75th UNGA

  • June 18, 2020
  • Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
  • Category: DPN Topics
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Subject:IR

Context:

Turkish diplomat VolkanBozkir was elected president of 75th UN General Assembly.

Concept:

  • The term United Nations was first coined by the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was first used as a collective pledge of representatives of 26 nations on the 1st January, 1942, as a commitment to continue to fight against the Axis Powers.
  • On October 24th, 1945, as many as 51 countries signed the United Nations Charter in South Africa.
  • The central role of the United Nations was the promotion of peace and security, development and human rights.

Bodies and mandate

  • The United Nations consists of six main organs – the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the Secretariat and the Trusteeship Council.
  • Second, there are a number of United Nations programmes and funds such as the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Development Programme (UNDP), and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) etc. These programmes and funds fall under the Economic and Social Council of the UN but are also reported to the General Assembly.
  • The third set of actors within the UN is the specialised agencies and analogous bodies working in diverse areas such as agriculture, health, labour and meteorology. Well known among these bodies are UNESCO, ILO, FAO and the World Bank set of institutions

Main organs

The General Assembly:

  • It is the mainstay of the UN. It is the only forum where all countries sit down together and discuss their pressing problems.
  • Moreover, all nation states have equal voting rights regardless of their economic status. The vote of the General Assembly represents at one level world opinion.
  • The decisions of the General Assembly, however, are not legally binding on the Member States and only represent, at best, the moral authority of the community of nations.

Security Council:

  • The Security Council is the UN organ which is in charge of security and internationalpeace and deals with crises as they arise.
  • Under the UN Charter, the SecurityCouncil’s decisions are legally binding and the Member States are obligated to carry them out.
  • At present, the Security Council is made up of 15 members out of whom 5members are permanent. The 10 non-permanent members are periodically elected for a 2 year term.
  • The permanent members have the veto power, i.e. , they can block a proposalby casting a negative vote.

Economic and Social Council:

  • The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is the central UN forum with regard to international economic and social issues.
  • It has 54 members who are elected by the General Assembly for a three year term.
  • ECOSOC plays a central role instrengthening the regional cooperation for development as well as setting priorities interms of economic and social work.
  • Most of the UN programmes and funds and functional commissions includingenvironmental ones such as the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) fallunder the purview of ECOSOC.
  • It thus coordinates the work of the UN specialized agencies, programmes and funds and undertakes follow-up action in terms of majorUN conferences. This role has become all the more important in the context of globalisation and with regard to issues such as sustainable development.Environmental concerns fall under the jurisdiction of ECOSOC.

Secretariat:

  • The UN Secretariat comprises various UN departments and is thus the backbone ofthe UN system.

International Court of Justice:

  • The International Court of Justice arbitrates on disputes between nation-state
  • It was established in June 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations and began work in April 1946.
  • The ICJ is the successor of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), which was established by the League of Nations in 1920.

United Nations Trusteeship Council:

  • It is established to ensure that trust territories were administered in the best interests of their inhabitants and of international peace and security.
  • The trust territories—most of them former mandates of the League of Nations or territories taken from nations defeated at the end of World War II—have all now attained self-government or independence, either as separate nations or by joining neighbouring independent countries.
  • The last was Palau, formerly part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which became a member state of the United Nations in December 1994.

G4

  • G-4 is a group of four countries i.e. Brazil, Germany, India and Japan which support each other’s bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
  • The G-4 countries have decided to prepare for a fresh push for reforms at the UNGA in 2020 when the UN celebrates its 75th anniversary.
75th UNGA IR