How to Find UN Documents

This blog post results from the discovery of the following search through Google.ca: A/64/439/Add.2 (Part II), proj. de rés. XV someone at the Canada Council for the Arts inquired about a United Nations document. The link to the Crusaders Armory blogspot was near the bottom of the first page of results. It is safe to assume that the searcher went through several other results before visiting my blog.

Many, if not most UN documents contain references to other UN documents. Tracking down those references can be extremely difficult unless you have the right search engine. Most of the search engine results will be to documents which reference the one you seek, few if any of them will provide a link to the desired document.

United Nations Publications has several interesting categories to check and a search window at the top of the page. That search produced irrelevant results. It did, however, display a link to another General Assembly Document Search. which produced a report declaring that there is no matching document.


By removing the suffix from the search term, I got this result, a 151 page pdf. file; a report on the Third Committee's Human Rights Protection & Promotion efforts.

If you can not find the document you need with that search engine, and it is directly related to human rights, there is another search engine you can tap. It is not my first choice because its output is in the form of a multi page table of descriptions and links. If you have the document symbol, try using it first to narrow the search results.


I recently discovered this resource: United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library which offers a wide variety of search categories but requires omission of all punctuation from the search phrase. I was not able to find the Third Cmte. report there. By back checking the link to the main library, I discovered a new resource: UN Pulse, which alerts users to newly released documents. This may prove to be an extremely valuable resource for those who are interested in specific issues before UN bodies.

Someone jumped the gun with the link to UN Pulse. The page is blank; there is nothing within the body tags. I will check it periodically and issue a new post about it after it goes live.