Researching the United Nations

The United Nations System

The United Nations ("UN") was established in 1945 with the signing of the United Nations Charter. There are six principal organs of the UN:

The General Assembly is the main deliberative body with representatives from all member states; the Security Council has only 15 members and is responsible for peace and security; and ECOSOC coordinates. The UN is a huge organization. For purposes of this guide, we will focus on those institutions and documents which are legally relevant.

The UN web site provides a good starting point for UN research. It is important to first orient yourself: the subject you are researching might be the purview of one of the hundreds of subcommittees. It is probably better to get an idea of what has happened recently in the area you are researching than to plunge right in looking for documents. The UN provides press releases on its web site. It also publishes a regular newsletter called the UN Chronicle (Law Annex). For less recent news, the Yearbook of the United Nations (Law Annex JX 1977 A1 U53) is a good annual review of the business of the UN. Other parts of the UN publish yearbooks, and these can be a good way to get an overview of the actions of a UN body on the topic you are researching. The UN Handbook (Law Ref JZ4970 .U65 1996) is also produced annually and performs a similar function.

Once you have oriented yourself to the topic and UN body you are studying you can begin to look for specific documents. There are five types of UN document: press releases, "masthead" documents, official records, sales publications and periodicals. Mostly, you will be dealing with masthead documents, which include working documents, resolutions, country reports and other types of documents. These are identified by a document number. For example, E/CN.4/Sub.2/AC.2/1987/WP.4/Add.1 is a document from the Economic and Social Council (E), the Commission on Human Rights (CN.4), the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Sub.2), the working group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery (AC.2) in 1987. The rest of the document number describes the specific document. There is a good discussion of document numbers in the research guide at the UN website.As you can no doubt tell using document numbers takes some getting used to.

As for other documents: as indicated above, press releases can be found at the UN web site. Official records are the official publication of the documents you can find as masthead documents. The library does not carry the Official Records, but you may need to cite to them for blue book purposes. Sales publications will be listed in the library catalog if the library has purchased them, as will periodicals. From now on, any discussion of UN documents will refer to masthead documents.

To begin identifying types of documents you can use UN-I-QUE, a bibliographic database of important document series produced by the Dag Hammarskjöld library. Many UN documents are produced annually, and Unique can help you identify the document number of the type of document you need. The most recent documents are indexed on Readex's Access UN which can be reached through the library homepage. This is only available from BU computers. Readex indexes UN documents that are not for sale from the UN. The UN used to produce a paper index which is available through 1996, the UNDOC Current Index (Law Micro Index JX 1977 A1 U45). It has promised to replace this index with another product but we have not yet purchased a replacement (ODS or Unbisplus).

Once you have identified the documents you want you will need to find them. There are two microfiche collections of UN documents available to you: the Pappas collection of United Nations Documents (Law Micro) and the Mugar collection of United Nations Documents (Mugar Micro Mfiche). Readex offers several types of collections, Pappas has the collection of legally relevant documents and Mugar has the complete collection. Full-text documents are also available at the UN web site., although these will tend to be more current documents. Documents are available from the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council, including GA and SC resolutions.

Another good source of full text documents is the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights web site. Especially useful are the Treaty Bodies Database, which includes documents produced by the UN and by individual countries under the various human rights treaties, and UNHCR, which includes documents related to refugees. Other UN sites have full-text documents, so it may be useful to hunt around the homepage of the UN body involved in the subject area you are researching. Finally, many important UN documents will be published in International Legal Materials (Law Annex, Westlaw-ILM, Lexis-INTLAW;ILM). The topics of treaties or the ICJ are not discussed here because they are discussed in the treaty research guide and the research guide to other sources of international law.

The UN is a very complex organization and there is no way to completely describe UN research completely in such a short guide. The purpose of this guide is just to get you started. Should you want a more detailed description of research in this area there are many good, and detailed, research guides.

 

 

Page maintained by Terri Gallego-O'Rourke
Last updated: August 2006