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UN General Assembly hall.jpg
United Nations (UN) General Assembly hall at the UN Headquarters, New York City, 2006
Org type Principal organ
Status Active

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; French: Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the UN. The United Nations General Assembly is made up of all United Nations member states. The Assembly meets once a year, which usually begins on the third Tuesday in September and ends in mid-December. The first meeting was held on 10 January 1946.

Voting in the General Assembly on important questions, for example suggestions on world peace, human rights and security, is by two-thirds of those present and voting. Other questions are decided by popular vote. Each member country has one vote.

At present, the Holy See (Vatican City) and Palestine are the only two observer states at the United Nations. Switzerland also had that status until it became a member state.

The president of the United Nations General Assembly is a position voted by representatives in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on a yearly basis. The president is the chair and presiding officer of the General Assembly.

United nations general assembly observers have the right to speak in the assembly. The observers have no rights to vote in the assembly.

History

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Methodist Central Hall, London, the location of the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.

The first session of the UN General Assembly was convened on 10 January 1946 in the Methodist Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations. The next few annual sessions were held in different cities: the second session in New York City, and the third in Paris. It moved to the permanent Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City at the start of its seventh regular annual session, on 14 October 1952. In December 1988, in order to hear Yasser Arafat, the General Assembly organized its 29th session in the Palace of Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Membership

All 193 members of the United Nations are members of the General Assembly, with the addition of the Holy See and Palestine as observer states. Further, the United Nations General Assembly may grant observer status to an international organization or entity, which entitles the entity to participate in the work of the United Nations General Assembly, though with limitations.

Agenda

The agenda for each session is planned up to seven months in advance and begins with the release of a preliminary list of items to be included in the provisional agenda. This is refined into a provisional agenda 60 days before the opening of the session. After the session begins, the final agenda is adopted in a plenary meeting which allocates the work to the various Main Committees, who later submit reports back to the Assembly for adoption by consensus or by vote.

Items on the agenda are numbered. Regular plenary sessions of the General Assembly in recent years have initially been scheduled to be held over the course of just three months; however, additional workloads have extended these sessions until just short of the next session. The routinely scheduled portions of the sessions normally commence on "the Tuesday of the third week in September, counting from the first week that contains at least one working day", per the UN Rules of Procedure. The last two of these Regular sessions were routinely scheduled to recess exactly three months afterward in early December but were resumed in January and extended until just before the beginning of the following sessions.

Committees

The main committees are ordinally numbered, 1–6:

  • The First Committee: Disarmament and International Security (DISEC) is concerned with disarmament and related international security questions
  • The Second Committee: Economic and Financial (ECOFIN) is concerned with economic questions
  • The Third Committee: Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian (SOCHUM) deals with social and humanitarian issues
  • The Fourth Committee: Special Political and Decolonisation (SPECPOL) deals with a variety of political subjects not dealt with by the First Committee, as well as with decolonization
  • The Fifth Committee: Administrative and Budgetary deals with the administration and budget of the United Nations
  • The Sixth Committee: Legal deals with legal matters

The roles of many 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.

Budget

The General Assembly also approves the budget of the United Nations and decides how much money each member state must pay to run the organization.

The Charter of the United Nations gives responsibility for approving the budget to the General Assembly (Chapter IV, Article 17) and for preparing the budget to the secretary-general, as "chief administrative officer" (Chapter XV, Article 97). The Charter also addresses the non-payment of assessed contributions (Chapter IV, Article 19). The planning, programming, budgeting, monitoring, and evaluation cycle of the United Nations has evolved over the years; major resolutions on the process include General Assembly resolutions: 41/213 of 19 December 1986, 42/211 of 21 December 1987, and 45/248 of 21 December 1990.

The budget covers the costs of United Nations programmes in areas such as political affairs, international justice and law, international cooperation for development, public information, human rights, and humanitarian affairs.

The main source of funds for the regular budget is the contributions of member states. The scale of assessments is based on the capacity of countries to pay. This is determined by considering their relative shares of total gross national product, adjusted to take into account a number of factors, including their per capita incomes.

In addition to the regular budget, member states are assessed for the costs of the international tribunals and, in accordance with a modified version of the basic scale, for the costs of peacekeeping operations.

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See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas para niños

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