If you want to know what a particular country said at the UN, the annoying answer is that there is no single "statements by country" page that covers everything. The material exists, but it is spread across the UN Journal, press summaries, official records and the Digital Library, each with its own delay and its own level of reliability. This is the workflow I use, roughly in the order I reach for each source.
Start with the meeting, not the country
Almost every statement at the UN belongs to a specific meeting, so the first job is pinning down which one you mean: body, date, meeting number. Once you have that, the rest gets much easier, because the UN files nearly everything under the meeting's document symbol. If you only know the topic and roughly when it came up, the UN Journal is where you narrow it down.
The UN Journal: schedule, speakers and eStatements
The Journal is the daily programme of meetings at Headquarters (Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna have sections too). For each meeting it shows the room, time and meeting number and, per the Dag Hammarskjöld Library guide, links to webcasts and eStatements since 2022.
A few things worth knowing:
- Speakers lists. Meeting entries often carry notes on the list of speakers: whether inscription is open or closed, time limits, and for some General Assembly meetings a link to a live list. Useful for checking whether a country was even scheduled to speak.
- eStatements. Click the eStatements icon next to a meeting and you get a "Speakers View" listing the delegations that submitted a text, each with a PDF. The file is in whatever language the delegation sent, so expect French, Spanish, Russian or "Multilingual" files next to English ones.
- It's the prepared text. Delegations are asked to send statements in ahead of time (one meeting notice I checked asked for them at least an hour before the meeting). So the PDF shows what they planned to say.
- Coverage is uneven. You'll mostly see eStatements on General Assembly plenary and committee meetings, and not every delegation submits. For the Security Council, lean on the verbatim record.
Also easy to miss: the "Download Meeting Content" block on each meeting page, which bundles documents, statements, records and press coverage when they exist.
Meetings Coverage: fast and readable, not official
UN Meetings Coverage publishes summaries of official meetings at Headquarters, in English and French, usually on the day of the meeting. The format goes speaker by speaker ("the representative of X said..."), mostly paraphrase with the occasional direct quote. If you need to know quickly where a country landed in a debate, this is the fastest route.
Each release ends with the line "For information media. Not an official record." Take that literally. The summaries are good but compressed, and a nuance in the full statement can get flattened into one sentence. Use the release to find the passage, then quote from the record.
UN Transcripts: search the spoken words
UN Transcripts is a newer UN public preview tool that turns Web TV recordings of public meetings into automatic transcripts. For this job, two features matter: it tries to label each speaker with a name and delegation, and its full text search returns the matching statements with a link to the exact moment in the video. That makes it a quick way to find where a country spoke before the verbatim record is out. Per its about page, speaker labels can fall back to "Speaker 1" when it can't tell, and it is not an official record, so treat attribution as a lead, not a fact.
Verbatim and summary records: the version you cite
Statements made in meetings may be issued as meeting records, and there are two kinds, as the UN research guide on meeting records explains:
- Verbatim records: full, first person accounts, with PV in the symbol (S/PV.6826, for example).
- Summary records: condensed, third person accounts, with SR in the symbol (A/C.4/66/SR.10, for example).
Not every meeting gets one. A body is entitled to one type or the other, and some meetings get neither, in which case the press release and sessional reports may be all there is.
Two details catch people out. First, verbatim records come out as provisional versions; delegations can send corrections before the final text goes into the Official Records. Second, the record "contains the text of speeches delivered in English and of the translation of speeches delivered in other languages." If a minister spoke in Arabic, the English verbatim is a translation, so for anything sensitive check the original language version. (More on that in our post on UN official languages and interpretation.)
To pull a record, search by symbol on documents.un.org, the Official Document System, which also supports full text search. For the Council specifically, see our guide to Security Council meeting records.
The Digital Library: speeches and votes by country
The UN Digital Library is where "what did [country] say" becomes a proper search. Its Speeches collection lets you search by speaker or by country or organization, add a keyword, and jump from each hit to the meeting record containing the speech. Per the library's own FAQ, coverage starts in 1964 for the Security Council, 1983 for the General Assembly, 1946 for ECOSOC and 1982 for the Trusteeship Council, and every General Debate speech is included. One catch: the hit points to the full meeting record, so you still have to scroll to your country's turn.
The library also has a Voting Data collection covering adopted General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, member state by member state. Putting a country's speech next to how it voted is often the most revealing part of the exercise, and explanations of vote are usually where the real reasoning sits.
If you'd rather browse than search, UN Member States on the Record gathers links to each country's statements in the General Debate, the General Assembly and its Main Committees, the Security Council and ECOSOC.
The General Debate has its own site
For the big September speeches, go straight to gadebate.un.org. Each speaker gets a page with the statement as a PDF, the video with all available audio tracks, and a short summary. The archive goes back to 2009 and is searchable by session, date and country or speaker.
Per the site's FAQ, rights of reply during the General Debate come at the end of each day, so a country's sharpest words may not be in its main speech at all.
Mission websites and social accounts
Permanent Missions often post their statements on their own websites and social accounts, sometimes within minutes. For remarks at informal meetings or side events that never get a record, this may be the only source. Treat these like eStatements: the prepared version. Speakers up against a time limit skip paragraphs, and the posted text won't tell you which.
Practical tips
- Search by meeting symbol. S/PV. plus the meeting number for the Security Council, A/[session]/PV. plus the number for General Assembly plenaries. Symbols beat keywords almost every time.
- Read to the end. In the General Assembly, rights of reply usually come at the end of the meeting, and that's where exchanges between two delegations get pointed.
- Check group statements. A country may say little in its national capacity because its position went out in a statement on behalf of a group it belongs to. Search for the group as well.
- Compare delivered and written. If wording matters, watch the passage on UN Web TV and compare it with the eStatement or mission text. Cuts and ad libs happen.
| Source | Timing | Official record? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| eStatements (in the Journal) | Day of meeting | No, submitted text | Exact prepared wording |
| Meetings Coverage | Usually same day | No | Quick view of who said what |
| UN Transcripts | After the recording is published | No, automatic | Finding the moment a country spoke |
| Verbatim or summary records | Later | Yes | Quoting and citing |
| Digital Library Speeches | After indexing | Links to records | Searching across years |
| gadebate.un.org | During the debate | PDFs and video | General Debate speeches |
Doing it for a single meeting video
All of the above is thorough, and slow when you need to know where five delegations stood in a debate that ended an hour ago. That's the gap Sumletter is built for.
Paste a UN Web TV meeting URL and Sumletter downloads the video, transcribes it with AI speech recognition and writes an executive summary. On the Professional plan and up you also get a breakdown by country: each delegation's position, main arguments and key statements. You can ask your own questions of the transcript, like "what did Brazil say about financing?", and translate the output into the six UN languages plus Turkish and German. A typical meeting takes roughly 10 to 15 minutes.
Honestly, though, it's AI output, not the official record. It can attribute a remark to the wrong delegation or miss something said in passing. Use it to find the passage, then quote from the verbatim record or the eStatement before you publish. If you want to see how it handles a meeting you already know well, the free trial covers one video with no credit card: sign up here.