About Where Countries Stand

Where Countries Stand prepares short, balanced briefings on what countries have said at the United Nations, and how they have voted. Every point quotes the UN’s own verbatim record and links to it. If the record holds nothing relevant, it says “No records found” rather than guessing.

The record

The Security Council. Its debates from 1992, from the UN Security Council Debates corpus (Schoenfeld and others, CC0) to the end of 2023, and from the UN’s verbatim records (S/PV) since, checked for new meetings twice a day.

The General Assembly’s General Debate. Every country’s annual statement, from the UN General Debate Corpus (Jankin, Baturo and Dasandi, CC0) and, for recent sessions, the General Assembly’s verbatim records (A/…/PV). Until a session’s record is published, about a year after the debate, statements come from the UN’s General Debate website, and are marked as not yet the official record. Rights of reply are included as records of their own.

General Assembly votes. Every recorded vote since 1946, from the UN Digital Library.

How a briefing is made

The question is read for its subject, dates, countries and groups, shown as filters above each briefing. The record is searched by keyword and by meaning; statements by heads of State or Government and ministers carry a little more weight, and recent statements more than old ones. Countries are grouped by their memberships on the date. An AI model then writes the briefing from those sources only, and every sentence is checked against them: unsourced connecting sentences are shown in grey, quotations not found word for word are marked, and judgemental words in the model’s own voice are underlined.

Impartiality

Briefings describe positions; they do not take them. The site’s own voice does not use labels such as “regime” or “rogue state”. Statements made on behalf of a group are attributed to the group. Countries are named as the UN names them.

Licences

The code is open source (AGPL-3.0). Briefing text is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0, because the UN’s own terms for its documents are non-commercial, with attribution. The two corpora are CC0.