Citizendia

 United Nations General Assembly
 

Spanish president in the General Assembly in New York
Org typePrincipal Organ
AcronymsGA, UNGA
HeadPresident of the UN General Assembly
As of 18 September 2007
Srgjan Kerim
former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
StatusActive
Established1945
Websitewww.un.org/ga
Wikimedia
Commons		Commons:Category:United Nations General Assembly United Nations General Assembly
PortalPortal:United Nations United Nations Portal

Membership For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA / GA) is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation. The President of the United Nations General Assembly is a position voted for by representatives in the United Nations General Assembly on a yearly basis Events 96 - Nerva is proclaimed Roman Emperor after Domitian is assassinated Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Dr Srgjan Asan Kerim (Срѓан Aсан Керим Srǵan Asan Kerim was the President of the United Nations General Assembly. The Republic of Macedonia (Република Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a repository of Free content images sound and other multimedia files This article lists the member states of the United Nations (UN. In addition to the current 192 member states, the United Nations welcomes many international agencies entities and one non-member State as observers While the United Nations is an International organization, the United Nations System is the whole network of international organizations treaties and conventions Its powers are to oversee the budget of the United Nations, appoint the non-permanent members to the Security Council, receive reports from other parts of the United Nations and make recommendations in the form of General Assembly Resolutions. The United Nations ( UN) is an International organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in International law, International security The United Nations ( UN) is an International organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in International law, International security A United Nations General Assembly Resolution is voted on by all member states of the United Nations in the General Assembly. [1] It has also established a wide number of subsidiary organs. [2]

The General Assembly meets under its president or secretary general in regular yearly sessions which last from September to December, although it can reconvene for special and emergency special sessions. The President of the United Nations General Assembly is a position voted for by representatives in the United Nations General Assembly on a yearly basis Its composition, functions, powers, voting, and procedures are set out in Chapter IV of the United Nations Charter. Chapter IV of the United Nations Charter contains the Charter's provisions dealing with the UN General Assembly, specifically its composition functions powers voting

The first session was convened on 10 January 1946 in the Westminster Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations. Events 49 BC - Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signaling the start of civil war. Year 1946 ( MCMXLVI) was a Common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full 1946 calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Methodist Central Hall Westminster is on Victoria Street in London, just off Parliament Square, next to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference London ( ˈlʌndən is the capital and largest urban area in the United Kingdom.

Voting in the General Assembly on important questions – recommendations on peace and security; election of members to organs; admission, suspension, and expulsion of members; budgetary matters – is by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. Other questions are decided by majority vote. Each member country has one vote. Apart from approval of budgetary matters, including adoption of a scale of assessment, Assembly resolutions are not binding on the members. The Assembly may make recommendations on any matters within the scope of the UN, except matters of peace and security under Security Council consideration. The one state, one vote power structure theoretically allows states comprising just eight percent of the world population to pass a resolution by a two-thirds vote. In Politics, representation describes how political power is alienated from most of the members of a group and vested for a certain time period in the hands of a small subset

During the 1980s, the Assembly became a forum for the North-South dialogue – the discussion of issues between industrialized nations and developing countries. These issues came to the fore because of the phenomenal growth and changing makeup of the UN membership. In 1945, the UN had 51 members. It now has 192, of which more than two-thirds are developing countries. Developing countries are countries that haven't reached Western-style standards of democratic government free market economy industrialization social programs and human rights guaranties Because of their numbers, developing countries are often able to determine the agenda of the Assembly (using coordinating groups like the G77), the character of its debates, and the nature of its decisions. The Group of 77 at the United Nations is a loose coalition of Developing nations designed to promote its members' collective Economic interests and create For many developing countries, the UN is the source of much of their diplomatic influence and the principal outlet for their foreign relations initiatives.

Contents

The agenda

The agenda for each session is planned up to seven months in advance and begins with the release of a preliminary list of items to be included in the provisional agenda. [3] This is refined into a provisional agenda sixty days before the opening of the session. After the session begins the final agenda is adopted in a plenary meeting which allocates the work to the various Main Committees who later submit reports back to the Assembly for adoption by consensus or by vote.

Westminster Central Hall, the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946
Westminster Central Hall, the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946

Items on the agenda are numbered. Methodist Central Hall Westminster is on Victoria Street in London, just off Parliament Square, next to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Several items may be discussed in a single plenary session. Also, discussions on a topic of the agenda can continue across separate meetings months apart.

General Assembly resolutions

See also: United Nations General Assembly Resolution and United Nations Document Codes

The General Assembly votes on many resolutions brought forth by sponsoring states. A United Nations General Assembly Resolution is voted on by all member states of the United Nations in the General Assembly. The United Nations issues most of its official documents in its six working languages Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and These are generally symbolic statements covering an array of world issues. Most General Assembly resolutions, while symbolic of the sense of the international community, are not enforceable as a legal or practical matter as the General Assembly lacks enforcement powers with respect to most issues. However, various groups feel that the old classic concept according to which General Assembly resolutions have no legal effect must be discarded. Not only does the General Assembly have authority to make final decisions in some areas such as the United Nations budget, but many resolutions may also be constitutive or proof of international customary law, and therefore binding on member states[4].

From the First to the Thirtieth General Assembly sessions, all General Assembly resolutions were numbered consecutively, with the resolution number followed by the session number in Roman numbers (for example, Resolution 1514 (XV), which was the 1514th numbered resolution adopted by the Assembly, and was adopted at the Fifteenth Regular Session (1960)). Beginning with the Thirty-First Session, resolutions are numbered by individual session (for example Resolution 41/10 represents the 10th resolution adopted at the Forty-First Session).

Special sessions

A meeting of the General Assembly in New York
A meeting of the General Assembly in New York

Special sessions may be convened at the request of the UN Security Council, or a majority of UN members, or, if the majority concurs, of a single member. A special session was held in October 1995 at the head of government level to commemorate the UN's 50th anniversary. Another special session was held in September 2000 to celebrate the millennium; it put forward the Millennium Development Goals. A further special session (2005 World Summit) was held in September 2005 to commemorate the UN's 60th anniversary; it assessed progress on the Millennium Development Goals, and discussed Kofi Annan's In Larger Freedom proposals. The 2005 World Summit, 14&ndash 16 September 2005, was a follow-up summit meeting to the United Nations ' 2000 Millennium Summit Kofi Atta Annan, GCMG (born 8 April 1938 is a Ghanaian Diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations

At the first Special Session of the UN General Assembly held in 1947, Oswaldo Aranha, then president of the Special Session, began a tradition that has remained until today whereby the first speaker at this major international forum is always a Brazilian. Osvaldo Euclides de Sousa Aranha ( February 15, 1894 - January 27, 1960) was a Brazilian politician diplomat and statesman who came [5]

Emergency special sessions

The General Assembly may take action on maintaining international peace and security if the UN Security Council is unable, usually due to disagreement among the permanent members, to exercise its primary responsibility. If not in session at the time, the General Assembly may meet in emergency special session[6] within twenty-four hours of the request thereof. An emergency special session is an unscheduled meeting of the United Nations General Assembly to make urgent recommendations on a particular issue Such emergency special sessions shall be called if requested by the Security Council on the vote of any seven members, or by a majority of the Members of the United Nations.

The "Uniting for Peace" resolution, adopted 3 November 1950, empowered the Assembly to convene in emergency special session in order to recommend collective measures – including the use of armed force – in the event of a breach of the peace or act of aggression. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA resolution 377 A, the "Uniting for Peace" resolution, states that in cases where the United Nations Security Events 644 - Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph, is killed by a Persian slave in Medina. Year 1950 ( MCML) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. As with all Assembly resolutions, two-thirds of UN Members 'present and voting' must approve any such recommendation before it can be formally adopted by the Assembly. Emergency special sessions have been convened under this procedure on ten occasions. The two most recent, in 1982 and 1997 through 2003 respectively, have both been convened in response to actions by the State of Israel. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Israel topics. The ninth considered the situation in the occupied Arab territories following Israel's unilateral extension of its laws, jurisdiction, and administration to the Golan Heights. The tenth was triggered by the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, and dealt with the issue of Palestine. The tenth emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly centers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the ongoing dispute and conflict over the West Bank East Jerusalem refers to the part of Jerusalem captured by Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and subsequently by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Name There are differences of opinion as to what the Palestinian territories should be called

Subsidiary organs

The General Assembly subsidiary organs are divided into five categories: committees (30 total, six main), commissions (seven), boards (six), councils and panels (five), working groups, and "other".

Committees

Main committees

The main committees are ordinally numbered, 1-6:

The roles of many of the main committees have changed over time. In Set theory, an ordinal number, or just ordinal, is the Order type of a Well-ordered set. The First Committee is one of six main committees at the General Assembly of the United Nations which deals with matters concerning World peace. The Economic and Finance Committee (ECOFIN is a committee within the United Nations that solves problems in the area of global finances and economics Until the late 1970s, the First Committee was the Political and Security Committee (POLISEC) and there was also a sufficient number of additional "Political" matters that an additional, unnumbered main committee, called the Special Political Committee, also sat. The Fourth Committee formerly handled Trusteeship and Decolonization matters. With the decreasing number of such matters to be addressed as the trust territories attained independence and the decolonization movement progressed, the functions of the Special Political Committee were merged into the Fourth Committee during the 1990s. Trust Territories were the successors of the remaining League of Nations mandates and came into being when the League of Nations ceased to exist in 1946 Decolonization refers to the undoing of Colonialism, the establishment of governance or authority through the creation of settlements by another country or jurisdiction

Each main committee consists of all the members of the General Assembly. Each elects a chairman, three vice chairmen, and a rapporteur at the outset of each regular General Assembly session.

Other committees

These are not numbered. According to the General Assembly website, the most important are:

Other committees of the General Assembly are enumerated in this list.

Commissions

There are seven commissions:

Despite its name, the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) was actually a subsidiary body of ECOSOC. The International Law Commission was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 for the "promotion of the progressive development of international law and The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 "to promote the progressive harmonization The Peacebuilding Commission was established in December 2005 by the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council acting concurrently The United Nations Commission on Human Rights ( UNCHR) was a functional commission within the overall framework of the United Nations. The Economic and Social Council ( ECOSOC) of the United Nations assists the General Assembly in promoting international economic and social cooperation

Boards

There are six boards.

Councils and panels The most important (as well as the newest) council is the United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the aforementioned UNCHR in March 2006. The United Nations Human Rights Council is an international body within the United Nations System.

There are a total of four councils and one panel.

Working Groups and other

There is a varied group of working groups and other subsidiary bodies.

General Assembly reform and UNPA

See also: United Nations Parliamentary Assembly

On 21 March 2005, Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented a report, In Larger Freedom, that criticized the General Assembly for focusing so much on consensus that it was passing watered-down resolutions reflecting "the lowest common denominator of widely different opinions". A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, or United Nations People's Assembly ( UNPA; French: Assemblée parlementaire des Nations Unies Events 630 - Byzantine emperor Heraclius restores the True Cross to Jerusalem. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The Secretary-General of the United Nations is the head of the Secretariat, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. Kofi Atta Annan, GCMG (born 8 April 1938 is a Ghanaian Diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations He also criticized the Assembly for trying to address too broad an agenda, instead of focusing on "the major substantive issues of the day, such as international migration and the long-debated comprehensive convention on terrorism". Human migration denotes any movement by Humans from one locality to another sometimes over long distances or Terrorism is the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion Annan recommended streamlining the General Assembly's agenda, committee structure, and procedures; strengthening the role and authority of its president; enhancing the role of civil society; and establishing a mechanism to review the decisions of its committees, in order to minimize unfunded mandates and micromanagement of the UN Secretariat. The President of the United Nations General Assembly is a position voted for by representatives in the United Nations General Assembly on a yearly basis Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning Society as opposed to the force-backed Unfunded mandates are regulations or conditions for receiving grants that impose costs on state and local governments for which they are not reimbursed by the federal government In Business Management, micromanagement is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of his or her subordinates or employees The United Nations Secretariat is one of the principal organs of the United Nations and it is headed by the United Nations Secretary-General, assisted by a staff Annan reminded UN members of their responsibility to implement reforms, if they expect to realize improvements in UN effectiveness. [7]

A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, or United Nations People's Assembly (UNPA), is a proposed addition to the United Nations System that eventually could allow for direct election of UN parliament members by citizens all over the world.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS: Chapter IV. The President of the United Nations General Assembly is a position voted for by representatives in the United Nations General Assembly on a yearly basis The below is a list of the current Permanent Representatives to the United Nations in New York together with their country and when their position was last confirmed Since the late 1990s there have been many calls for reform of the United Nations (UN The Secretary-General of the United Nations is the head of the Secretariat, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. While the United Nations is an International organization, the United Nations System is the whole network of international organizations treaties and conventions The Economic and Social Council ( ECOSOC) of the United Nations assists the General Assembly in promoting international economic and social cooperation The Music for UNICEF Concert A Gift of Song was a Benefit concert of Popular music held in the United Nations General Assembly in The UNIS-UN Conference is organized and run by high school students from the United Nations International School (UNIS A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, or United Nations People's Assembly ( UNPA; French: Assemblée parlementaire des Nations Unies The United Nations Interpretation Service is a part of the Meetings and Publishing Division ( MPD of the UN 's Department for General Assembly and Conference Management ( DGACM UN. org.
  2. ^ General Assembly: Subsidiary organs. UN. org.
  3. ^ Research Guide: General Assembly. caitlinUnited Nations.
  4. ^ ICJ Advisory Opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons (1996)par. 70
  5. ^ Historical Personalities and Diplomats: Oswaldo Aranha. Brazilian Ministry of External Relations.
  6. ^ UNGA Emergency Special Sessions. UN. org.
  7. ^ In Larger Freedom, Chapter 5. United Nations.

External links

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