ABSTRACT
Article 7 of the Charter establishes the General Assembly as one of six “principal organs” of the United Nations (UN). It is the only one of the six that includes representatives of all member states, simultaneously respecting and confirming their sovereign equality by giving each of them one vote, regardless of military power, wealth, population, size of territory, or any other characteristic. Historically, it is successor to the Assembly of the League of Nations. The League Assembly also included representatives of all member states but tended to be overshadowed by the League Council, where the foreign ministers of the major powers often met to address the major crises of the day. As decolonization brought former colonies into the organization, the UN General Assembly has evolved from a fifty-one-member body drawn, like its League predecessor, mainly from Europe and Latin America to a 191member body with a primarily African and Asian membership. More constant, and also building on League experience, has been the use of regional and other caucusing groups to organize the members into clusters that give structure to interactions (see Chapter 3).
