Crime prevention
Crime prevention and criminal justice issues have been a concern of the United Nations since its early days. Recent decades have seen the widespread appearance and growth of transnational organized crime and there is therefore an increasing need for international cooperation to address this problem.
Crime prevention work of the UN
The United Nations works to set standards for fair and efficient criminal justice systems and to prevent criminal acts in a range of ways. The UN monitors
- transnational organized crime
- rights of offenders and their victims
- trafficking
- corruption
- cybercrime
- illicit drugs
- arms trade
- international terrorism.
UNODC
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, (UNODC) coordinates the UN work with drugs and crime issues.
ECOSOC Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice
The ECOSOC Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice
functions as an advisory body to the General Assembly and other UN entities. The Commission assists in the preparations of the UN Crime Conferences held every five years.
UNICRI
The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) conducts research and provides technical assistance, documentation and information.
More on UN and crime prevention
- The World Criminological Directory, published by UNICRI, contains almost 500 institutes worldwide working within the field of crime prevention.
- TRACK - Tools and Resources for Anti-Corruption Knowledge UNODC's central platform of tools and resources for anti-corruption knowledge.
- Legal Library. Legislation and information on the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).
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. 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 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.