UNHCR
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR gives protection and support to refugees globally. Established in 1950, it is one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world. It is headquartered in Geneva, with regional offices in over 120 countries. More than 80 percent of the agency's staff work in the field.
Mandate of the High Commissioner
The UNHCR is mandated by its Statute and guided by the definitions of the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol. Its mandate has, however, gradually been expanded to include protecting and providing humanitarian assistance to other persons of concern, including internally displaced persons. The UNHCR seeks lasting solutions by assisting refugees to return to their own country and integrate locally, or resettle in another country.
UNHCR Northern Europe
UNHCR Northern Europe. UNHCR’s activities in the Northern Europe region are currently overseen by the UNHCR Regional Representation for Northern Europe located in Stockholm, Sweden, in addition to the UNHCR Regional Liaison Office, Vilnius, Lithuania.
More on UNHCR
The UNHCR website provides background information, news, full text documents, reports and statistics.
The 1951 Geneva Convention with the 1967 Protocol is issued in several versions:
- Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
- The 1951 Refugee Convention with the 1967 protocol. See the UNHCR website for the convention and its protocol. There you can also access information about signatures, ratifications, reservations and preparatory work, the so called Travaux préparatoires.
- UNHCR publications and resources on refugee related issues, such as:
- UNHCR Global Report. An annual survey of the activities of UNHCR.
- UNHCR data and statistics.
- UNHCR Figures at a glance
- UNHCR Refugee Data Finder.
- RefWorld, UNHCR's database for refugee information. Contents:
- Full text documents
- Country information, such as country reports and profiles, news and maps
- International and national law related to refugees
- Refugee case law
- Statistics
- References to book, articles and conference papers.
- Official Records of the General Assembly. No. 12. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees submits an annual report to the General Assembly in this documentary series.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 1981 and 1954.
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.