and understand the materials she needed, opening doors to insights that might otherwise have stayed hidden. What started as a research tool became something transformative – a way to see the legal system not as a static set of rules, but as a living dialogue shaped by political processes, connecting EU and national legislation, and bridging languages.

A year later, in 2026, Anna arrived in Strasbourg for an internship at the European Court of Human Rights. Her work as a legal trainee meant long days and late evenings assisting officers in analysing cases from Finland and its Nordic neighbours. Sometimes, when she compared Finnish criminal law to human rights conventions, she thought of Lagradarn: how it had once simplified her studies, and how it hinted at a future where such comparisons could be made in an instant, across systems and borders.

She couldn’t have known how close that future already was.

Indeed, already during the 2030s, LAWPOL will have started to transform into a truly Nordic–European research infrastructure. The new generation of Law Radar will have enabled users to navigate seamlessly from national preparatory materials and Finnish laws – including Åland Islands’ legislation – to EU directives and the decisions of both domestic and European courts. Norway and Sweden will have, with support from LAWPOL, developed their own linked research infrastructures, and together the systems will form a transparent web of interconnected legal and political knowledge.

Little did Anna know that, by the late 2030s, she herself would be using these tools every day. Working as a Legal Expert at the Finnish Ministry of Justice, she would rely on the evolved LAWPOL infrastructure to trace legislative histories, verify compliance with EU and international obligations, and understand how past judgments continue to shape new reforms. The bilingual interface will have become a standard of fairness and accessibility, ensuring that both Finnish and Swedish speakers have equal means to engage with the law-drafting process.

By the time the 2040s arrive, what began as a pilot tested by some students will have become part of Europe’s shared legal memory. Through LAWPOL, knowledge will have become not only accessible but alive, evolving with those who use it. And somewhere, a new student will sit before their screen, unaware that the clarity they now take for granted began years ago with the LAWPOL project, when Anna and other students first tested the system, quietly hoping that one day understanding the law could be as natural as speaking it.

About the LAWPOL Project: Funded by the Research Council of Finland and NextGenerationEU (RRF), the LAWPOL project was a joint initiative between the University of Turku (Faculty of Law and Centre for Parliamentary Studies) and Åbo Akademi University (Institute for Human Rights). The project expanded the LAWPOL research infrastructure, which integrates Lakitutka (Lagradarn/Law Radar) and Politiikkapöytä (Policy Desk) and which continues to evolve as a service compiling public legal and political data for interdisciplinary research. This impact story was collaboratively authored by researchers across the partner institutions as part of the project, which concluded on 31 December 2025.

Heading image by SCY from Pixabay.