UNESCO
The Constitution of UNESCO - United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was signed at a conference in London in 1945 and the organization became an agency of the United Nations in 1946. UNESCO is based in Paris, with over 50 field offices and several institutes and offices around the world.
Activities
UNESCO's purpose is to contribute to peace by promoting collaboration among nations through
- education
- science
- culture
- communication and information.
UNESCO has developed a wide range of programmes and activities, including
- literacy campaigns
- educational projects
- protection of the world heritage
- promotion of cultural policies and new information technologies
- support of sustainable human development.
UNESCO functions as an intellectual forum for a global exchange of ideas and knowledge. UNESCO:
- organizes meetings and conferences
- undertakes studies and research
- develops guidelines, standards and legal instruments.
Structure
The Executive Board supervises the implementation of the decisions taken by the General Conference. It also examines the programme and budget. UNESCO is the only UN agency with a system of National Commissions in 194 Member and Associate States.
More on UNESCO
- The UNESCO website provides multilingual information about the structure of the Organization, programmes and activities, news, statistics and analysis, publications, full text documents and reports, conventions and recommendations.
- Legal Texts, Full text conventions, resolutions, declarations and other standard-settings instruments.
- The UNESCO World Heritage List.
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics compiles internationally comparable statistics on topics within the field of interest to UNESCO.
- UNESCO Publications
- The UNESCO Courier is published monthly with a timely theme of concern to the Organization.
- World Heritage provides articles on World Heritage.
- World Heritage Newsletter gives up-to-date accounts of issues facing World Heritage.
- Resources, documents, forms, and tools necessary for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention.
- UNESDOC/UNESCO Digital Library provides bibliographic records and full text of UNESCO documents, publications and periodicals.
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.