Feedback: Campaign to put UN documents on Internet

TABITHA Powledge is enthusiastic about being able to download Aesop's Fables and The Joys of being a Woman, but the Internet can surely do more than simply replicate the facilities of a good library. It should make available documents which are not readily accessible, or which arrive in bigger libraries too late to be useful.

I am trying to persuade the UN to put all their documentation on the Internet. Security Council Resolutions, reports by the Secretary-General, and the reports published by the UN Human Rights Centre in Geneva sometimes take weeks to reach even the Foreign Office, let alone the Libraries of the Houses of Parliament. If all these and other documents published by the UN were offered on the Internet, it would be enormously useful to NGOs and particularly human rights organisations.

The first step is to persuade the Foreign Office to take this idea seriously.

(Lord) Eric Avebury

Chairman, Parliamentary Human Rights Group

Compuserve 100275,1565; Internet phrg@demon. co. uk