The InterDependent

Since the annual general debate of the United Nations General Assembly is fast approaching – when heads of state and top politicians from member countries deliver speeches on global problems – it makes sense to tackle the cliché that the assembly is an “ineffectual talk shop.” Indeed, the annual debate is considered a place where government officials hold “shop-window speeches” to protect their reputations and the powerless UN body engages in endless debates, producing resolutions that are not legally binding but mere political recommendations and moral rebukes.

This criticism is factually wrong and unfair.

It is wrong because the General Assembly has many powers, starting with deciding on the UN budget. It also elects the members of the Economic and Social Council, the nonpermanent members of the Security Council and – in cooperation with the Security Council – the secretary-general and the judges of the International Court of Justice. In addition, it can create subsidiary entities, like the Human Rights Council.

In this way, the General Assembly has been playing a central role in developing the UN system into a complex network of institutions fulfilling many tasks.

The General Assembly can also work out and adopt international conventions for ratification through the UN member countries and prepare, convene and follow up on world conferences on pressing global themes, such as the Rio conference 1992 on environment and development or the world conference on human rights in Vienna 1993.

By working out the conventions and convening world conferences, the General Assembly has been central in developing international law for many fields, in establishing international regimes of cooperation and in promoting and stabilizing international norms of political behavior beyond the legally binding rules, like the responsibility to protect, the most recent example.

The criticism aimed at the General Assembly is also unfair because it was never meant to be an executive body but instead a forum for deliberation and debate. The weighty decision-making abilities granted to the UN are held by the Security Council, where the great powers are able – through the right of veto – to prevent any decision that counters their own national interests.

Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo

United Nations staff members gather on Sept. 14, 2001, in a ceremony in the General Assembly to show sympathy to those affected by the 9/11 attacks. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is presiding.

Contrary to all cheap clichés, the General Assembly has an important function: It brings together all the countries on an equal footing, offering the opportunity to engage in cooperation at a global level and on a broad spectrum of issues, taking into account the interests of all groups in gradually forming a political consensus.

The assembly is therefore not a political player in the proper sense; it acts indirectly and in the long run, reflecting the common ground of the world’s nations at a given point of time. If this reflection reveals that the world community is unable to act in a political conflict or in solving a global problem, the assembly and its slow, complex mechanisms are not to blame. The inability to act lies in the member countries’ lack of political will. When they are ready to act, the General Assembly proves to be highly effective: Just think of the quick establishment of the post of the High Commissioner for Human Rights through Resolution 48/141 in December 1993 – just six months after the Vienna conference in June 1993.

The primary function of the General Assembly is to create political clarity and a sense of responsibility: What it can do and has done time and again is to speak out clearly on the problems and how they can be solved.

In this context, the general debate provides a few weeks of intellectual focus in national capitals on global themes while drawing the attention of the general public on the United Nations, thanks to media interest during that short period of time.

It is up to the political decision-makers in the member countries themselves to make more use of the insights the General Assembly provides.