GENERAL ASSEMBLY

The General Assembly is the main deliberative assembly of the United Nations. Composed of all United Nations member states, the assembly meets in regular yearly sessions, but emergency sessions can also be called.^[67] The assembly is led by a president, elected from among the member states on a rotating regional basis, and 21 vice-presidents.^[68] The first session convened 10 January 1946 in theMethodist Central Hall Westminster in London and included representatives of 51 nations.^[18]

When the General Assembly votes on important questions, a two-thirds majority of those present and voting is required. Examples of important questions include recommendations on peace and security; election of members to organs; admission, suspension, and expulsion of members; and budgetary matters.^[69] All other questions are decided by a majority vote. Each member country has one vote. Apart from approval of budgetary matters, 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 that are under consideration by the Security Council.^[67]

Draft resolutions can be forwarded to the General Assembly by eight committees:^[70]

• General Committee – a supervisory committee consisting of the assembly's president, vice-president, and committee heads
• Credentials Committee – responsible for determining the credentials of each member nation's UN representatives
• First Committee (Disarmament and International Security)
• Second Committee (Economic and Financial)
• Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural)
• Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization)
• Fifth Committee (Administrative and Budgetary)

• Sixth Committee (Legal)

UN Secretariat

— Administrative organ of the UN —

• Supports the other UN bodies administratively (for example, in the organization of conferences, the writing of reports and studies and the preparation of the budget);

• Its chairperson – the UN Secretary General – is elected by the General Assembly for a five-year mandate and is the UN's foremost representative

UN General Assembly— Deliberative assembly of all UN member states —

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• May resolve non-compulsory recommendations to states or suggestions to the Security Council (UNSC);

• Decides on the admission of new members, following proposal by the UNSC;

• Adopts the budget;

• Elects the non-permanent members of the UNSC; all members of ECOSOC; the UN Secretary General(following his/her proposal by the UNSC); and the fifteen judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Each country has one vote.

STRUCTURE

The United Nations' system is based on five principal organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Secretariat, and theInternational Court of Justice.^[52] A sixth principal organ, the Trusteeship Council, suspended operations in 1994, upon the independence of Palau, the last remaining UN trustee territory.^[53]

Four of the five principal organs are located at the main UN Headquarters in New York City.^[54] The International Court of Justice is located in The Hague, while other major agencies are based in the UN offices at Geneva,^[55] Vienna,^[56] and Nairobi.^[57] Other UN institutions are located throughout the world. The six official languages of the United Nations, used in intergovernmental meetings and documents, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.^[58] On the basis of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the UN and its agencies are immune from the laws of the countries where they operate, safeguarding the UN's impartiality with regard to the host and member countries.^[59]

Below the six organs sit, in the words of the author Linda Fasulo, "an amazing collection of entities and organizations, some of which are actually older than the UN itself and operate with almost complete independence from it".^[60] These include specialized agencies, research and training institutions, programmes and funds, and other UN entities.^[61]

The United Nations obey the Noblemaire principle, which is binding on any organisation that belongs to the united nations system. This principle calls for salaries that will draw and keep citizens of countries where salaries are highest, and also calls for equal pay for work of equal value independent of the employee's nationality.^[62][63] Staff salaries are subject to an internal tax that is administered by the UN organizations.^[62][64][65]

HISTORY OF UNITED NATIONS

1942 "Declaration of United Nations" by the Allies of World War II

Main article: Declaration by United Nations

The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the US State Department in 1939.^[7] The text of the "Declaration by United Nations" was drafted by President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins, while meeting at the White House, 29 December 1941. It incorporated Soviet suggestions, but left no role for France. "Four Policemen" was coined to refer four major Allied countries, United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and China, which was emerged in Declaration by United Nations.^[8] Roosevelt first coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries.^[b] "On New Year's Day 1942, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, Maxim Litvinov, of the USSR, and T. V. Soong, of China, signed a short document which later came to be known as the United Nations Declaration and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures."^[9] The term United Nations was first officially used when 26 governments signed this Declaration. One major change from the Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision for religious freedom, which Stalin approved after Roosevelt insisted.^[10][11] By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed.^[12]

Background

In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organizations and conferences had been formed to regulate conflicts between nations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.^[3] Following the catastrophic loss of life in the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations to maintain harmony between countries.^[4] This organization resolved some territorial disputes and created international structures for areas such as postal mail, aviation, and opium control, some of which would later be absorbed into the UN.^[5] However, the League lacked representation for colonial peoples (then half the world's population) and significant participation from several major powers, including the US, USSR, Germany, and Japan; it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935, theJapanese invasion of China in 1937, and German expansions under Adolf Hitler that culminated in the Second World War.^[6]