Voting in the Security Council and the PLO

1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 470-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Gross

The United States and some other members of the United Nations have been concerned in recent years about the substance of some resolutions of the General Assembly and the procedures by which they were adopted. Their concern was intensified by certain actions at the twenty-ninth session, when the Assembly sustained a ruling of its President with respect to the representation and participation of South Africa in that and future sessions, when it curbed the right of Israel to participate in the debate on the question of Palestine, when it accorded to the representative of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) a treatment usually reserved to the head of a member state, and when it declared by Resolution 3210 (XXIX) of October 14, 1974, “that the Palestinian people is the principal party to the question of Palestine” and invited the PLO “to participate in the deliberations of the General Assembly on the question of Palestine in plenary meetings.”

1966 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-431

Amendments to Articles 23, 27, and 61 of the Charter of the United Nations, adopted by the General Assembly on December 17, 1963, came into force on August 31, 1965. The amendment to Article 23 enlarges the membership of the Security Council from eleven to fifteen. The amended Article 27 provides that decisions of the Security Council on procedural matters be made by an affirmative vote of nine members (formerly seven) and on all other matters by an affirmative vote of nine members (formerly seven), including the concurring votes of the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The amendment to Article 61 enlarges the membership of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) from eighteen to 27.


1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. LeBlanc

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) in December 1948. A representative of the United States signed the Convention, and President Truman later transmitted it to the Senate with a request that it give its advice and consent to ratification. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the Convention in 1950. It has since held hearings on four occasions (1970, 1971, 1977 and 1981), and favorably reported the Convention to the Senate four times (1970, 1971, 1973 and 1976). However, the Senate has failed to act; a resolution of ratification was debated on the floor in 1973-1974, but it fell victim to a filibuster and the Convention remains in committee.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
David Bosco

Less has changed in US diplomacy at the United Nations than many observers expected when the Obama administration took office in January 2009. In the UN Security Council, the United States has pursued a generally steady course that in many respects builds on the accomplishments of the Bush administration. Unexpectedly, the Security Council’s pace of work diminished considerably during the first few years of the new administration. The most significant change is the atmospherics of US diplomacy, not its substance: the Obama administration has participated in processes that the Bush administration shunned and has toned down US criticism of the United Nations’ perceived shortcomings.


1988 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 833-837
Author(s):  
Eric S. Koenig

Plaintiff, the United States, brought an action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and four individuals seeking an injunction to close the PLO’s Permanent Observer Mission (Mission) to the United Nations as violative of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 (ATA). The district court (per Palmieri, J.) entered summary judgment for defendants and held: (1) the ATA does not require the closure of the PLO’s Mission to the United Nations; (2) the status of the PLO’s Mission, an invitee of the United Nations, is protected by the Agreement Between the United States and the United Nations Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations (Headquarters Agreement); and (3) Congress did not intend the ATA to supersede the Headquarters Agreement.


1967 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-510 ◽  

The General Assembly held its 21st session, comprising the 1409th–1501st plenary meetings, at UN Headquarters from September 20 to December 20, 1966, during which time it took action on 98 agenda items and adopted 115 resolutions. During the session the Assembly unanimously admitted four new states to UN membership: Guyana on September 20, Botswana and Lesotho on October 17, and Barbados on December 9, 1966. In accordance with a telegram of September 19 from the Ambassador of Indonesia to the United States addressed to the Secretary-General in which he stated that his government had decided to resume full cooperation with the United Nations and to resume participation in its activities starting with the 21st session of the Assembly and upon the Assembly's expression of its agreement to that effect Indonesia resumed full participation in the work of the UN on September 28. The Organization's total membership thereby reached 122 during the session.


1947 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-343

The last of the main organs of the United Nations to begin functioning, the Trusteeship Council met for its first session at Lake Success on March 26, 1947. Representatives were present from five powers administering trust territories (Australia, Belgium, France, New Zealand and United Kingdom) and four non-administering states (China, Iraq, Mexico, and the United States); the USSR, although automatically a member of the Council by virtue of her permanent membership on the Security Council, did not designate a representative and took no part in the activities of the Council.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Terlingen

When on October 13, 2016, the General Assembly appointed by acclamation António Guterres of Portugal as the United Nations’ ninth secretary-general, there was a sense of excitement among the organization's 193 members. For once, so it seemed, they felt they had played an important role not only in choosing the secretary-general but also in appointing a man generally considered to be an outstanding candidate for a position memorably described as “the most impossible job on this earth.” The five permanent, veto-wielding members of the Security Council (Perm Five) still exercised the greatest power in the selection process, as they always had in the past. Yet the candidate chosen appears, surprisingly, not to have been the first choice of either the United States or Russia, two of the Perm Five that until then had effectively chosen the secretary-general between them in an opaque and outdated process. It is doubtful that António Guterres would have been appointed if the General Assembly had not embarked on a novel process to select him.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-281
Author(s):  
Stefano Recchia

Abstract Research suggests that military interveners often seek endorsements from regional international organizations (IOs), in addition to approval from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to reassure international and domestic audiences. Toward that end, interveners should seek the endorsement of continent-wide regional IOs with the broadest and most diverse membership, which are most likely to be independent. In practice, however, interveners often seek endorsements from subregional IOs with narrow membership and aggregate preferences similar to their own. This should weaken the reassurance/legitimation effect significantly. I argue that such narrower regional endorsements are sought not so much to reassure skeptical audiences, as to pressure reluctant UNSC members to approve the intervention by putting those members’ relations with regional partners at stake. To illustrate this argument and probe its plausibility, I reconstruct France's successful efforts to obtain UNSC approval for its interventions in Côte d'Ivoire (2002–2003) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2003) at a time when the United States was hesitant to support France because of the two countries’ falling-out over the Iraq War. For evidence I rely on original interviews with senior French and US officials.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Cupać ◽  
Irem Ebetürk

Antifeminist mobilisation is growing in the United Nations. It is led by a coalition of certain post-Soviet, Catholic, and Islamic states; the United States; the Vatican; conservative nongovernmental organisations, occasionally joined by the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, the UN Africa Group, and the G77. Uniting them is the aim of restoring the ‘natural family’ and opposing ‘gender ideology’. The group has become increasingly strategic, and its impact can already be seen in a number of UN fora, including the Security Council. By surveying feminist notions of backlash and comparing them to Alter and Zürn’s definition of ‘backlash politics’, the article gauges whether the group’s activities can be characterised as such politics. The conclusion is that they can, suggesting that we are looking at a group with the potential to alter not only the global course of women’s rights but also how politics is done within the UN.


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