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The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.[2] It is the world's largest international organization.[3] The UN is headquartered in New York City (in the United States, but with certain extraterritorial privileges), and the UN has other offices in Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the International Court of Justice is headquartered.

After some limited successes and failures during the 1920s, the League proved ineffective in the 1930s, as it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1933. Forty nations voted for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan voted against it and walked out of the League instead of withdrawing from Manchuria.[12] It also failed to act against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, when calls for economic sanctions against Italy failed. Italy and other nations left the League.

United Nations

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Roosevelt's idea of the "Four Powers", referring to the four major Allied countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, emerged in the Declaration by the United Nations.[24] On New Year's Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Soviet Union's former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the Chinese Premier T. V. Soong signed the "Declaration by United Nations",[25] and the next day the representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures. During the war, the United Nations became the official term for the Allies. In order to join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis powers.[26]

The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented,[a] and the Security Council took place in London beginning in January 1946.[38] Debates began at once, covering topical issues such as the presence of Russian troops in Iranian Azerbaijan and British forces in Greece.[41] British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb served as interim secretary-general.

With the spread of decolonization in the 1960s, the UN's membership shot up due to an influx of newly independent nations. In 1960 alone, 17 new states joined the UN, 16 of them from Africa.[47] On 25 October 1971, with opposition from the United States, but with the support of many Third World nations, the People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat on the Security Council in place of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan). The vote was widely seen as a sign of waning American influence in the organization.[53] Third World nations organized themselves into the Group of 77 under the leadership of Algeria, which briefly became a dominant power at the UN.[54] On 10 November 1975, a bloc comprising the Soviet Union and Third World nations passed a resolution, over strenuous American and Israeli opposition, declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. The resolution was repealed on 16 December 1991, shortly after the end of the Cold War.[55][56]

Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced several simultaneous, serious crises within Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the nations that previously made up Yugoslavia.[70] The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the United States' withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu. The UN mission to Bosnia faced worldwide ridicule for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing.[71] In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide amidst indecision in the Security Council.[72]

The General Assembly is the main deliberative assembly of the UN. Composed of all UN member states, the assembly meets in regular yearly sessions at the General Assembly Hall, but emergency sessions can also be called.[100] The assembly is led by a president, elected by the member states on a rotating regional basis, and 21 vice-presidents.[101] The first session convened on 10 January 1946 in the Methodist Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations.[38]

The Security Council is charged with maintaining peace and security amongst nations. While other organs of the UN can only make recommendations to member states, the Security Council has the power to make binding decisions that member states have agreed to carry out, under the terms of Charter Article 25.[105] The decisions of the council are known as United Nations Security Council resolutions.[106]

The International Court of Justice (or ICJ), sometimes known as the World Court,[118] is the primary judicial organ of the UN. It is the successor to the Permanent Court of International Justice and occupies the body's former headquarters in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, making it the only principal organ not based in New York City. The ICJ's main function is adjudicating disputes among nations. Examples of issues they have heard include war crimes, violations of state sovereignty and ethnic cleansing.[119] The court can also be called upon by other UN organs to provide advisory opinions on matters of international law.[120] All UN member states are parties to the ICJ Statute, which forms an integral part of the UN Charter, and non-members may also become parties. The ICJ's rulings are binding upon parties and, along with its advisory opinions, serve as sources of international law.[118] The court is composed of 15 judges appointed to nine-year terms by the General Assembly. Every sitting judge must be from a different nation.[120][121]

The Group of 77 (or the G77) at the UN is a loose coalition of developing nations that is designed to promote its members' collective economic interests and create an enhanced joint negotiating capacity in the UN. Seventy-seven nations founded the organization, but by November 2013 the organization had since expanded to 133 member countries.[137] The group was founded 15 June 1964 by the "Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries" issued at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (or the UNCTAD). The group held its first major meeting in Algiers in 1967, where it adopted the Charter of Algiers and established the basis for permanent institutional structures.[138] With the adoption of the New International Economic Order by developing countries in the 1970s, the work of the G77 spread throughout the UN system.[139] Similar groupings of developing states also operate in other UN agencies, such as the Group of 24 (or the G-24), which operates in the IMF on monetary affairs.[140]

The UN has carried out 71 peacekeeping operations since 1947, and as of April 2021, over 88,000 peacekeeping personnel from 121 nations have been deployed on missions.[146] The largest is the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (or UNMISS), which has close to 19,200 uniformed personnel,[147] and the smallest, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (or UNMOGIP), consists of 113 civilians and experts charged with monitoring the ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir. UN peacekeepers with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (or UNTSO) have been stationed in the Middle East since 1948, the longest-running active peacekeeping mission.[148]

In 1948, the General Assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee headed by American diplomat and activist Eleanor Roosevelt, and including the French lawyer Ren Cassin. The document proclaims basic civil, political and economic rights common to all human beings, though its effectiveness towards achieving these ends has been disputed since its drafting.[168] The Declaration serves as a "common standard of achievement for all people and all nations" rather than a legally binding document, but it has become the basis of two binding treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.[169] In practice, the UN is unable to take significant action against human rights abuses without a Security Council resolution, though it does substantial work in investigating and reporting abuses.[170]

In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; followed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.[171] With the end of the Cold War, the push for human rights action took on new impetus.[172] The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was formed in 1993 to oversee human rights issues for the UN, following the recommendation of that year's World Conference on Human Rights. Jacques Fomerand, a scholar of the UN, describes the organization's mandate as "broad and vague", with only "meagre" resources to carry it out.[173] In 2006, it was replaced by a Human Rights Council consisting of 47 nations.[174] Also in 2006, the General Assembly passed a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,[175] and in 2011 it passed its first resolution recognizing the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community.[176]

Along with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the UN takes a leading role in co-ordinating emergency relief.[193] The World Food Programme (or the WFP) provides food aid in response to famine, natural disasters, and armed conflict. The organization feeds an average of 90 million people in 80 nations per year.[193][194] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (or the UNHCR) works to protect the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people.[195] The UNHCR and the WFP programmes are funded by voluntary contributions from governments, corporations, and individuals, though the UNHCR's administrative costs are paid for by the UN's primary budget.[196]

Core features of the UN apparatus, such as the veto privileges of some nations in the Security Council, are often described as fundamentally undemocratic, contrary to the UN mission, and a main cause of inaction on genocides and crimes against humanity.[231][232] e24fc04721