UNISPAL — The Question of Palestine Documents Collection

UNISPAL is the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, maintained by the Division for Palestinian Rights, and it is the closest thing that exists to an authoritative, freely accessible, chronological document base for the diplomatic history of Palestine. It carries the history of how the question came before the United Nations after the Second World War, the mandate and background of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the International Court of Justice cases, and the study on the legality of the Israeli occupation.

Its structural value is the indexing by organ. Resolutions are separated into General Assembly, Security Council, Human Rights Council and Economic and Social Council series, which is how anyone arguing about international law actually needs them — the distinction between what the Assembly has resolved and what the Council has resolved is the distinction the argument usually turns on. Alongside the resolutions sit the studies prepared for the Committee, the Monthly Bulletin of UN Actions, NGO Action News, and the daily flow of briefings, press releases and reports from the UN system.

The less obvious use is the one that matters most to Palestinian researchers. Because member states and the PLO transmit documents to the Secretary-General for circulation, UNISPAL holds authoritative English texts of Palestinian documents that are otherwise hard to source. The full text of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988 is there — together with the Palestine National Council’s Political Communiqué from the same Algiers session and the covering letters from Riyad Mansour and the Permanent Representative of Jordan — because the PLO asked for it to be circulated as an official document of the General Assembly and the Security Council. That is why the definitive English text of the founding statement of the State of Palestine sits on a United Nations server rather than a Palestinian one, and it is worth noticing why.

Practical notes. UNISPAL’s URLs have been migrated more than once and many older citations in the literature point at dead domino.un.org addresses; the current form is un.org/unispal/document/. Full-text search across the collection is weak, so it is usually faster to find a document’s UN symbol elsewhere and then search for that. And UNISPAL is a UN system, with the framings that implies — it is a document repository, not a Palestinian narrative source, and it should be used for texts rather than for interpretation.

Sources

• The Question of Palestine — United Nations
• Declaration of the State of Palestine, Palestine National Council, 15 November 1988 — UNISPAL