By Otto Spijkers

Today, the United Nations will launch a new website, the Audiovisual Library of International Law. It is made essentially by the Codification Division of the Office of Legal Affairs. This is how the UN presents this new project:  

The Audiovisual Library of International Law consists of three main components:

1. the Lecture Series provides lectures by eminent international law scholars and practitioners from different countries on virtually every subject of international law;
2. the Historic Archives contains introductory notes prepared by internationally recognized experts, audiovisual materials recording the history of the negotiation and adoption of significant legal instruments (e.g., the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, and the Law of the Sea Convention), the procedural history as well as the text of the legal instruments and other key documents; and
3. the Research Library provides an extensive on-line library of international law materials, including treaties, jurisprudence, United Nations documents, yearbooks and legal publications as well as scholarly writings provided by HeinOnLine.

All this will be available – for free – at http://www.un.org/law/avl/.