Intergovernmental Organizations are entities that generally create, administer, and enforce international agreements. Their members are governments. They will link to much of the basic law that you need. Notice that in addition to the texts of agreements, they often have links to related national laws, the texts of case decisions, and data compiled from separate governments. Like NGO's, they also provide good factual information in the form of statistical reports and narrative analysis.
Here are links to the IGOs most commonly researched by students in our seminars:
Here are more complete lists of intergovernmental organizations:
Northwestern University's links to IGO's (alphabetical order)
The World Legal Information Institute's list (options to search by country, subject or alphabet)
The biggest IGO is the United Nations. UN Legal publications are all available from one page. You can search for information produced by a particular division of U.N. or peruse the UN digital library according to document type, subject, keyword, author, title, etc...The Official Documents System has proceedings, resolutions, and other parliamentary kinds of publications, but not treaties or press releases. U.N. treaties are available via the Barco Law Library's subscription to the U.N. Treaty Collection.
Non-governmental organizations generally have no legal power; they do not sign treaties, decide disputes, or enforce international law. Their members may be private individuals, businesses, or non-profit groups, but not governments. Their involvement with international law is typically information-based. NGOs observe issues, report on issues, analyze government involvement, recommend changes in laws, archive information on topics of significance to their organization, and provide references to resources compiled by others involved with their interests.
NGOs are important sources of information because they are committed to causes that help people, because they operate with relatively little money and tend to work efficiently, because they are directly involved with people who suffer from problems rather than just the government representatives, and because they report their findings for the purpose of enlightening all people rather than just satisfying a political agenda. Typically, NGO Web sites make most of their information available for free although they sometimes have to sell copies of their biggest research reports to raise money for future research. When you are using an NGO Web site to get facts for use in a law project, look for links with titles like "studies," "publications, "data," and "our work."
Electronic Information System for International Law (under revision 2021)
Duke University's NGO list in issue order
The University's electronic subscriptions to the Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) and Policy File have a tremendous wealth of policy-related scholarly writing that involves the work of non-governmental organizations.