The UN General Assembly convened Tuesday in New York City for its annual meeting, setting its agenda for the coming year and addressing some of the world’s most pressing social and diplomatic issues.
The Assembly, now in its 78th session, has undergone significant changes as its influence has waned and global politics has shifted.
Here’s how the Assembly works.
What does the General Assembly do?
The General Assembly is one of the six bodies of the United Nations, including the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council.
The body was established in 1945 as “the main deliberative, policymaking and representative organ” of the UN, and it is the only one within the UN and the wider world of international alliances (NATO, BRICS and the Group of 20, for example) where all 193 member states have equal representation. As a condition of membership, each state must pay an “assessed contribution” to UN operations.
“This is where every country has a seat,” said Peter J. Hoffman, an associate professor of international affairs at the New School and the director of its United Nations Summer Study. “It’s hard to take care of cats, but the fact that everyone is in the room together and everyone has a chance, that in itself creates a kind of credibility for it.”
At the meeting in New York, representatives from each member state discussed international issues as part of the General Debate and voted on hundreds of resolutions.
What are the powers of the Assembly?
Unlike the UN Security Council, which can impose sanctions or authorize the use of force, the General Assembly is purely deliberative. Much of its power derives from its ability to resolve issues and make recommendations on matters of international importance.
“In terms of actual resolutions that have teeth, that doesn’t happen because when the Security Council issues a resolution, it says, You will do this,” said Dr. Hoffman. “If the General Assembly does it, it’s a recommendation: You should do it.”
For example, a resolution passed by the Assembly in November 2022 authorized for the first United Nations commemoration in May of this year of the Palestinian displacement during the creation of Israel.
The General Assembly also appointed the UN secretary general, currently António Guterres, for a five-year term and the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council. A new president of the Assembly is elected every year, and the position rotates among representatives of five geographic regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe among others.
The Assembly meeting gives leaders a global platform. During the General Debate, each member state is allotted 15 minutes to speak on the theme of the year, but that limit is usually ignored. Last year, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivered a scathing rebuke of Russia’s invasion of his country in a recorded speech to the General Assembly.
What’s on the agenda this year?
The overall theme for 2023 is “Rebuilding trust and restoring global unity: accelerating action on the 2030 agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals towards peace, prosperity, progress and keep everything going.” But the key words are “2030 agenda” and “Sustainable Development Goals.”
In 2015, the General Assembly adopted 17 goals, called the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, as part of “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and in the future. ” These include “no poverty,” “zero hunger,” “climate action” and “gender equality,” among others.
The SDGs were formally adopted under a resolution known as Agenda 2030, a reference for when some of them should be achieved, although some goals have no set date. In 2017, a resolution was passed to formalize specific indicators of progress towards these goals.
“The real story is that only 15 percent of the SDGs have been met and almost half of them are off track.,” Dr. Hoffman said.
In an effort to shake up the body, Mr. Guterres issued “a wake-up call to accelerate the implementation of the SDG Member states given until 2024 to find a way to the SDGs and Agenda 2030 will be restored.
How has the Assembly changed over the years?
Since its establishment, the UN General Assembly has grown to 193 member states in 2011, when South Sudan was accepted, from 51 countries mainly based in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East.
The establishment of the UN coincided largely with the advent of the Cold War, which subsequently created a wedge between the West and the East, especially in the Security Council. But the politics of the Assembly has long been dictated by tensions between the rich countries of the “global north” – broadly considered to include Australia, Europe, North America, Israel, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand – and the “global south,” which is largely represented by the former colonies of the global north across Africa, Asia and Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean.
“In the ’60s and ’70s, you started to see political change and especially the emergence of the so-called new international economic order in the ’70s,” said Dr. Hoffman, “that there is a trend in the global south and The countries that do not come together to say, Oh, the terms of trade are not fair between the north and south
At the same time, pressure on the global south to begin addressing environmental degradation inspired a blistering response to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1972 speech at a UN conference in which she asked, “Isn’t poverty and need the greatest. pollutions?” as a statement of what he sees as the hypocrisy of the global north in dictating terms to developing countries.
