UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

UN report finds — UN reports are not widely read

A United Nations report seeking ways to improve efficiency and cut costs has revealed: U.N. reports are not widely read.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres briefed countries on Friday on the report, produced by his UN80 reform that focused on how U.N. staff implement thousands of mandates given to them by bodies like the General Assembly or Security Council.

He said last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100 reports, a 20% increase since 1990.


An outsider is bound to suspect that UN reports are not compiled to be widely read. The U.N. secretariat doesn't necessarily expect anyone at all to read those 1,100 reports once they have been issued. The function of a bureaucracy is to produce reports, not necessarily reports which are widely read, or even read at all.

Even if they haven't been read, those U.N. reports are available to be referred to in the future, to preload debates should the need arise.