  This paper presents a new dataset containing 65,393 speeches held in the
public meetings of the UN Security Council (UNSC) between 1995 and 2017. The
dataset is based on publicly available meeting transcripts with the S/PV
document symbol and includes the full substance of individual speeches as well
as automatically extracted and manually corrected metadata on the speaker, the
position of the speech in the sequence of speeches of a meeting, and the date
of the speech. After contextualizing the dataset in recent research on the
UNSC, the paper presents descriptive statistics on UNSC meetings and speeches
that characterize the period covered by the dataset. Data highlight the
extensive presence of the UN bureaucracy in UNSC meetings as well as an
emerging trend towards more lengthy open UNSC debates. These open debates cover
key issues that have emerged only during the period that is covered by the
dataset, for example the debates relating to Women, Peace and Security or
Climate-related Disasters.
