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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18908 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18908/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

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.