How to search the UN sanctions list

Screen100 checks names against three official lists: the OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, the OFAC Consolidated (Non-SDN) list, and the United Nations Security Council Consolidated List. The UN list is the one teams search least carefully. It is a separate source from both the OFAC lists and the EU list, its designations come from Security Council sanctions committees rather than a national treasury, and it binds people in a given country only through that country's own law. This guide covers where the UN list is published, how its entries are built, how to search it, and what we saw when we ran UN-style names through our own matcher.

Where the UN list is published

The Security Council publishes its consolidated list through the sanctions committee pages on un.org. The official search at scsanctions.un.org runs full-text queries over the list and lets you narrow results to one committee list, such as the ISIL (Da'esh) and Al-Qaida list, the 1988 Committee list, or the list for a particular country. The country field is optional, so a search can run on a name alone. For batch work, the same materials page links to the list as XML in sorted views, including an alphabetical view and a view sorted by permanent reference number.

The three routes below do different jobs. Choose by what you are trying to do, not by which one you found first.

Route	Best for	Limitation
UN sanctions search (scsanctions.un.org)	Checking a named person or entity, with a committee filter	Manual, one query at a time, and no record kept for you
UN consolidated XML	Scripted or scheduled screening against a full copy	You must parse it, track its version, and handle a failed download
Screen100 free screen	A quick name check across OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated and UN Security Council	Searches our copy of the lists, so confirm a hit against the UN source before you act on it

What a UN entry contains

The list has separate sections for individuals and for entities and other groups. Each entry carries a permanent reference number, and the prefix tells you which sanctions regime the name belongs to. According to the UN's own list page, numbers beginning QD relate to the Al-Qaida regime. Use the reference number to identify a designation, not the displayed name, because names are where the variation sits.

An individual record can hold up to four name parts, plus any number of aliases, titles, nationalities and dates of birth. An entity record has a name and aliases, and usually fewer identifiers. That structure matters for screening. A match on a primary name tells you little if the customer file uses one of the aliases, and it tells you even less if the file has no date of birth or nationality to compare.

How Screen100 loads the UN list

Our ingest pipeline reads the UN consolidated XML in src/lib/ingest/run.ts. For each individual it joins the four name parts into one primary name. For each entity it takes the entity name as the primary name. Every alias is stored as an alternative name, the UN list type is stored as the program, and the UN's DATAID is kept as the source entry ID, so the same record traces back to the same identifier each time the list refreshes.

Two limits follow from the source, and they are worth knowing before you rely on a UN result. The loader takes the year-of-birth field when the source gives one, so a UN individual may have only a year to compare against. And the loader does not carry addresses for UN entries, so a UN hit has fewer details to confirm or rule it out than an OFAC hit usually does.

What the matcher does with UN-style names

We ran name pairs through the scoring function behind the free screen and the API, using the same bands the product applies: 0.88 or above is a match, and 0.72 up to 0.88 is a possible match. The pairs below are test inputs we wrote for this post. They are not entries copied from the UN list. The scores come from a run on 10 November 2026 at commit b95cf54.

Mohammed Ali Hassan against Muhammad Ali Hassan scores 0.937, a match. A common transliteration variant lands in the match band.

Ahmed Khan against Ahmad Khan scores 0.955, a match. A one-letter spelling difference is still a strong candidate.

Hassan, Mohammed Ali against Mohammed Ali Hassan scores 0.962, a match. The name is normalised, including reordering, before it is compared.

Ali Hassan against Mohammed Ali Hassan scores 0.925, a match. A partial name, with the given name dropped, still lands in the match band.

John Smith against Jane Smithers scores 0.818, a possible match. Similar letters without a shared identity fall into the review band.

Two conclusions follow. First, a spelling variant of a common name will produce a strong candidate, so a transliteration variant needs review, not dismissal. Second, a partial query also scores as a strong candidate, which means the score alone cannot separate a true match from a shortened name. What decides the result is the identifiers the entry gives you, such as a date of birth, a nationality or a reference number, compared against the customer record. The score tells you which candidates to look at. It does not tell you who they are.

The same discipline applies to any list. Our guide to name screening in AML covers how matching works in more depth, and reducing false positives covers how to tune a review queue without missing real hits.

Member states implement the list through national law

The UN list tells you whom the Security Council has designated. It does not, on its own, state what your business must do about them. Member states give effect to listings through their own national legislation, and the prohibitions, exceptions and penalties depend on the jurisdiction. A freeze that applies in one country may be drawn differently in another. The official UN materials say as much: the consolidated list is not the whole body of sanctions measures or the law that implements them.

In practice, screen against the UN list and against the implementing rules of every jurisdiction where you operate, and record which of those each check covered. The EU list works the same way, as our guide to searching the EU sanctions list explains.

Timing and failed downloads

A consolidated file can lag a new designation, so treat the retrieval date as part of the evidence. A screen run against last week's file is a screen against last week's list. Our refresh loads each list inside a single transaction, so a failed fetch keeps the previous data in place rather than leaving a half-loaded set. That protects the dataset, but it also means an old copy can remain in use until the next successful run.

A failed download is not a clear result. If the UN file cannot be retrieved, the right outcome is to flag the gap and retry. Recording no matches at that point would be a false clear.

What to record for each check

An auditor needs to be able to reproduce a UN screen. Keep the list name, the retrieval date or version, the exact name and identifiers searched, every candidate returned, and the reviewer's decision with its reasons. These are the same habits that OFAC screening requirements expect, and they carry across to the UN list without change.

Put it together

Search the UN list with the full name, match against aliases as well as the primary name, and confirm each candidate against identifying details before you clear or escalate it. Keep the UN list in the same process as the OFAC and EU lists, record which lists a given check covered, and do not treat a failed download or a single list as proof that a party is clear. You can run a free name check against the OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated and UN Security Council lists to see how a result is presented and cited.