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10 J. Conflict Resol. 1 (1966)

handle is hein.journals/jcfltr10 and id is 1 raw text is: Majority decisions and minority responses in the UN General Assembly CATHERINE SENF MANNO' I. Introduction Twenty years ago, when the representa- tives of 50 countries met in San Francisco to found the United Nations, they decided to adopt a new rule of international deci- sion-making-the rule of the majority. The defunct League of Nations had gradually reduced the severity of the principle of unanimity which it took over from the prac- tice of centuries of international confer- ences and applied to decisions of both its principal organs, the League Assembly and Council (Riches, 1933). But those who drafted the UN Charter in 1945 completely abandoned the unanimity principle in favor of majority or qualified majority voting, by equal voting states, for the representative political organ-the General Assembly. Some two thousand resolutions later, the Nineteenth Session of the General Assem- 'This article is adapted from a chapter of an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Weighted Voting in the UN General Assembly: A Study of Feasibility and Methods (American Uni- versity, 1964). The author is a statistician in the U.S. Census Bureau, Washington; the re- search reported here has no relation to official duties. bly returned once more to unanimity as the basis for decision-making. In that crisis- ridden session, decisions were limited to those few matters that all could agree upon. The crisis had its origin in the refusal of two permanent Security Council members (France and the USSR) to accept assess- ments imposed by a General Assembly ma- jority decision, even though the binding nature of those budgetary obligations was upheld by the International Court of Jus- tice. The Charter provides a sanction against this particular form of noncompli- ance in Article 19, but no member state was willing to risk the consequences of invoking that sanction by taking away the Assembly voting rights of those in ex- cessive arrears. In the absence of agree- ment on a compromise between the princi- pal parties to the conflict-the United States and the Soviet Union-the Assem- bly decided to hold the problem in abey- ance. This course was more attractive than solving the problem either by sacri- ficing part of the Assembly's authority or by risking defections of important Mem- bers.

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