Commission on the Status of Women
The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) was established by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 1946. Its purpose is to prepare reports and to make recommendations to ECOSOC on promoting women's rights in a broad range of fields, as well as to develop recommendations and proposals for action on urgent problems.
As far back as 1945, in the Preamble of the UN Charter, the principle of equality between men and women was reaffirmed. Members of the Commission are 45 government experts chosen according to a geographical representation. They meet in regular sessions once a year.
The Commission has organized the World Conferences on Women and has been mandated to review and appraise the outcome of these conferences, assessing and advancing their implementation.
More on UN and the Commission on the Status of Women
The individual documents from the Commission on the Status of Women carry the following symbols:
E/ Economic and Social Council |
-/CN.6 Commission number 6 = Commission on the Status of Women |
-/year |
-/current number |
Ex. E/CN.6/2000/3 Economic and Social Council, Commission on the Status of Women, year 2000, document 3 |
- Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) web site. Information about the structure and work of the Commission and full text documents and reports, from 1992-.
- The Commission submits an annual report to the ECOSOC in the documentary series Supplements to the Official Records of the Economic and Social Council with the symbol pattern: E/CN.6/YEAR/No.
- Supplements are posted as 'Reports' at the ECOSOC website.
- UN Library research guide : Gender and the UN commission on the status of women (CSW)
- Ask Dag! : Where can I fin information about the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)? FAQ by Dag Hammarskjöld Library, New York.
- UN Library Geneva Research Guide: Women and Gender Equality.
- SDG Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
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.