New Web Guide to UN Legal Sources

I have created a new web guide: UN Legal Research Starting Points.

On the main page of this guide, I link to newly released UN documents from the feed: UN Pulse. Examples of  recently available documents include: the UNCTAD-JETRO report, International Trade After the Economic Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities, and the UN-World Bank report, Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disasters: The Economics of Effective Prevention.

On the main page of this guide, I also link to databases of UN documents, such as UNBISnet and the UN’s Official Documents System. These two databases are good sources of UN masthead documents and resolutions.  UNBISnet also provides voting records for UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions and an index to speeches.  TIP: Use UNBISnet to research by topic.  UNBISnet offers many search features. UNBIS Thesaurus identifies UN subject descriptors that researchers can use to when searching for documents in UNBISnet.  Neither UNBISnet nor Official Documents System provides a complete online archive of UN documents from 1945-present.

Often, the best source of UN documents is the website of the UN body that authors, or publishes, the documents.  The UN’s international law page links to websites of UN law-related bodies.  There is no UN website that allows researchers to comprehensively search decisions of multiple UN-related courts and tribunals. TIP:  On-campus or off-campus through the BLS proxy server,  search Oxford Reports on International Law and Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law to identify decisions of UN-related courts and tribunals. UN legal news sources also highlight recent decisions.

Below is one of the library’s newest books about the United Nations:

Feel free to ask me for help in locating UN documents, Jean Davis