Review of United Nations Information Resources

Review-2001/12 -  UNTC - The United Nations Treaty Collection - Courtesy: United Nations Office of Legal Affairs. Treaty Section

Type, size and coverage dates:

The United Nations Treaty Collection Database is an online full-text collection of UN's treaty-related data. This on-line service offers access to over 40,000 treaties and international agreements. It contains:

  1. All multilateral treaties deposited with the Secretary- General of the United Nations and those formerly deposited with the League of Nations - their latest status and a link to the full texts.
  2. Bilateral and multilateral treaties registered with and published by the United Nations Secretariat in accordance with Article 102 up to a certain date - Detailed treaty references and full texts in all authentic language(s).
  3. Recently Deposited Multilateral Treaties that have been deposited but not yet published - available for viewing and downloading in some or all of their authentic languages.

Sources of Information:

Under Article 102 of the Charter of the United Nations, "Every treaty and every international agreement entered into by any Member of the United Nations after the present Charter comes into force shall as soon as possible be registered with the Secretariat and published by it". The collection contains all such documents deposited to the UN Treaty Section.

Type of literature:

This collection includes six categories of treaty-related data:

  1. Status of Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General
  2. The United Nations Treaty Series
  3. Texts of Recently Deposited Multilateral Treaties
  4. Photographs of Treaty Signature Ceremonies
  5. Titles of the Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General in the UN official languages
  6. Summary of Practice of the Secretary-General as Depositary of Multilateral Treaties

Target users and use:

The UNTC Database is directly useful for the Permanent Missions to the United Nations, Government Offices, NGOs, UN staff, UN Agencies, Individuals and Institutions all over the world.

Government departments of Member States and UN staff at duty stations may also be frequent users of this database.

Availability and Updates:

The United Nations Treaty Collection - UNTC, is available on the Internet through the world-wide web at the URL: http://untreaty.un.org/. The Database has been prepared and updated regularly, by the Treaty Section of the Office of Legal Affairs of the United Nations.

Access:

Access to the United Nations Treaty Collection is available online through Internet on subscription. In keeping with the expressed wishes of the Member States of the United Nations, a mechanism for charging a fee for access to the UN Treaty Collection Web site has been put in place.

Permanent Missions to the United Nations, Government Offices, NGOs, UN staff, UN Agencies, Individuals and Institutions within Developing Countries receive free access.

Government departments of Member States too may have free access through usernames and passwords allocated to them (Member States will exercise their discretion in the distribution of these usernames/passwords). Free access is available to all UN staff at duty stations.

The Subscribers have a choice of accessing the United Nations Treaty Collection through the Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses (up to 10) or a User Name and Password.

The United Nations Common Library in Islamabad has obtained an IP access and is now connected to the UNTC Database.

Please visit the UN Common Library, to consult the UNTC Database and online retrieval of any UN treaty-related data through our Free Internet Access Terminals. Otherwise, please feel free to use Ask UNCOL, our phone / email-based remote reference service to make database searches for you for the document/s you need and send the search results or document/s to you by return email. The documents may be printed, downloaded on Floppy discs or saved and delivered electronically to an e-mail address as an attachment.

UNTC has been made available to the UN Common Library for free public use by the courtesy of Dag Hammarskjöld Library, UN Head Quarters, in New York.