UN Treaty Bodies

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Most UN committees (Human Rights Committee, Committee on the Rights of the Child, etc.) issue decisions, recommendations, views, annual reports, and other documents to the General Assembly or ECOSOC. Not every committee issues all of these kinds of documents. Most of the documents listed below can be located by using the indexes to UN documents. For more detailed information about the types of documents issued by these bodies, see United Nations Documentation: Research Guide on Human Rights. Another great tool for figuring out UN documents and tools is our UN Resources & Research Tools guide.

Use the following tools to locate the UN document number and date of the document. Once you have the document number and the date, use the UN Room to locate the documents.

• AccessUN (1944-present) (UCB only)
  The best index for locating U.N. documents by keyword, author, title or U.N. symbol. Contains some full-text documents.
• UNBISnet - UN Bibliographic Information System
  Catalogue of UN publications and documentation indexed by the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Library of the UN Office at Geneva, and non-UN publications held in the collection of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library. Also includes voting records and index of speeches.
• UN-I-QUE: United Nations Info Quest
  Good for identifying documents for certain categories of materials.
• United Nations Official Documents (ODS)
  A fully searchable database, ODS covers all types of official United Nations documentation, beginning in 1993. Older UN documents are, however, added to the system on a daily basis. ODS also provides access to the resolutions of the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council from 1946 onwards.

Many of the general comments and recommendations, decisions, views, and consideration of reports of the UN treaty bodies listed below can be found on the Internet.

• UNHCHR, Treaty-based bodies, see aslo search the Treaty Bodies Database (see the old Treaty Bodies Database page).
• University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, Other Treaty-Based Committees.
• The United Nations Human Rights Treaties (bayefsky.com) . Provides easy access to documents from the major treaty bodies of the UN. Access is by state, category, or subject.
• Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Case Law Database (CCPR, CERD, CEDAW, country reports, and general comments and general recommendations).

International Human Rights Instruments, Compilation of General Comments and General Recommendations Adopted by Human Rights Bodies (New York: United Nations, 1994-). The most current version is U.N. Doc. HRI/GEN/1/Rev.8 and HRI/GEN/1/Rev.8/Add.1 (available in PDF).

Some of these documents are reproduced in periodicals such as Human Rights Law Journal (Kehl am Rhein: N.P. Engel, 1980-).

For more assistance in locating UN documents, see Wiltrud Harms (in the UN Room) or Marci Hoffman.

This guide was prepared by Marci Hoffman, International and Foreign Law Librarian, UC Berkeley Law Library, revised January 2008.