International court of justice - ICJ
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. All members of the United Nations are automatically parties to the ICJ.
Function of the International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice has a twofold function:
- the settlement of disputes between states, not individuals, on the basis of international law.
- the delivery of advisory opinions on legal questions at the request of specifically authorized international organs.
Members of the ICJ
The Court can only deal with a dispute when the States concerned have recognized its jurisdiction. All UN member states are parties to the ICJ. A state that is not a UN member may, however, also join the Court on conditions determined by the General Assembly.
More on the International Court of Justice
- International Court of Justice: Basic Toolkit, a multimedia product that aims to familiarize the general public with the history, role and functioning of the Court by providing basic information and links to practical resource.
- International Court of Justice and its documentation.
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. UN official documents and open access publications, UN maps, UN voting data and speeches.
- UN iLibrary. UN publications online covering different topics.
- ODS (Official Document System) is an full-text database of UN documents published since 1993, including digitized documents published between 1946 and 1993.
- Daily list of documents. Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
- UNBIS Thesaurus is 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 (in 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, Sweden and the UN Library in New York and the UN library in Geneva.