UN Travaux Préparatoires

An independent research resource for reading how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two International Covenants were drafted: the UN's own meeting records, split into speeches, each with its speaker, delegation, date, the article under discussion and the page of the UN record beside it. The UN document, linked from every passage, remains the authority.

What it does

• Searches every speech, chair turn and vote of the Commission on Human Rights, the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly’s Third Committee, 1946–66, by word, phrase, speaker, delegation, article or session.
• Follows each article through the drafting: its drafts at every stage, the meetings that debated it, its amendments and votes.
• Ask (experimental) takes a question in a sentence and returns the passages closest to it in meaning, even when they use other words.
• Check holds the citations in your own text against the records: the document, the page or paragraph, the delegate named and the quotation.
• Gives every passage its UN symbol and page or paragraph pinpoint, a citation in UN, Bluebook or OSCOLA style, and a link to the UN copy.

How far to trust it

The text is machine-read from scans of 1946–66, and the speakers, speech boundaries and article tags are made by machine; every change to the data was measured on a blind sample before it was kept, and the database’s About page gives each figure (speakers 98% right on the page images, article tags about 95%) and lists the mistakes found. Summary records paraphrase the delegates; check the UN copy before quoting.

Data and citation

Cite the UN document by symbol and pinpoint for anything you quote (e.g. E/CN.4/SR.60, p. 10 (Malik, Lebanon)), and the database itself as: Szoszkiewicz, Ł. (2026). UN Travaux Préparatoires [Database]. Adam Mickiewicz University. The additions (division into speeches, speakers, delegations, article tags, decisions) are released under CC BY-NC 4.0; the UN documents stay under the UN’s terms.