Frontline Defenders Handbook for Human Rights Defenders

The first thing to say about the United Nations is that it is a large and complex institution. It is difficult to generalise in precise terms about how the UN is organised in different countries, let alone describe how UN institutions interact with one another or are coordinated regionally and globally. Always in transformation, the system is regularly re-structured from the centre and, at its edges and inside its different institutions, at any one time these change processes are unevenly integrated. Even within the UN, relatively few officials understand clearly and in detail how the UN system works ? or should work ? as a whole.