Population issues
The population issues are linked to demographic, economic and social development and have always been a matter of concern to the United Nations. As a result, there are numerous UN bodies, funds and programmes involved in population activities.
United Nations Population Division
The United Nations Population Division within the UN Secretariat serves as an administrative centre. It provides support and service, and facilitates access to information. It also enhances coordination and cooperation among UN and international, regional and national organizations active in the field of population.
United Nations Population Commission
The United Nations Population Commission was set up in 1946 as the world's first international body to deal with population problems. It was renamed in 1994 as the Commission on Population and Development (CPD). It is a functional commission to ECOSOC, advising the Council and performing studies. The Commission also monitors and reviews the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International Coference on Population and Development.
United Nations Population Agency
Starting in 1966, the UN has been providing technical assistance to countries wishing to implement a new population policy. The United Nations Population Agency (UNFPA) was created to enable the UN to better respond to the needs in the area of population activities.
More on UN and population issues
- UN DESA - Population division.
- The database World Population Prospects: Population Database provides global population statistics.
World Population Conferences
The United Nations has organized three World Population Conferences:
- World Population Conference, 19-30 August 1974, Bucharest;
- International Conference on Population, 6-14 August 1984, Mexico City;
- The United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 5-13 September 1994, Cairo.
The official documents from the conferences carry the following symbols:
A/CONF.80 | United Nations Population Conference (Bucharest : 1974) |
E/CONF.76 | International Conference on Population (Mexico City : 1984) |
A/CONF.171 | International conference on Population and Development (Cairo : 1994) |
- The General Assembly 21st special session was convened in 1999 to review and appraise the implementation of the Programme of Action, adopted at the 1994 Conference.
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.