Reports and exchange letters
Reports and letters are means of communicaton within the UN system. These documents often provide an overview and background to an action of a certain conflict situation.
The Security Council annual report
The Security Council annual report to the General Assembly provides an overview of the organization and the activities of the Council.
The report covers all issues considered by the Security Council and its subsidiary organs during the reporting period. It also contains
- matters not dealt with in the official meetings
- lists of documents issued by the Council.
The Security Council annual report (supplement) to the General Assembly have the following documentary symbol:
A/ General Assembly |
-/session number |
2/current number |
Ex. A/68/2 General Assembly, 68th session, no 2 = Report of the Security Council (for the year 2012-2013) |
- The annual report is published as no 2 in the series Supplements to the Official Records of the General Assembly.
- The Security Council annual reports from 1946-.
- UN Documentation : Security Council reports. Research guide by Dag Hammarskjöld Library, New York.
The Secretary-General reports to the Security Council
The Secretary-General and his staff of experts submit reports to the Security Council on issues called for by resolutions. Through these reports the Security Council obtains background information, analysis and recommendations for further action.
- The reports of the Secretary-General to the Security Council are issued as individual documents.
- For the period 1946-1992 the reports in print are included in the UN Collection of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library, Uppsala.
- Guides and tutorials by the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library, New York:
- Tutorial: Find Reports
- Research guide: Reports
Exchange letters of the President of the Security Council
In the exchange of letters between the Secretary-General and the President of the Security Council you can find the background information on issues brought before the Security Council. Here the Secretary-General may notify the Security Council on a certain conflict situation and in his answer, the President of the Security Council gives a short summary of the actions by the Council. Relevant reports and studies are often included as attachments.
- Exchange of letters between the Secretary-General and the President of the Security Council. The letters are issued as individual documents published electronically for recent years at the Security Council website.
- Letters in print for the years 1946-1992 are available through the UN collection of the Dag Hammarskjöld and the Law Library, Uppsala, and in the libraries at UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.
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.