Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T22:38:39.337Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How nations vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Miguel Marín-Bosch
Miguel Marín-Bosch
Affiliation:
Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations.
Get access

Extract

For over forty years the United Nations’ General Assembly has been meeting annually to examine a broad range of international issues. At the conclusion of its debates, it adopts resolutions and decisions on each of its agenda items. While some resolutions are procedural, many can be considered important, even historic, because of the events they spawned or because they marked a turning point in international relations. These include, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the Partition of Palestine, and the recognition of the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China in the UN.

Type
Research Note
Information
International Organization , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1987 , pp. 705 - 724
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. See, for example, Castañeda, Jorge, Legal Effects of UN Resolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Nicholas, H. G., The United Nations as a Political Institution, 5th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 135Google Scholar; and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's introductory statement to the U.S. State Department's Report to Congress on Voting Practices in the United Nations, February 24, 1985, pp. 1–12Google Scholar. Compare their views to those of Goodrich, Leland M., The United Nations in a Changing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 80–81Google Scholar.

2. This is the approach Planetary Citizens use to analyze UN General Assembly voting patterns.

3. Over the past fifteen years, the UN's Department of Public Information has published the General Assembly voting records. For previous sessions, one must rely on the verbatim records of the General Assembly meetings.