United Nations General Assembly

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**United Nations General Assembly**
A meeting of the General Assembly in New York
Org type:	Principal Organ
Acronyms:	GA, UNGA
Head:	President of the UN General Assembly As of 12 September 2006 Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa Bahrain
Status:	Active
Established:	1945
Website:	www.un.org/ga
Wikimedia Commons:	United Nations General Assembly
Portal:	United Nations Portal

The United Nations General Assembly (GA) is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations. It is the main deliberative organ of the United Nations. It is made up of all United Nations member states and meets in regular yearly sessions under a president elected from among the representatives.

As the only UN organ in which all members are represented, the Assembly serves as a forum for members to discuss issues of international law and make decisions on the functioning of the organization.

1 Overview
2 Special Sessions
3 General Assembly Resolutions
4 Emergency Special Sessions
5 Subsidiary organs
6 General Assembly reform
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] Overview

The General Assembly meets in regular, special and emergency special session. Its regular annual session usually begins on the third Tuesday in September and its work is suspended in late December. It reconvenes as required in the following year. The session concludes in September on the day before the next session begins. The President of the General Assembly is elected at least three months prior to the opening of each session (until 2003, the President was elected at the first meeting of the session). The General Debate follows, when all the members have the opportunity to address the assembly over a two-week period. Traditionally, the Secretary-General makes the first statement, followed by the president of the assembly. The first session was convened on 10 January 1946 in the Westminster Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations.

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.

Membership

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

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. 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. For many developing countries, the UN is the source of much of their diplomatic influence and the principal outlet for their foreign relations initiatives.

[edit] Special Sessions

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.

[edit] General Assembly Resolutions

The General Assembly votes on many resolutions brought forth by sponsoring states. 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, in some areas, such as the United Nations budget, the General Assembly does have authority to make final decisions.

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).

[edit] 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 within twenty-four hours of the request therefor. Such emergency special session 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" resolutions, adopted in 1950, empower the Assembly to convene in emergency special session to recommend collective measures – including the use of armed force – in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression. Two-thirds of the members must approve any such recommendation. Emergency special sessions under this procedure have been held on ten occasions. The two most recent, in 1982 and 1997 through 2003 respectively, have both been convened in response to actions by Israel. 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 occupation of East Jerusalem and dealt with the issue of Palestine.

At the first Special Session of the UN General Assembly held in 1947, Oswaldo Aranha, then head of the Brazilian delegation to the UN, began a tradition that has remained until today whereby the first speaker at this major international forum is always a Brazilian.

[edit] Subsidiary organs

The General Assembly subsidiary organs are divided into 5 categories: Committees (30 total, 6 main), Commissions (7), Boards (6), Councils and Panel (5), working group and others.

[edit] Committees

[edit] Main Committees

The Main Committees are ordinally numbered, 1-6:

The First Committee: Disarmament and International Security (DISEC)
The Second Committee: Economic and Financial (ECOFIN)
The Third Committee: Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian (SOCHUM)
The Fourth Committee: Special Political and Decolonization (SPECPOL)
The Fifth Committee: Administrative and Budgetary
The Sixth Committee: Legal

The roles of some of the Main Committees have changed over time. 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.

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.

[edit] Other Committees

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

Credentials Committee. This committee is charged with ensuring that the diplomatic credentials of all UN representatives are in order. The Credentials Committee consists of nine Member States elected early in each regular General Assembly session.
General Committee: A supervisory committee entrusted with ensuring that the whole meeting of the Assembly goes smoothly. The General Committee consists of the President and Vice Presidents of the current General Assembly session and the Chairman of each of the six Main Committees.

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

[edit] Commissions

There are seven commissions.

Despite its name, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) during its existence was actually a subsidiary body of ECOSOC.

[edit] Boards

There are six boards.

[edit] Councils and Panel

The most important (as well as the newest) council is the United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the aforementioned UNCHR in March 2006.

There is a total of four Councils and one Panel.

[edit] Working Groups and Other

There is a varied group of Working Groups and other subsidary bodies.

[edit] General Assembly reform

See also: Reform of the United Nations

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." 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." 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. Annan reminded UN members of their responsibility to implement reforms, if they expect to realize improvements in UN effectiveness [1]: