UN, affiliated agencies & other international government organizations

What's New

  • UN Wire
    Daily e-mail summary of key news stories on the UN and global affairs. Free registration is required.

General

  • United Nations
    Points to an overview of the U.N., its main organs and specialized agencies, member states, issues and campaigns, key documents and publications. 
  • Organization chart of the United Nations, showing its constituent organs and affiliated bodies

 

Catalogues and Indexes

  • Intergovernmental organization search engine
    searches across hundreds of IGO websites, enabling users to research topics important to intergovernmental organizations.
  • United Nations Digital Library (UNDL)   
    Online catalogue covering both UN documents and publications. The Digital Library includes UN documents, voting data, speeches, maps, and open access publications. Provides access to UN materials in digital format and bibliographic records for print UN documents starting in 1979.

  • Research Guides (Dag Hammarskjöld Library)
    Identifies documents and major publications of the UN and its constituent bodies. Titles are grouped under topics such as disarmament, environment, gender, human rights, international law, and peace and security. Where applicable, a link is provided to the publication's web version (either full text, summary, or extracts). Also includes some works published outside of the UN system.
  • LABORDOC
    The catalogue of the International Labour Organization Library is a rich database comprising roughly 550,000 references to the world's literature on labour related topics. These include industrial relations, labour law, employment, working conditions, vocational training, labour-related aspects of economics, social development, rural development, technological change, labour legislation, personnel management, social security, occupational safety and health, income distribution, employment and training policy, migrant workers, equal opportunity and other related subjects. Some 1,000 citations and digital files are added each year.

Statistics

  • UN Comtrade Database 
    Provides commodity trade data for all available countries and regions since 1962, with a selection of historical data from 1900 - 1960. Note the 'Visualize data' button, pointing to several ingenious visualization and data extraction tools from the government, private and academic sectors.
  • FAOSTAT
    A mulitlingual site from the FAO, providing statistics by country and topic, such as, fertilizers, pesticide use, land use, forest land, forestry production, soil, livestock, nourishment and CO2 emissions. 
  • UN Data
    Rapid keyword searching for statistics by country. "Country data services" points to countries' national statistics agencies. "Databases" allows searching by topic, UN agency or database title.
  • UNICEF - Information by Country
    Contains brief tables of demographic and socio-economic indicators such as infant mortality, life expectancy, adult literacy, nutrition, health HIV/Aids, education, economy, and women.

Treaties

  • United Nations Treaty Collection
    Click "Depositary" and "Certified true copies" for the full text of multilateral treaties deposited with the Secretary-General. "Registration and Publication" also allows the option of viewing the League of Nations Treaty Series.

Full Text sources

  • WTO Documents Online (World Trade Organization)
    Contains over 140,000 official documents from 1995 onwards, retrievable by keyword and browse searching.
  • European Court of Human Rights  
    Contains judgements, decisions, case-law analyses and guides, official texts, case statistics as well as statistics indentifying violations by articles and states. "Case-law" links to the HUDOC database for searching judgments, decisions, consultative opinions, legal summaries and press releases.   
  • Official Document System of the United Nations (ODS)
    First launched in 1993, ODS includes full-text, born-digital UN documents published from 1993 onward, including documents of the Security Council, General Assembly, and Economic and Social Council and their subsidiaries. Also covers scanned documents published between 1946 - 1993, including all resolutions of the principal organs, all documents of the Security Council and the General Assembly Official Records. ODS does not include UN sales publications and the Yearbook; these can be found in the United Nations Digital Library (UNDL) listed above.
  • ILO Databases (International Labour Organization)
    A convenient gateway to legislative, statistical and terminological databases relating to the world of work. This includes NORMLEX, pointing to key documents such as the ILO Constitution, ILO Conventions and Recommendations, country profiles relating to labour, and ratifications of ILO Conventions by country. 
  • UNHCR - Research & Evaluation 
    Contains evaluation reports of the organization's projects, programs, and policies as well as research papers on refugee issues. 
  • IMF eLibrary
    A comprehensive gateway to IMF publications by topic and country.