International Organisations and Headquarters: Full List

Every competitive paper carries one or two questions that simply ask where an organisation sits or when it was born. The facts do not change, so this is among the safest marks in the general awareness section. The trick is to group the organisations by the city they work from, because a single city usually holds several of them, and then to attach the founding year and the one job each body is known for.

The United Nations and its principal organs

The United Nations came into existence on 24 October 1945, after the Charter signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945 was ratified by the required states, and that day is observed as United Nations Day. Its headquarters is in New York. The Charter created six principal organs: the General Assembly, where every member has one vote; the Security Council, with fifteen members, of whom five are permanent, namely China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, each holding a veto, and ten elected for two-year terms; the Economic and Social Council; the Secretariat, headed by the Secretary-General; the Trusteeship Council, whose work was suspended in 1994; and the International Court of Justice, which alone sits outside New York, at The Hague in the Netherlands. The Organisation works in six official languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, so German is the standard wrong option in this question. Trygve Lie of Norway was the first Secretary-General.

Specialised agencies and where they work

Three points from this table are asked again and again. The ILO was set up in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles, long before the UN itself, and became the first specialised agency associated with it; it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. World Health Day is observed on 7 April because the WHO constitution came into force on that date in 1948. Rome is the food city, holding the FAO, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Financial and economic bodies

The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 in New Hampshire in the United States produced two institutions, the International Monetary Fund, which watches over exchange rates and lends to countries in balance of payments trouble, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the core of the World Bank Group, which lends for development projects. Both work from Washington DC. The World Trade Organization, in Geneva, began on 1 January 1995 and replaced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Asian Development Bank, founded in 1966, has its headquarters at Manila in the Philippines; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is at Beijing and the New Development Bank of the BRICS countries at Shanghai. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, formed at Baghdad in 1960, works from Vienna, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development from Paris, as does the Financial Action Task Force. The Bank for International Settlements, the bank of central banks, is at Basel in Switzerland.

Regional groups and other bodies

• SAARC was founded by the Dhaka declaration of 1985 and its secretariat is at Kathmandu; BIMSTEC has its secretariat at Dhaka.
• ASEAN was created by the Bangkok Declaration of 1967 and works from Jakarta.
• NATO, formed in 1949, and the European Union both have their headquarters at Brussels; the Commonwealth Secretariat is at Marlborough House in London.
• The African Union sits at Addis Ababa, the Arab League at Cairo and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at Jeddah.
• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, formed in 2001, has its secretariat at Beijing, and India became a full member in 2017.
• Interpol works from Lyon in France, the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in 1863 on the initiative of Henry Dunant, from Geneva, Amnesty International from London and Transparency International, which publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index, from Berlin.
• Geneva also holds the World Economic Forum, whose annual meeting is held at Davos, CERN and the International Organization for Standardization.

How to remember it

Learn the cities rather than the bodies. Geneva holds the WHO, ILO, WTO, UNCTAD, WIPO, WMO, UNHCR, ICRC and the Red Cross movement. Vienna holds the IAEA, UNIDO and OPEC. The Hague holds the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the OPCW. Rome holds the three food bodies and Nairobi the UN environment programme, the only major UN headquarters in Africa. Once the city groups are fixed, the odd ones out, Montreal for civil aviation, Bern for post, London for shipping and Lyon for police cooperation, are easy to add.