International law commission

The International Law Commission (ICL) was established in 1947 by the General Assembly. Its mission is to promote the progressive development of international law and its codification, in accordance with article 13(1)(a) of the Charter of the United Nations.

Structure

The members of the Commission is elected by the General Assembly for a five-year term. The members are elected in their personal capacity as experts, not as representatives of their Governments.

Functions

The International Law Commission holds an annual session in Geneva for a period of ten to twelve weeks. The subjects for consideration are partly chosen by the ILC itself, partly through recommendations by the General Assembly or the Economic and Social Council.

When the International Law Commission has completed a draft article, it is referred to the General Assembly for further action. The Assembly usually convenes a diplomatic conference of plenipotentiaries to incorporate it into multilateral agreements.

• International Law Commission. Background information about the structure and work of the Commission and full text documents and reports.

Individual documents from the International Law Commission carry the following symbols:

A/ General Assembly

-/CN.4 Commission no. 4 = International Law Commission

-/sequential number

Ex. A/CN.4/L.622 General Assembly, Commission no. 4, limited distribution (Limited), dokument 622.

• Summary records of meetings are posted at International Law Commission, Sessions under the symbol A/CN.4/SR.sequential number.
• Annual reports of the International Law Commission are published in the series General Assembly. Official Records. Supplement No. 10, under symbol A/session number/10.
• The Yearbook of the International Law Commission contains summary records of meetings for a given year and texts of the draft articles prepared by the Commission.
• The Analytical Guide to the Work of the International Law Commission, 1949-1997 allows researchers to trace the Commission's work on a particular international law issue.

• UN Charter in Swedish | in English
• UN System Chart
• Yearbook of the United Nations
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Swedish | in English
• Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action
• Statue of the International Court of Justice

• United Nations Digital Library offers UN documents and open access publications, UN voting data and speeches, UN maps, Content in 6+ languages. Replaces the traditional online catalogue UNBISnet.
• UN iLibrary UN publications online covering different topics.
• ODS full-text UN documents published from 1993 onward and scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993 in the official languages of the UN.
• Daily list of documents (ODS). Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
• UNBIS Thesaurus a multilingual database of the controlled vocabulary used to describe UN documents.
• Index to proceedings is an annual bibliographic guide to the proceedings and documentation of the major UN organs. The index includes:
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  • a comprehensive subject index
  • an index to speeches
  • a voting chart of resolutions
• United Nations Documents Index (United Nations Digital Library) References to all documents by subject area are published. A collection of indexes is held by the Dag Hammarskjöld and Law Library, Uppsala, and the Libraries at UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.