How Much is a Human Right Worth? ECtHR-NPD: A Benchmark for Predicting Non-Pecuniary Damage Awards

arXiv:2609.18908 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-09-16 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-09-16

Updated: 2026-09-16

Comments: EMNLP 2026 main conference paper. 28 pages, 5 figures

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Existing legal benchmarks cover diverse tasks, while continuous monetary remedies remain comparatively underexplored.

Terminology

Abstract

Existing legal benchmarks cover diverse tasks, while continuous monetary remedies remain comparatively underexplored. We introduce ECtHR-NPD, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for predicting non-pecuniary damage (NPD) awards at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from case information when no statutory formula or explicit calculation rule determines the amount. ECtHR-NPD contains 14,575 cases with case-level awards in nominal euros, chronological splits, and a protocol separating target construction from model input. We evaluate a battery of methods, including constant predictors, gradient-boosted trees, retrieval methods, fine-tuned encoder language models (LMs), prompted decoder LMs, and knowledge-augmented agents. Our results show that more sophisticated LM and agentic approaches do not consistently outperform the strongest feature-based baseline. All model families struggle to identify zero awards and to calibrate high-award predictions, with further degradation on the Challenging test view, making ECtHR-NPD a challenging testbed for current state-of-the-art open-weight and proprietary LMs.

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