Read the text and answer the questions that follow it.
We the Peoples: The Promise of the United Nations
1. “We the peoples of the United Nations,” begins the United Nations Charter. It goes on to list four principal aims for the global organization. First, the UN was to safeguard peace and security in order “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Second, it was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Third, the UN was to uphold respect for international law. And fourth, the new organization pledged “to promote social progress and better standards of life.” In the summer of 1945, the founders of the United Nations thus vowed to make the world a better place.
The UN family
2. The United Nations has six main organs. Five of them – the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Secretariat – are based at UN Headquarters in New York. The sixth, the International Court of Justice, is located at the Hague in the Netherlands. With the exception of the Trusteeship Council, which became obsolete with the completion of the decolonization process, these organs still constitute the basic superstructure of the UN. The functions of these organs are vastly different: while the GA is basically the parliament of the UN and the Security Council its executive committee, the Secretariat is the operational body of – or the bureaucracy that runs – the UN.
3. The UN "family," though, is much larger, encompassing fifteen specialized agencies and several programs and bodies. Some of the organizations, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), were founded during the League of Nations era in the 1920s. Many more have been created since 1945 to address the specific problems that the UN has been called to solve.
4. To top it all off, the UN has a set of "subsidiaries" and partners. Throughout its history, the UN has associated withalmost three thousand non-governmental organizations [NGOs]. This was already envisioned in 1945: article 71 of the UN Charter explicitly states that the UN "may make suitable arrangements for consultation with NGOs which are concerned with matters within its competence[1]." In practice this means that every year the UN works together with hundreds of NGOs to undertakehumanitarian tasks in the world's conflict zones.
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The main UN organs and their responsibilities
5. The General Assembly (GA), composed of representatives of all UN member states, is the forum where each of the 193 member states can make its case heard. As the main deliberative organ of the United Nations, the General Assembly is empowered to discuss and make recommendations on any subject falling within the scope of the Charter itself. In many ways, the General Assembly functions like a national parliament. It has a president and twenty-one vice presidents. Each member state, regardless of its size, has one vote.
Box 1. Criticism of the GA
The very size of the GA means that its effectiveness is limited. The annual meetings – or regular sessions – that usually open in September have become ritualistic and tend to make news only in connection with a possible high-profile appearance, by the U.S. president, for instance.
Criticism of the UN General Assembly has focused on its tendency to seek consensus resolutions that meet the approval of all members rather than to try to pass stronger, more meaningful resolutions. The General Assembly also has a reputation for being excessively tedious with resolutions that are not only ineffective but often repetitive in nature. And these are non-binding resolutions.
6. The Security Council (SC) is the central organ of the entire UN system. It has primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. To that effect, the SC was granted wide powers that would make it an active participant in international affairs. It could investigate any dispute or situation that might lead to international friction and it was authorized to decide on economic sanctions or military action. The SC was therefore mandated to use its powers both as a means of preventing a conflict and as a way of enforcing a state's compliance with a specific decision or resolution.
7. The Council is composed of 15 members. The UN Charter names five of them as permanent members of the SC (known as the P-5): China, France, the United Kingdom, Russian Federation, and the United States (those that were chiefly responsible for the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945). The other ten non-permanent members are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms.
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