endomorphosis/ipfs_saint_helena_laws

Laws of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha

Research snapshot of official legislation published by the St Helena Government at www.sainthelena.gov.sh: the Revised Edition of the Laws (2017, kept updated) for each of the three territories, and Ordinances and Legal Notices published in the Gazette.

Not legal advice. The official published text prevails over this corpus.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Batch	sh_b1 (staged 2026-10-16T22:59:29Z)
Laws / instruments	509
Articles (sections)	13,175
Heading-only TOC rows dropped	3,065 (listed in manifests/known_gaps.json)
Repeal placeholders kept	109 (metadata_json.body_status = repealed_placeholder)
Language	en
Jurisdiction	St Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha (column jurisdiction)
Source	www.sainthelena.gov.sh (official)
Collector	scrapers/sh_b1/collect_sh.py

Contents

Kind	Rows
Revised Edition 2017 consolidated Ordinances (with subsidiary legislation)	250
Gazette Legal Notices (subsidiary legislation, as made)	175
Gazette Ordinances (as made)	84

Jurisdiction	Laws	Articles
Ascension	136	2621
St Helena	331	9001
Tristan da Cunha	42	1553

• data/laws.parquet: one row per instrument (full text after page-furniture trimming).
• data/articles.parquet: one row per section; subsidiary legislation printed after an Ordinance is numbered as part 2, 3, ... (p2-1, ...).
• Schema: the same columns as other ipfs_*_laws datasets (copied from ipfs_liberia_laws). The laws file's jurisdiction column holds the territory name ('St Helena', 'Ascension' or 'Tristan da Cunha'); the articles file has one extra trailing jurisdiction column with the same values. Consolidated texts take the territory of the list they are published under; Gazette instruments are 'St Helena' unless their title or heading names Ascension or Tristan da Cunha (basis kept in metadata_json.jurisdiction_basis; ISO 3166-2 code in metadata_json.jurisdiction_iso).
• Every article text is a verbatim slice of its law's stored text: laws.text[char_start:char_end] with the offsets in the article's metadata_json (ascending within a law). Arrangement-of-sections / table-of-contents lines with no body are not articles (dropped, listed in manifests/known_gaps.json); sections that survive only as 'Omitted' / 'Repealed by ...' placeholders are kept with metadata_json.body_status = repealed_placeholder.
• manifests/: batch summary, drop log (Bills, duplicates, non-legislation), known_gaps.json (whole-text-fallback laws, duplicate PDFs dropped, heading-only rows dropped), changed_ids.json (article ids vs the pre-fix staging), code hashes, PII scan result and pii_scan_notes.md.
• SHA256SUMS: sha256 of every data, README, MANIFEST, manifest and scraper file (sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS).
• scrapers/sh_b1/: the collector, extraction, OCR, staging and verification code, with a how-to-run README; pinned versions in scrapers/requirements.txt.

Scope

• In: Ordinances (consolidated and as made), Legal Notices (regulations, rules, orders) and the subsidiary legislation printed with each consolidated Ordinance.
• Out: Bills (not law), gazette notices (appointments, staff changes, authorisations), lists and tables, UK Acts that apply to the territories.

OCR and text quality (batch sh_b1)

• Text source: the PDFs' own text layer (pdftotext -layout) for 508 instruments; tesseract OCR (eng, 300 dpi, system tessdata) for 1.
• A text-layer document is DEGRADED when more than 8 % of its characters fall outside printable Latin text; an OCR document is DEGRADED when its mean word confidence is below 80.
• Sections: 43 instruments had no detectable numbered sections and are carried as one whole-text article (listed in manifests/known_gaps.json).
• Article texts are raw slices of the stored law text (no whitespace reflow); a staging gate refuses any article that is not laws.text[char_start:char_end].

DEGRADED items: none.

OCR items:

Title	Pages	Mean confidence	Status
Administrator (Tristan da Cunha) Ordinance , 1948	2	94.16	ok

PII review

Free-webmail addresses are redacted. The only PII-scan warnings are telephone/fax numbers of government offices printed in official forms and notices (Labour Regulating Authority, Land Development Appeals Tribunal, Media Standards Commission, Attorney General's Chambers). They are official office numbers and are kept; see manifests/pii_scan_notes.md.

License / reuse

Official legislation published by the St Helena Government. The site shows a generic government copyright footer and has no specific terms-of-use page (described here, not quoted). The Revised Edition texts are stated to be authoritative as at their revision date; later Gazette instruments may amend them. Not legal advice.