Meeting records
The General Assembly annual session usually begins on the third Tuesday in September. The session is suspended in mid-December and is resumed as needed in the following year.
Some issues are considered only in plenary meetings, while others are allocated to one of the six main committees. Elections of members to the Councils are always held in plenary. When it concerns other issues, the Assembly will decide if there are practical or political reasons for discussions in plenary.
Find meeting records
Statements made during UN meetings may be issued as documents called meeting records.
Verbatim records of the plenary meetings of the General Assembly are records with full, first-person account of the meeting. It is possible to follow the debates of the General Assembly plenary meetings through the verbatim records.
The General Assembly meeting records carry the following document symbols:
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A/ General Assembly |
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-/PV Verbatim Records of meetings = proces-verbaux |
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-/session number |
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-/consecutive number |
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A/55/PV.12 = the 12th meeting of the General Assembly 55th session |
- The press releases is an alternative source of information, giving a brief and concise - but unofficial - version of the meetings.
- Journal of the United Nations lists forthcoming meetings and agendas.
- Research guides by Dag Hammarskjöld Library, New York:
Key UN documents
- 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
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.
- All UN documents from 1993-.
- All resolutions of the Principal Organs from 1946-.
- All Security Council plenary documents from 1946- in English, French and Spanish.
- All supplements to the General Assembly Official Records (GAOR) from 1946-.
- All General Assembly plenary meeting records from 1946- in English, French and Spanish.
- Older documents are being scanned: Update on UN Digitization Programme.