Documents of the Commission may be missing from this web site for the following reasons:

• In the case of documents issued in mimeograph format in earlier years, only those that were subsequently reproduced in the Yearbook of the International Law Commission have been made available. Where hard copies of the individual documents not in the Yearbook still exist, attempts have been made to also have those scanned and placed on this site to provide as complete a collection as possible;
• Up until 1955 documents were issued in the original language of submission, meaning that the other linguistic versions were not always produced, i.e. some documents were only available in English or in French or in Spanish;
• In some cases, documents have deliberately been excluded from this site; these include draft documents such as the draft report of the International Law Commission, which serves as the basis upon which the Commission adopts its annual report, and which, accordingly, is superceded as soon as the final version is adopted;
• In connection with more recent documentation (post-1995), where a Yearbook of the International Law Commission volume does not yet exist, links are provided to the version available on the United Nations Optical Disk System, i.e. the version which the Commission itself considered (and not the final edited version to be included in a Yearbook); in some cases such documents (or particularly language versions thereof) are not available on that System, for technical reasons.