Yearbooks of International Organizations

If you are looking for information about an international organization, institute, or court, look to see if they put out a yearbook (annuaire in French, anuario in Spanish), and if they do, whether or not we have it in our collection.  We do subscribe to a fair number of them, e.g. the Yearbook of the International Court of Justice, Annuaire Europeen/European Yearbook (the yearbook of the Counsel of Europe), and there are a number of others to which we do not currently subscribe, but we do have back issues, e.g. Anuario Interamericano de Derechos Humanos (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights), Yearbook of the International Institute of Humanitarian Law. 

These annual publications:

• give you easy access to key documents of the organization;
• provide contact information for personnel and offices;
• explain the mission and give overviews of activities during the relevant year;
• provide statistics in some cases; and
• sometimes contain substantive articles by legal scholars.

They can be useful starting places in your search to understand the workings of an international entity or to locate a particular person or publication.

Sarah E. Cox