May, 2003
Basic Facts: The Official Documents System (ODS) stores digitally all United Nations documents in all six official languages. Most of these documents are not available on the UN web site and they may be difficult to obtain as print copies, especially for NGOs without representative offices at UN official sites. Accessible to the Secretariat through a local area network since 1993, the ODS has also been available to missions and member governments since late 1996 through a restricted web portal. Since 1997, NGOs have been able to access ODS only by paying a large annual subscription fee.
After a software upgrade for the system, the UN planned to make the ODS available without charge worldwide in 2002. However, budget cuts by member states in December 2001 eliminated the $1.5 million UN investment in computer servers necessary to begin the service. NGOs are now campaigning to insure this sum in the 2004-2005 biennial UN budget. Because there are so many claims on the UN's small budget, vigorous NGO lobbying will be required to insure the item will be included this time. The Fifth (Budget) Committee of the General Assembly will make the decision in December, 2003.
Further Details: The ODS stores all official documents from 1993 to the present and it also includes selective documents from earlier periods, including resolutions of UN bodies going back to 1945. Only an estimated 10% of the documents in the ODS are available on the UN web site.
The UN set the ODS fee for NGO subscribers at a high rate and it is now $1,125 per year. NGOs have always felt that this charge is inappropriate and highly discriminatory against those with low budgets, especially NGOs from developing countries.
In April 1997, twelve leading NGOs sent a memo to the Secretary General, asking that the system be made available for free to all accredited NGOs. The NGOs put forward many arguments in favor of free service. They pointed out, among other things, that while some claimed that such service would be "too expensive," in fact the UN's cost of providing this service would be considerably less than the cost of printing the documents and distributing them worldwide.
Recent Developments: In the late ‘90's, the UN's Information Technology office reprogrammed the ODS, making it much faster, more searchable and more user-friendly. During the 3-year reprogramming, software engineers designed the new ODS for fully "open access," multi-lingual use, so that anyone around the world could access it via a web interface. The software was ready by 2001. The UN plan called for installation of the new servers to accommodate increased use with global open-access in 2002. The 2002-2003 UN biennial budget was to take care of the costs, budgeted at $1.5 million.
In mid-December 2002, during the final biennial budget negotiations in the Fifth Committee, delegates cut the IT budget deeply in the process of pruning the overall UN budget. Today, NGOs must persuade member states to support the $1.5 million server investment in the 2004-2005 biennial budget. Secretariat staff have included the sum in the 2004-2005 budget draft. It is now up to delegations to keep it there.
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