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What is the point of the UN General Assembly?
The United Nations (UN) General Assembly is the world’s parliament, where all the UN’s 193 member states are represented. Each sovereign state gets one vote so it is not exactly representative of the world’s population. The General Assembly is not nearly as powerful as the Security Council, which can pass binding resolutions, and is dominated by the five permanent members: the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France and Russia, who each have a veto. But the General Assembly can express world opinion, make recommendations to the Security Council and elect the Council’s non-permanent members. The 74th session takes place this year, in September, in New York.
The General Assembly and the Security Council are two of six main organs of the UN. They sit alongside the Secretariat, the International Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council. The world’s leaders converge on New York, where each is given a time limit of 15 minutes to speak in front of the green marble podium and orate in front of the world. Leaders occupy positions in the hall in alphabetical order by country name, usually with a different nation occupying the first seat each year.
In truth, the General Assembly week usually makes news in the first day or two, when the United States president and other powerful heads of state tend to have their moment, and then attention tends to tail off. For that reason, there is always some horse trading before the General Assembly week, with ′ ministers from big countries trying to swap speaking slots with presidents of small countries. This year, there is a climate action summit on the eve of the general debate, attended by the teen activist, Greta Thunberg. Putting the climate emergency centre stage and forcing states to do something are two very distinct things, however.
Although it is the UN Secretary General who gets the limelight for most of the year, the event gives the president of the General Assembly, elected each year by the member states ahead of general debate, a chance to shine. This year it is Nigeria’s Tijjani Muhammad-Bande. After the initial excitement of greeting the world leaders, however, it is rather a thankless task, introducing each leader to the assembly and then sitting through one speech after another, most of them turgid and self-congratulatory.
The UN General Assembly is the world’s biggest summit and it attracts a lot of side events because of the proximity and potential participation of world leaders. The most glittering of these events is the Goalkeepers conference run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where celebrities, activists and politicians will talk about global inequality
(Julian Borger. www.theguardian.com, 23.09.2019. Adaptado.)
In the excerpt from the first paragraph “which can pass binding resolutions”, the underlined word indicates
