endomorphosis/ipfs_belize_laws

Belize Laws (AGM Revised Edition / Acts / SIs)

Research snapshot of official national legislation from Attorney General's Ministry / Press Office (agm.gov.bz, pressoffice.gov.bz).

Not legal advice. The official gazette / authentic source prevails over this corpus.

Snapshot

Field	Value
Snapshot date	2026-09-25
Coverage	catalog-backed incomplete
Source	Attorney General's Ministry / Press Office (agm.gov.bz, pressoffice.gov.bz)
Collector	scrapers/collect_bz.py
Laws / instruments	2,158
Articles	73,937
Retrieval	1,938 live from official Belize sources (agm.gov.bz, pressoffice.gov.bz, nationalassembly.gov.bz); 220 from Wayback captures of official nationalassembly.gov.bz and agm.gov.bz URLs (15 OCR'd)
Language	en
Jurisdiction	Belize
License	bz-agm-official-texts

Contents

• data/laws.parquet — one row per instrument.
• data/articles.parquet — article/section rows for the same snapshot.
• scrapers/collect_bz.py — research collector used to build this snapshot (catalog discovery).
• scrapers/_bz_dedup_batch.py — batch runner with duplicate pre-filter, post-fetch dedupe and error-page / app-shell / non-legislation / binary-garbage rejection.
• scrapers/_bz_densify_articles.py — standard section splitter.
• scrapers/ctrlchars.py — length-preserving control-character normaliser.
• scrapers/ctrl_audit.py — control-character audit (every string column, every row).
• scrapers/_bz_fix_error_pages.py — v3 fix script (control-character pass; error-page row replacement).
• scrapers/_bz_ocr_garbled.py — OCR re-extraction for PDFs whose text layer cannot be decoded.
• scrapers/textlayer.py — detects garbled PDF text layers (shifted letters, non-words, partial garble) so the fetch pipeline can re-extract them by OCR.
• scrapers/_bz_reocr_noise.py — re-runs OCR on rows whose OCR text contains blank-page fragment noise, using the noise-page filter.
• scrapers/_bz_endpass_v11.py — v11 end pass: re-extraction from the same official PDF (page-level OCR of garbled pages, full re-OCR, margin-note-aware OCR).
• scrapers/_bz_endpass_v11_apply.py — v11 end pass: replace-or-keep decision, re-split, and the fallback split for laws with no sections.
• scrapers/_bz_endpass_v12_apply.py — v12: CoS-approved replacement of the 3 texts kept in v11 (word-hit and layout criteria).

License / reuse

Official Belize AGM Revised Edition / Acts / SI texts; authentic AGM text prevails; not legal advice.

This dataset is not legal advice. The official source prevails.

Provenance

• Base: Hub tip 7f637e60 (v11: 2,158 laws / 73,936 articles). This is a small fix-only release (bz_fix_endpass_v12, 2026-09-25) with no new laws. It replaces the 3 texts that v11 had kept: S.I. 1 of 2020 and S.I. 11 of 2020 (re-OCR with far fewer typos) and S.I. 18 of 2021 (same words in the correct reading order), using OCR of the same official PDFs. These 3 laws were re-split; all other rows are unchanged. OCR text may contain recognition errors.
• Earlier (v11): Hub tip 2aa45fa7 (v10: 2,158 laws / 73,678 articles). This is a fix-only release (bz_fix_endpass_v11, 2026-09-25) with no new laws. It re-extracts texts from the same official PDFs: the 20 rows whose text layer had garbled letters (mostly schedules and appropriation tables; the garbled pages were OCR'd, all other pages kept as they were) and 23 of the 25 2020 S.I.s whose scanner-made OCR layer had many typos (re-OCR'd). A text was replaced only when it scored clearly better and kept at least 90% of the old text; 3 candidates did not pass and the old text stays (S.I. 18 of 2021, S.I. 1 of 2020, S.I. 11 of 2020). Replaced texts are marked metadata.text_replaced, with the old hash and scores in metadata.history. The replaced laws and 33 laws that had no article split were re-split; the rest of the articles are unchanged. OCR text may contain recognition errors. It also flags the 6 press releases from the earlier snapshot as non-legislation in their metadata and rewords the S.I. 80 of 2025 exclusion note so that it describes the copyright notice without quoting it. MANIFEST.md lists every affected law id.
• Earlier (v10): Hub tip b7cdef9c (v9: 1,975 laws / 70,774 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 10 (bz_catalog_deepen_v10, 2026-09-25), which finishes the catalog: 183 older National Assembly instruments (158 Acts, mostly 2015-2020, and 25 S.I.s, mostly 2023-2024) from Wayback captures of their official nationalassembly.gov.bz URLs, because that site now shows a suspended-account page. 7 of them had a garbled text layer and were OCR'd from the same captured PDF; OCR text may contain recognition errors. 8 uploads that turned out to be Bills rather than the enacted Acts, and 16 duplicates of instruments already in the pack, were left out. All rows from the tip are unchanged. This README and MANIFEST.md also restore the detailed notes for v9.
• Earlier (v9, uploaded by CoS as Hub commit b7cdef9c with a generated README): Hub tip 10e29ff2 (v8: 1,900 laws / 69,998 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 9 (bz_catalog_deepen_v9, 2026-09-25), capped at 75 rows: the last 51 annual S.I.s on the AGM portal (2020, 2025, 2026) and 3 Press Office S.I.s, fetched live; and 21 older instruments (19 National Assembly Acts of 2015-2017 and 2 Revised Edition subsidiary-law volumes) from Wayback captures of their official URLs, because those hosts now return a suspended-account or portal page. 14 of them were OCR'd from the official PDF: 9 scanned PDFs with no text layer and 5 with a garbled text layer. OCR text may contain recognition errors. Press Office summaries of S.I.s, press releases and a Spanish translation were left out because they are not the law itself. All rows from the tip are unchanged.
• Earlier (v8): Hub tip 9dbf3060 (v7: 1,650 laws / 68,220 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 8 (bz_catalog_deepen_v8, 2026-09-25): 250 annual S.I.s (2020-2026), fetched live from agm.gov.bz. 39 of them were OCR'd from the official PDF: 26 scanned PDFs with no text layer and 13 with a garbled text layer. OCR text may contain recognition errors. The garbled-text detector now also catches garble that is limited to schedules, tables or capital letters. The Schedule to S.I. 80 of 2025 (the 2024 Belize Building Code) is permanently excluded because it carries a third-party copyright notice (ICC) and its extraction was poor; the S.I. 80 of 2025 row now says so in its metadata (the only change to an earlier row). All other rows from the tip are unchanged.
• Earlier (v7): Hub tip 6e6740cf (v6: 1,401 laws / 65,310 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 7 (bz_catalog_deepen_v7, 2026-09-25): 249 annual S.I.s (2022-2025), fetched live from agm.gov.bz. 23 of them were OCR'd from the official PDF: 9 scanned PDFs with no text layer and 14 with a garbled text layer. OCR text may contain recognition errors. The Schedule to S.I. 80 of 2025 (the 2024 Belize Building Code, which carries a third-party copyright notice (ICC)) is not included; the regulations of S.I. 80 of 2025 are. All rows from the tip are unchanged.
• Earlier (v6): Hub tip c69566aa (v5: 1,151 laws / 63,701 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 6 (bz_catalog_deepen_v6, 2026-09-25): 250 annual S.I.s (2020-2024), fetched live from agm.gov.bz. 194 of them are scanned PDFs with no text layer and 1 had a garbled text layer; all 195 were OCR'd from the official PDF. Blank scanned back pages are dropped from the OCR output. OCR text may contain recognition errors. All rows from the tip are unchanged.
• Earlier (v5): Hub tip 8ee6e637 (v4: 900 laws / 59,046 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 5 (bz_catalog_deepen_v5, 2026-09-25): the remaining 73 annual Acts (2024-2026) and 178 annual S.I.s (2021-2023), all fetched live as PDFs from agm.gov.bz. All rows from the tip are unchanged.
• The fetch pipeline now detects PDFs whose text is garbled, such as shifted letters or undecodable characters, and PDFs with no text layer. It re-extracts both kinds by OCR from the same official PDF. 8 new rows were OCR'd this way; they may contain recognition errors.
• Earlier (v4): Hub tip e614aaf1 (v3: 650 laws / 43,303 articles). This pack adds catalog batch 4 (bz_catalog_deepen_v4, 2026-09-25): the remaining 103 subsidiary-law volumes and 147 annual Acts (2021-2024), all fetched live as PDFs from agm.gov.bz. All rows from the tip are unchanged.
• 14 of the new PDFs have fonts that cannot be decoded to text: 13 Senior Courts Practice Directions of 2025, which the AGM portal lists under Subsidiary Laws, and the Blue Bonds Loan Act 2021. They were OCR'd from the same official PDF and may contain recognition errors.
• Earlier (v3): Hub tip 21cc53f9 (v2: 650 laws / 41,546 articles). This is a fix-only release (bz_fix_ctrl_and_error_pages_v3, 2026-09-25) with no new catalog laws: it normalizes control characters in the older rows and replaces 26 error-page rows with official text. All other rows are unchanged.
• Earlier: v1 (9b1a0cc9) and v2 added catalog batches 1 and 2 on top of the original 150-row snapshot.
• Catalog: 3,348 rows from the Attorney General's Ministry portal (Revised Edition Caps, Subsidiary Laws, annual Acts and S.I.s), the Press Office S.I. page, and Wayback captures of official upload folders.
• Batch 1 added 250 Revised Edition Caps (substantive laws). Batch 2 added the remaining 113 substantive Caps and 137 subsidiary-law volumes of the Revised Edition 2020. All 500 were fetched live as PDFs from agm.gov.bz; none came from Wayback.
• Duplicate checks (byte hash; S.I. or Act number and year; Cap number; normalised title) kept duplicate copies out. Press releases, bills, communiques, motions and similar non-legislation were skipped.
• No non-official or third-party sources were used.
• Control characters: C0/C1 control characters are normalized. They were replaced, not deleted, so every row keeps its exact character length. Correction: v1 and v2 said none remained, but the check was faulty and missed 3,826 in 117 law texts and 3,730 in 1,410 article texts, all in the original 150 rows. This release normalizes them, and a corrected check finds none in any column.

Source

• https://www.agm.gov.bz/laws

Known gaps

Catalog-backed: every row of the 3,348-row catalog has now been processed. 1 row could not be obtained (Cap 36 Education Regulations: the portal link returns a portal page and the only Wayback capture of the PDF is truncated), and 1 Spanish translation of a Press Office S.I. is deliberately excluded. 2 rows from the earlier snapshot (S.I. 104 of 2022 and S.I. 141 of 2022) still hold an AGM portal page instead of law text, because no official copy could be found. They are flagged in metadata. 8 instruments have no article split: 6 press releases from the earlier snapshot (not legislation; flagged in metadata as press releases) and the 2 unresolved rows. The other 34 formerly unsplit instruments now have articles: numbered paragraphs, heading blocks (Practice Directions), or one article holding the whole text (short proclamations and notices). Section splits include arrangement-of-sections lines as short article rows. nationalassembly.gov.bz is suspended (Wayback only). Skip belizelaw.org. Not vLex. The garbled rows and weak OCR rows listed in earlier releases were re-extracted in v11; The 3 rows v11 kept (S.I. 18 of 2021 and 2 of the 2020 S.I.s) were replaced in v12. 3 older rows contain a few (1-5) garbled words below the detector threshold. OCR text may contain recognition errors.

Replaced error-page rows (CoS exception)

In the earlier snapshot, 28 rows held an error page instead of law text: 24 showed a suspended-account page from nationalassembly.gov.bz and 4 showed an AGM portal page. With CoS approval, each was re-fetched from an official source into the same id: first the AGM portal (live), then a Wayback capture of the original URL taken before the suspension. The number and title were checked against the text. The old page's URL, title, length and hashes are kept in metadata.error_page_history, and the new source is recorded in metadata.replacement. 26 rows were replaced: 10 live from the AGM portal and 16 from Wayback, 7 of them via OCR. 2 rows were unresolved; they are left unchanged and flagged with error_page_unresolved. Some replaced rows are bills or committee notices rather than enacted law, marked by metadata.document_kind.

id	old len / arts	new len / arts	source	live / Wayback	kind
bz-act-no-28-of-2022-the-peoples-constitution-commission	123 / 0	28,770 / 35	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-act-no-6-of-2021-belize-constitution-ninth-amendment-act-2021	123 / 0	10,658 / 7	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-act-no.-25-of-2022-belize-constitution-tenth-amendment-act-2022	123 / 0	6,633 / 12	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-belize-constitution-2012updated-march	123 / 0	444,447 / 197	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20210426	legislation
bz-belize-constitution-2017updated-march	123 / 0	351,402 / 220	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20210517	legislation
bz-belize-constitution-chapter-4-2021	123 / 0	354,886 / 227	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20260527	legislation
bz-belize-constitution-eleventh-amendment-bill-2021-updated	123 / 0	3,693 / 8	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312	bill
bz-belize-constitution-ninth-amendment-bill-2021	123 / 0	8,546 / 4	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312	bill
bz-belize-constitution-tenth-amendment-bill-2021	123 / 0	6,525 / 8	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312	bill
bz-belize-constitution-twelfth-amendment-bill-2022	123 / 0	4,203 / 8	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	bill
bz-cap_04_belize_constitution_act	363 / 0	397,885 / 202	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-cap_103.03_mutual_administrative_assistance_in_tax_matters_act_-_schedule_i_needs_to_be_inserted	363 / 0	307,540 / 279	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-communique-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committe-3rd-may-2023	123 / 0	1,058 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	committee_communique
bz-communique-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committee	123 / 0	1,084 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	committee_communique
bz-communique-the-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committee	123 / 0	969 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	committee_communique
bz-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committee-18.09.2024-public-notice	123 / 0	1,028 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	public_notice
bz-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committee-meeting-communique-31.10.22	123 / 0	878 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	committee_communique
bz-constitution-of-belize-as-of-7-nov.-2022	123 / 0	357,171 / 219	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20260728	legislation
bz-public-notice-constitution-and-foreign-affairs-committee-on-oct-23	123 / 0	988 / 0	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312 + OCR	public_notice
bz-si-no.-48-of-2023-belize-constitution-public-service-emoluments-and-allowances-reduction-amendment-regulations-2023	123 / 0	2,260 / 2	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-si-no.-58-of-2024-belize-constitution-a-proclamation-declaring-a-state-of-emergency-in-the-southside-of-belize-city-and-certain-parts-on-the-cayo-district	123 / 0	6,953 / 10	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-si-no.-59-of-2024-belize-constitution-emergency-powers-regulations-2024	123 / 0	21,308 / 27	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-si-no.-61-of-2023-belize-constitution-judicial-and-legal-services-prescribed-offices-order-2023	123 / 0	2,464 / 3	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-si-no.-80-of-2023-belize-constitution-emergency-powers-regulations-2023	123 / 0	21,301 / 26	www.agm.gov.bz	live (AGM portal)	legislation
bz-si_no._104_of_2022_belize_constitution__public_service_emoluments_and_allowances__reduction__revocation_and_revival___regulations__2022	363 / 0	363 / 0	-	UNRESOLVED (unchanged; metadata flag only)	legislation
bz-si_no._141_of_2022_belize_constitution__emergency_powers___revocation__regulations__2022	363 / 0	363 / 0	-	UNRESOLVED (unchanged; metadata flag only)	legislation
bz-the-constitution-of-belize	123 / 0	354,546 / 227	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20210825	legislation
bz-the-peoples-constitution-commission-bill-2022	123 / 0	28,686 / 36	www.nationalassembly.gov.bz	Wayback 20250312	bill