The United Nations Documents Index covers documents and publications issued by the United Nations offices worldwide. The publication indexes a wide variety of documentation such as major reports and studies, resolutions and decisions, draft resolutions and meeting records, including documents of restricted distribution. The information in this publication is arranged in the following nine sections: documents and publications; official records; sales publications; United Nations maps included in UN documents; United Nations sheet maps; United Nations document series symbols; author index; title index and subject index.

A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents – a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.

An analysis of the UN human rights treaty bodies, their methods of interpretation, their effectiveness and issues of legitimacy.