Refugees

Founded in 1919 as the Library of the League of Nations, the Library became the UN Library at Geneva when the League’s assets were transferred to the United Nations in 1946.

The Library serves as a central Library for: the United Nations Office at Geneva; the specialized agencies and other intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations headquartered in Geneva; the Permanent Missions in Geneva; interested external students and researchers.

UNOG Library specializes in two major areas:

• It is a complete depository for United Nations documents and publications and it maintains a comprehensive collection of materials of the specialized agencies and the United Nations affiliated bodies.
• It collects books, periodicals and electronic resources to support the programmes and activities of the Organization: international law, international relations, political science, humanitarian affairs, human rights, refugees, disarmament, economic and social development, etc.
• As the former library of the League of Nations, the collections also include some rare materials from the pre-League period.

Highlights of the UNOG Library Collections:

United Nations and Specialized Agencies - The Library houses all United Nations documents and it maintains a comprehensive collection of materials of the specialized agencies and the United Nations affiliated bodies.

Legal and Political Collections - The collections contain books and publications covering international relations and national and international law (dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, yearbooks, law digests, treaty series, law codes, and monographs).

Economic, Social and Statistical Collections - The collections holds books and publications on economic and social topics such as business, finance, trade, transnational corporations, transport, energy, environment, population, status of women, etc. The collections also contain the latest official statistical publications from most countries of the world and from many intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations.

UNHCR/Refugee Studies Collection - In 2008 the UNHCR Library was closed and its entire collection was transferred to UNOG Library. UNOG now offers access to all of these materials and continues to build on this collection, regularly purchasing books and electronic subscriptions that support refugee studies research and the work of UNHCR staff.

Fonds and Collections

Established in 1996, the archive includes material from more than half a century of field operations around the world as well as material from headquarters. It occupies about 10 kilometres of shelving space on two basement floors in Geneva's headquarters. Electronic archives, comprising some 7 million documents, are stored and managed in a handful of dedicated, secure servers.

The collections are globally and historically unique in scope and content. They contain a trove of detail about important historical events, including, for example, records from the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the first major emergency in which we became operational, as well as emergencies in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, and in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. They contain originals, for instance, of the letter sent by the late Tunisian leader, Habib Bourguiba, seeking international help for refugees fleeing the conflict in neighbouring Algeria in 1957 – the first plea to UNHCR for help by a country outside Europe. UNHCR is working to bring more material back from the field and to implement state-of-the-art systems for the preservation of digital materials in order to make them more accessible.

How to Access

• The UNHCR Archives are located in our headquarters at 94 Rue de Montbrillant, CH-1202 Geneva, Switzerland.
• Consult the Research Room Regulations before your visit. For more information, write to us in Geneva or email archives@unhcr.org.

Opening Hours

Research facilities are open Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 13:00.

Fonds and Collections

• League of Nations Secretariat
• Nansen Fonds (Refugees)
• League of Nations External Fonds
• Private Papers (1884-1986)
• International Peace Movements (1870-)
• United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) Archives (including ECE, Human Rights, OCHA, UNCTAD)
• Visual Materials: photographs, caricatures, posters, plans and drawings of the Palais des Nations

League of Nations Research Guide: https://libraryresources.unog.ch/leagueofnationsarchives

How to Access

• The reading room is accessible to external researchers (historians, lawyers, lecturers, students and the general public) upon registration through our online form.
• More information: in French here and in English here

Opening Hours

The reading room is open from Monday to Friday, from 08:30 am to 05:30 pm.