The United Nations Treaty Collection provides free access to a wealth of information about international treaties covering a wide range of subject areas including international human rights, international law, international security, human rights, refugees. It can be used to download full text treaties and check for the latest information on whether certain treaties are in force.
Website of UNCITRAL, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. The site is available in the six official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. UNCITRAL is a core legal body of the UN which works towards the progressive harmonisation of the law of international trade.
This database provides a worldwide list of libraries which are depositories of official documents from the United Nations and organisations within the UN system including: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Civil Aviation Organization; International Labor Organization, UNESCO and the World Bank. Each entry contains contact addresses, telephone numbers and links to websites where appropriate. The site can be searched or browsed, for example by country.
The United Nations Chronicle is a quarterly magazine published by the United Nations Department of Public Information to provide news to the public about current UN activities. It covers a wide range of topics covering all aspects of United Nations responsibility, including health, economic development, human rights, United Nations reform and peace-keeping operations. Each issue contains articles on current UN activities in the field, interviews with leading UN personnel and first person accounts of situations.
UN-I-QUE is a database created by the Dag Hammarskjold Library with which you can look up the document number of a UN official document or sales publication. It covers documents from 1946 to 2014 (it is no longer updated), including annual reports from UN committees and commissions, UN monograph series, UN journals and reports of conferences. The database can be searched by key word to find the title and document number of a document.
This site contains the full-text of a guide which was prepared by the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold Library and aims to provide an overview to the type of documents produced by the United Nations and how to trace them. It details the main types of documents issued by the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council including resolutions, speeches, reports and press releases. It then describes the basic indexes which should be used to find particular types of material issued by the UN and its main bodies.
The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (UNECOSOC) is an organ of the UN which aims to promote higher living standards and find solutions to international economic and social problems. Its website contains a description of the role of the body within the wider organisation of the United Nations, its current activities and members. It also contains the full-text of all its official resolutions since 1982 and all sessional documents from 1994 onwards. The latter include details of welfare programmes and economic surveys of particular areas of the world.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency of the United Nations which acts to maintain and extend international cooperation in the standardization and improvement of all forms of telecommunication. Its website provides information on the history and membership of the ITU with the full-text of all its press releases from 1996 onwards. It also offers a calendar of forthcoming events, news cuttings relating to the telecommunications sector and information on world radio communication conferences.
The United Nations Office at Geneva is the largest and most active centre for multilateral conference diplomacy in the world. The main areas of its expertise are disarmament, human rights, humanitarian affairs and trade and economic activities. The site contains links to speeches by the Director-General and a searchable list of press releases, which are available in full-text in HTML and PDF formats. There are also links to the UNOG Library. A further feature of the site is an archive of documents which contains the full-text of key documents such as the UN charter.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was created by the UN General Assembly in 1951. The site offers background information about the work of the UNHCR which includes advocacy, capacity building, fund raising and global needs assessment. There is a section dealing with the groups of people the UNHCR works with including children, women, elderly, disabled and asylem seekers and information on the areas of the world where the UNHRC operates. There are legal documents, statistics and global reports.
