Human settlements
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme - UN-Habitat is the leading agency within the United Nations for coordinating activities in the field of human settlements.
UN declarations on human settlement
The United Nations has adopted declarations linking the concept of human settlements to social, economic and physical aspects of development. In the declarations, the following is central to the mandate of United Nations Human settlements programme:
- The right to adequate shelter.
- Priority must be given to the needs of the most disadvantaged people.
Functions of the UN-Habitat
The UN-Habitat operates at many levels through
- knowledge management and reporting
- advocacy of norms
- technical cooperation
- innovative financing for the implementation of the Habitat Agenda.
More on UN and human settlements
- UN-Habitat.: Background information, news and documents and reports.
- A main objective of the UN-Habitat mandate is the promotion of the principles set fourth by the United Nations Conferences on Human Settlements.
- Istanbul +5. The General Assembly held a Special Session for an overall review and appraisal of the implementation of the Habitat Agenda, 6-8 June 2001.
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.