UN tribunals

The United Nations has established international tribunals designed to bring to justice the instigators and perpetrators associated with wartime atrocities:

  1. the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
  2. the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)
  3. Sierra Leone - Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)
  4. Lebanon - Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL)
  5. Cambodia - Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)
  6. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) or the 'Mechanism' took over functions from the ICTY and the ICTR.

Functions of the tribunals

The tribunals have been established by Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. They have a threefold function:

  1. To do justice.
  2. To deter further crimes.
  3. To contribute to the restoration and maintenance of international peace.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia is a national court, established as part of an agreement between the United Nations and Cambodia.

See also DagDok:

UN documents and publications in catalogues and databases

  • 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:
    • a list of all documents
    • 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.
Last modified: 2023-03-20
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