Argument from silence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_silence 

Marco Polo's travel journals are silent on the Great Wall of China, which some believe (against the historical consensus) is evidence of him never visiting the country, or rather exemplifies his gift in diplomatic mindfulness.

To make an argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio) is to express a conclusion that is based on the absence of statements in historical documents, rather than their presence. In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the assertion that an author is ignorant of a subject, based on the lack of references to it in the author's available writings.

Thus in historical analysis with an argument from silence, the absence of a reference to an event or a document is used to cast doubt on the event not mentioned. While most historical approaches rely on what an author's works contain, an argument from silence relies on what the book or document does not contain. This approach thus uses what an author "should have said" rather than what is available in the author's extant writings.

An argument from silence may apply to a document only if the author was expected to have the information, was intending to give a complete account of the situation, and the item was important enough and interesting enough to deserve to be mentioned at the time.

Arguments from silence, based on a writer's failure to mention an event, are distinct from arguments from ignorance which rely on a total "absence of evidence" and are widely considered unreliable; however arguments from silence themselves are also generally viewed as rather weak in many cases; or considered as fallacies.

Historical analysis

Structure of the argument

A copy of Magna Carta, 1287

John Lange provided the basic structure for the analysis of arguments from silence based on three components:

• An extant document D in which no reference to an event E appears.

• It is known that the intention of the author of document D was to provide an exhaustive list of all the events in the class of events to which E belongs

• Event E is assumed to be a type of event which the author of D would not have overlooked, had the event taken place.

The applicability of these three conditions is decided on a case-by-case basis, and there are no general dialectical rules for them, except the historian's expertise in evaluating the situation. In Lange's analysis, an argument from silence is only suggestive and never logically conclusive.

Professors of history Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier thus state that an argument from silence can act as presumptive evidence only if the person failing to mention the information was in a position to have the information, and was purporting to be giving a complete account of the story in question. Howell and Prevenier state that arguments from silence face the difficulty that a historian can not just assume that an author would have recorded the fact in question; for if the fact did not seem important enough to an author it would have been excluded.

Professor of English Michael Duncan states that there are very few scholarly analyses of arguments from silence; but these typically view it as fallacious. Duncan adds that arguments from silence are not mentioned in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations or Hamblin's book Fallacies, but both of these texts discuss the somewhat similar case of argument from ignorance. Errietta Bissa, professor of Classics at University of Wales, flatly states that arguments from silence are not valid. David Henige states that, although risky, such arguments can at times shed light on historical events.

Author's interest

The importance of an event to contemporary author plays a role in the decision to mention it, and historian Krishnaji Chitnis states that for an argument from silence to apply, it must be of interest and significance to the person expected to be recording it, else it may be ignored; e.g. while later historians have lauded the Magna Carta as a great national document, contemporary authors did not even record a word about its greatness; to them it was a feudal document of low significance, among several other seemingly similar items.

Classicist Timothy Barnes notes that the low level of interest in and awareness of Christians within the Roman Empire at the turn of the first century resulted in the lack of any discernible mention of them by Roman authors such as Martial and Juvenal, although Christians had been present in Rome since the reign of Claudius (41 to 54 AD) and both authors referred to Judaism. Theologian Peter Lampe states that during the first two centuries, the silence of Roman sources on Christians in Rome may be partly due to the fact that Christians often kept to themselves and did not reveal their identities.

Examples

Convincing applications

A page of a medieval Talmud

An example of a convincing application is that while the editors of the Yerushalmi and Bavli talmuds mention the other community, most scholars believe these documents were written independently; and Louis Jacobs writes, "If the editors of either had had access to an actual text of the other, it is inconceivable that they would not have mentioned this. Here the argument from silence is very convincing."

Sometimes the silence of multiple sources may have a probative value that sheds light on the historical circumstance, for instance Jacob Neusner states that an argument from silence regarding the absence of an Exilarch sheds light on the relationship between Jews and the Parthian administration in Babylonia.

An example of a convincing application is the silence of Cicero on works of oratory by Cato; the argument gaining its strength from the fact that Cato was such an important figure in Cicero's Brutus and he would have likely been cited if possible. Although Cicero's silence on Cato is a convincing argument from silence, the same strength does not apply to Cicero's silence on the questorship of Caelius, Michael Alexander stating that a number of factors may have precluded Cicero from mentioning it.

Failed applications

Yifa has pointed out the perils of arguments from silence, in that the lack of references to a compilation of a set of monastic codes by contemporaries or even by disciples does not mean that it never existed. This is well illustrated by the case of Changlu Zongze's "Rules of purity" which he wrote for the Chan monastery in 1103. One of his contemporaries wrote a preface to a collection of his writings neglecting to mention his code. And none of his biographies nor the documents of the Transmission of the Lamp, nor the Pure Land documents (which exalt him) refer to Zongze's collection of a monastic code. However a copy of the code in which the author identifies himself exists.

Historian Pierre Briant points out that the recent discovery of a customs memorandum from Egypt which dates to the time of Xerxes and records the registration and taxation of ships overrides previous reasonings about the type of commercial prosperity associated with Sidon based on the relative silence in texts about roads and is a reminder of the dangers of any argument from silence.

Frances Wood based her controversial book Did Marco Polo go to China? on arguments from silence. Woods argued that Marco Polo never went to China and fabricated his accounts because he failed to mention elements from the visual landscape such as tea, did not record the Great Wall and neglected to record practices such as foot-binding. She argued that no outsider could spend 15 years in China and not observe and record these elements. Most historians disagree with Wood's reasoning.

Professors of philosophy Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard state that arguments from silence are generally weak and can go astray in many cases, and point to examples such as Marco Polo's neglect of the Wall of China, and Pliny the Younger's silence on the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum when he discusses the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius in detail in his letters.

Use with caution

A denier from Bourges, 1180

Some historians note the general dangers of arguing from silence, but use them in specific cases as indications of levels of professional activity within medieval communities, e.g. historian John E. Law states that while arguing from silence is always dangerous, one may use it as an indication of the low level of local military employment in Camerino for the Da Varano in the Middle Ages. Similarly, historian Patricia Skinner states that after accounting for the dangers of arguments from silence they may provide an indication of the scarcity of females within the medical profession in medieval southern Italy. Historian James Amelang has pointed out that although the autobiographies of early medieval artisans are surprisingly silent on issues regarding their trade and craft, arguing from silence includes hazards in that historians may be assigning weight to past significance in view of modern emphasis.

Barrie J. Cook, the British Museum European coin curator, notes the risks of arguing from silence, yet states that they may shed light on the medieval propensity of the usage of the French denier from Le Mans versus the Angevine.

Greg Walker, professor of rhetoric and English, states that during the reign of Henry VIII, the lack of references to named plays by Nicholas Udall (e.g. the Respublica) do not necessarily support their not having been performed at court; given other evidence such as payment warrants issued to Udall for performance masks.

Legal aspects

Jed Rubenfeld, professor of Law at Yale Law School, has shown an example of the difficulty in applying arguments from silence in constitutional law, stating that although arguments from silence can be used to draw conclusions about the intent of the Framers of the US Constitution, their application can lead to two different conclusions and hence they can not be used to settle the issues.

In the context of Morocco's Truth Commission of 1999 regarding torture and secret detentions, Wu and Livescu state that the fact that someone remained silent is no proof of their ignorance about a specific piece of information. They point out that the absence of records about the torture of prisoners under the secret detention program is no proof that such detentions did not involve torture, or that some detentions did not take place.

Russell's teapot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot 

Part of a series on
Bertrand Russell
Views on philosophy Views on society Russell's paradox Russell's teapot Theory of descriptions Logical atomism

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.

Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

Russell's teapot is still invoked in discussions concerning the existence of God, and has had influence in various fields and media.

Description

In an article titled "Is There a God?" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy:

I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.

Analysis

Chemist Peter Atkins said that the point of Russell's teapot is that there is no burden on anyone to disprove assertions. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler theory with fewer assertions (e.g., a universe with no supernatural beings) should be the starting point in the discussion rather than the more complex theory. Responding to the invocation of Russell's "Celestial Teapot" by Richard Dawkins as evidence against religion, an apologia by philosopher Paul Chamberlain contends that such arguments rely on an undue distinction between positive and negative claims. Chamberlain says it is logically erroneous to assert that positive truth claims bear a burden of proof while negative truth claims do not; he says "every truth claim, whether positive or negative, has a burden of proof."

In his books A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and The God Delusion (2006), biologist Richard Dawkins used the teapot as an analogy of an argument against what he termed "agnostic conciliation", a policy of intellectual appeasement that allows for philosophical domains that concern exclusively religious matters. Science has no way of establishing the existence or non-existence of a god. Therefore, according to the agnostic conciliator, because it is a matter of individual taste, belief and disbelief in a supreme being are deserving of equal respect and attention. Dawkins presents the teapot as a reductio ad absurdum of this position: if agnosticism demands giving equal respect to the belief and disbelief in a supreme being, then it must also give equal respect to belief in an orbiting teapot, since the existence of an orbiting teapot is just as plausible scientifically as the existence of a supreme being.

Philosopher Brian Garvey argues that the teapot analogy fails with regard to religion because, with the teapot, the believer and non-believer are simply disagreeing about one item in the universe and may hold in common all other beliefs about the universe, which is not true of an atheist and a theist. Garvey argues that it is not a matter of the theist propounding existence of a thing and the atheist simply denying it – each is asserting an alternative explanation of why the cosmos exists and is the way it is: "the atheist is not just denying an existence that the theist affirms – the atheist is in addition committed to the view that the universe is not the way it is because of God. It is either the way it is because of something other than God, or there is no reason it is the way it is."

Philosopher Peter van Inwagen argues that while Russell's teapot is a fine piece of rhetoric, its logical argument form is less than clear, and attempting to make it clear reveals that the Teapot Argument is very far from cogent. Another philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, states that a falsehood lies at the heart of Russell's argument. Russell's argument assumes that there is no evidence against the teapot, but Plantinga disagrees:

Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven't. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism.

Philosopher Gary Gutting rejects Russell's teapot for similar reasons, arguing that Russell's argument accords theism far less support than it actually has. Gutting points out that numerous sensible, competent people appeal to personal experience and arguments in support of God's existence. Thus, to simply reject the existence of God, out of hand, seems unjustified, according to Gutting.

The literary critic James Wood, without believing in God, says that belief in God "is a good deal more reasonable than belief in a teapot" because God is a "grand and big idea" which "is not analogically disproved by reference to celestial teapots or vacuum cleaners, which lack the necessary bigness and grandeur" and "because God cannot be reified, cannot be turned into a mere thing".

One counter-argument, advanced by philosopher Eric Reitan, is that belief in God is different from belief in a teapot because teapots are physical and therefore in principle verifiable, and that given what we know about the physical world we have no good reason to think that belief in Russell's teapot is justified and at least some reason to think it not.

Similar analogies

Other thinkers have posited non-disprovable analogies, such as J. B. Bury in his 1913 book, History of Freedom of Thought:

Some people speak as if we were not justified in rejecting a theological doctrine unless we can prove it false. But the burden of proof does not lie upon the rejecter.... If you were told that in a certain planet revolving around Sirius there is a race of donkeys who speak the English language and spend their time in discussing eugenics, you could not disprove the statement, but would it, on that account, have any claim to be believed? Some minds would be prepared to accept it, if it were reiterated often enough, through the potent force of suggestion.

Astronomer Carl Sagan in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World offered a similar non-disprovable analogy called the Dragon in the Garage as an example of skeptical thinking. If Sagan claimed there was a dragon in his garage, you would wish to verify it for yourself but if Sagan's dragon was impossible to detect:

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?

Influence in religious parodies

The concept of Russell's teapot has influenced more explicitly religion-parodying concepts such as the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 1960s musician and psychedelic poet Daevid Allen of the band Gong employed the image of a flying teapot in his Planet Gong Universe and the Flying Teapot album trilogy, and refers to Russell's teapot in his book Gong Dreaming 2: The Histories & Mysteries of Gong from 1969-1975.

 

Argument from ignorance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance 

 

John Locke

Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents "a lack of contrary evidence"), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true. This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false. It also does not allow for the possibility that the answer is unknowable, only knowable in the future, or neither completely true nor completely false. In debates, appealing to ignorance is sometimes an attempt to shift the burden of proof. In research, low-power experiments are subject to false negatives (there would have been an observable effect if there had been a larger sample size or better experimental design) and false positives (there was an observable coincidental effect). The term was likely coined by philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century.

Examples

False positives

Often seen in anecdotal evidence, superstitions, correlation-causation fallacies, and experiments with small sample size

• "I took a placebo pill and now my symptoms are completely gone. The placebo cured my symptoms."
• "I wore red socks and we won the baseball game. My red socks helped win the game."
• "When ice cream sales increase, so do murders, therefore more ice cream causes more murders". (These events correlate due to the common element of high temperatures. High temperatures, not ice cream sales, leads to more murders).

Absence of evidence

These examples contain or represent missing information.

• Statements that begin with "I can't prove it but ..." are often referring to some kind of absence of evidence.
• "There is no evidence of foul play here" is a direct reference to the absence of evidence.
• "There is no evidence of aliens, and therefore, aliens do not exist" appeals to an absence of evidence.
• "A recent study said there is no strong evidence that shows flossing reduces cavities or gum disease." The NIH dental health expert indicated that large-scale, long-term clinical trials are expensive and challenging to perform, and that patients would still likely benefit from flossing.

False negatives

These examples have the potential for "false negative" results.

• When the doctor says that the test results were negative (a month later the test is positive).
• Under "Termites" the inspector checked the box that read "no" (a week later termites are discovered).
• A patient uses an antibiotic for only one day and stops because they feel it isn't working. (Had they used it for 7 days the drug would have worked).

Evidence of absence

These examples contain definite evidence that can be used to show, indicate, suggest, infer or deduce the non-existence or non-presence of something.

• One very carefully inspects the back seat of one's car and finds no adult-sized kangaroos.
• The police did not find a gun in the suspect's clothing.
• The elderly patient did not have any teeth in his mouth.

Arguments from ignorance

(Draws a conclusion based on lack of knowledge or evidence without accounting for all possibilities)

• "I take the view that this lack (of enemy subversive activity in the west coast) is the most ominous sign in our whole situation. It convinces me more than perhaps any other factor that the sabotage we are to get, the Fifth Column activities are to get, are timed just like Pearl Harbor ... I believe we are just being lulled into a false sense of security." – Earl Warren, then California's Attorney General (before a congressional hearing in San Francisco on 21 February 1942).
• This example clearly states what appeal to ignorance is: "Although we have proven that the moon is not made of spare ribs, we have not proven that its core cannot be filled with them; therefore, the moon’s core is filled with spare ribs."
• Carl Sagan explains in his book The Demon-Haunted World:

Appeal to ignorance: the claim that whatever has not been proven false must be true, and vice versa. (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore, UFOs exist, and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Related terms

Contraposition and transposition

Contraposition is a logically valid rule of inference that allows the creation of a new proposition from the negation and reordering of an existing one. The method applies to any proposition of the type If A then B and says that negating all the variables and switching them back to front leads to a new proposition i.e. If Not-B then Not-A that is just as true as the original one and that the first implies the second and the second implies the first.

Transposition is exactly the same thing as Contraposition, described in a different language.

Null result

Null result is a term often used in science to indicate evidence of absence. A search for water on the ground may yield a null result (the ground is dry); therefore, it probably did not rain.

Related arguments

Argument from self-knowing

Arguments from self-knowing take the form:

1. If P were true then I would know it; in fact I do not know it; therefore P cannot be true.
2. If Q were false then I would know it; in fact I do not know it; therefore Q cannot be false.

In practice these arguments are often unsound and rely on the truth of the supporting premise. For example, the claim that If I had just sat on a wild porcupine then I would know it is probably not fallacious and depends entirely on the truth of the first premise (the ability to know it).

Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution 

 

The Bill of Rights in the National Archives

The Ninth Amendment (Amendment IX) to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. It is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment reads:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The amendment was introduced during the drafting of the Bill of Rights when some of the American founders became concerned that future generations might argue that, because a certain right was not listed in the Bill of Rights, it did not exist. However, the Ninth Amendment has rarely played any role in U.S. constitutional law, and until the 1980s was often considered "forgotten" or "irrelevant" by many legal academics.

Text

The amendment as proposed by Congress in 1789 and later ratified as the Ninth Amendment reads as follows:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The hand-written copy of the proposed Bill of Rights, 1789, cropped to just show the text that would later be ratified as the Ninth Amendment

Background before adoption

When the U.S. Constitution was put to the states for ratification after being signed on September 17, 1787, the Anti-Federalists argued that a Bill of Rights should be added. One of the arguments the Federalists gave against the addition of a Bill of Rights, during the debates about ratification of the Constitution, was that a listing of rights could problematically enlarge the powers specified in Article One, Section 8 of the new Constitution by implication. For example, in Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton asked, "Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" Likewise, James Madison explained to Thomas Jefferson, "I conceive that in a certain degree ... the rights in question are reserved by the manner in which the federal powers are granted" by Article One, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The Anti-Federalists persisted in favor of a Bill of Rights during the ratification debates, but also were against ratification, and consequently several of the state ratification conventions gave their assent with accompanying resolutions proposing amendments to be added. In 1788, the Virginia Ratifying Convention attempted to solve the problem that Hamilton and the Federalists had identified by proposing a constitutional amendment specifying:

That those clauses which declare that Congress shall not exercise certain powers be not interpreted in any manner whatsoever to extend the powers of Congress. But that they may be construed either as making exceptions to the specified powers where this shall be the case, or otherwise as inserted merely for greater caution.

This proposal ultimately led to the Ninth Amendment. In 1789, while introducing to the House of Representatives nineteen draft Amendments, James Madison addressed what would become the Ninth Amendment as follows:

It has been objected also against a Bill of Rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.

Like Alexander Hamilton, Madison was concerned that enumerating various rights could "enlarge the powers delegated by the constitution". To attempt to solve this problem, Madison submitted this draft to Congress:

The exceptions here or elsewhere in the constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people; or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.

This was an intermediate form of the Ninth Amendment that borrowed language from the Virginia proposal, while foreshadowing the final version.

The final text of the Ninth Amendment, like Madison's draft, speaks of other rights than those enumerated in the Constitution. The character of those other rights was indicated by Madison in his speech introducing the Bill of Rights (emphasis added):

It has been said, by way of objection to a bill of rights ... that in the Federal Government they are unnecessary, because the powers are enumerated, and it follows, that all that are not granted by the constitution are retained; that the constitution is a bill of powers, the great residuum being the rights of the people; and, therefore, a bill of rights cannot be so necessary as if the residuum was thrown into the hands of the Government. I admit that these arguments are not entirely without foundation, but they are not as conclusive to the extent it has been proposed. It is true the powers of the general government are circumscribed; they are directed to particular objects; but even if government keeps within those limits, it has certain discretionary powers with respect to the means, which may admit of abuse.

The First through Eighth Amendments address the means by which the federal government exercises its enumerated powers, while the Ninth Amendment addresses a "great residuum" of rights that have not been "thrown into the hands of the government", as Madison put it. The Ninth Amendment became part of the Constitution on December 15, 1791, upon ratification by three-fourths of the states.

The final form of the amendment ratified by the states is as follows:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Judicial interpretation

The Ninth Amendment has generally been regarded by the courts as negating any expansion of governmental power on account of the enumeration of rights in the Constitution, but the Amendment has not been regarded as further limiting governmental power. The U.S. Supreme Court explained this, in U.S. Public Workers v. Mitchell 330 U.S. 75 (1947): "If granted power is found, necessarily the objection of invasion of those rights, reserved by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, must fail."

The Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore (1833) that the Bill of Rights was enforceable by the federal courts only against the federal government, not against the states. Thus, the Ninth Amendment originally applied only to the federal government, which is a government of enumerated powers.

Some jurists have asserted that the Ninth Amendment is relevant to the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Arthur Goldberg (joined by Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan) expressed this view in a concurring opinion in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965):

The Framers did not intend that the first eight amendments be construed to exhaust the basic and fundamental rights ... I do not mean to imply that the ... Ninth Amendment constitutes an independent source of rights protected from infringement by either the States or the Federal Government ... While the Ninth Amendment – and indeed the entire Bill of Rights – originally concerned restrictions upon federal power, the subsequently enacted Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the States as well from abridging fundamental personal liberties. And, the Ninth Amendment, in indicating that not all such liberties are specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments, is surely relevant in showing the existence of other fundamental personal rights, now protected from state, as well as federal, infringement. In sum, the Ninth Amendment simply lends strong support to the view that the "liberty" protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments from infringement by the Federal Government or the States is not restricted to rights specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments. Cf. United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75, 94–95.

In support of his interpretation of the Ninth, Goldberg quoted from Madison's speech in the House of Representatives as well as from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 84:

I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted, and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.

But the two Justices who dissented in Griswold replied that Goldberg was mistaken to invoke the Ninth as authority. Hugo Black's dissent said:

My Brother GOLDBERG has adopted the recent discovery that the Ninth Amendment, as well as the Due Process Clause, can be used by this Court as authority to strike down all state legislation which this Court thinks violates "fundamental principles of liberty and justice", or is contrary to the "traditions and [collective] conscience of our people". ... [O]ne would certainly have to look far beyond the language of the Ninth Amendment to find that the Framers vested in this Court any such awesome veto powers over lawmaking, either by the States or by the Congress. Nor does anything in the history of the Amendment offer any support for such a shocking doctrine. The whole history of the adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights points the other way, and the very material quoted by my Brother GOLDBERG shows that the Ninth Amendment was intended to protect against the idea that, "by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power" to the Federal Government, "those rights which were not singled out were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government [the United States], and were consequently insecure." That Amendment was passed not to broaden the powers of this Court or any other department of "the General Government", but, as every student of history knows, to assure the people that the Constitution in all its provisions was intended to limit the Federal Government to the powers granted expressly or by necessary implication. ... [F]or a period of a century and a half, no serious suggestion was ever made that the Ninth Amendment, enacted to protect state powers against federal invasion, could be used as a weapon of federal power to prevent state legislatures from passing laws they consider appropriate to govern local affairs.

And Potter Stewart's dissent said:

[T]o say that the Ninth Amendment has anything to do with this case is to turn somersaults with history. The Ninth Amendment, like its companion, the Tenth, which this Court held "states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered", United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 312 U.S. 124, was framed by James Madison and adopted by the States simply to make clear that the adoption of the Bill of Rights did not alter the plan that the Federal Government was to be a government of express and limited powers, and that all rights and powers not delegated to it were retained by the people and the individual States. Until today, no member of this Court has ever suggested that the Ninth Amendment meant anything else, and the idea that a federal court could ever use the Ninth Amendment to annul a law passed by the elected representatives of the people of the State of Connecticut would have caused James Madison no little wonder.

Since Griswold, some judges have tried to use the Ninth Amendment to justify judicially enforcing rights that are not enumerated. For example, the District Court that heard the case of Roe v. Wade ruled in favor of a "Ninth Amendment right to choose to have an abortion," although it stressed that the right was "not unqualified or unfettered." However, Justice William O. Douglas rejected that view; Douglas wrote that "The Ninth Amendment obviously does not create federally enforceable rights." See Doe v. Bolton (1973). Douglas joined the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe, which stated that a federally enforceable right to privacy, "whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stated in Gibson v. Matthews, 926 F.2d 532, 537 (6th Cir. 1991) that the Ninth Amendment was intended to vitiate the maxim of expressio unius est exclusio alterius according to which the express mention of one thing excludes all others:

[T]he ninth amendment does not confer substantive rights in addition to those conferred by other portions of our governing law. The ninth amendment was added to the Bill of Rights to ensure that the maxim expression unique est exclusion alterius would not be used at a later time to deny fundamental rights merely because they were not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

Justice Antonin Scalia expressed the view, in the dissenting opinion of Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), that:

The Declaration of Independence ... is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people.

Scholarly interpretation

Professor Laurence Tribe shares the view that this amendment does not confer substantive rights: "It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution."

In 2000, Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn gave a speech at the White House on the subject of the Ninth Amendment. He said that the Ninth Amendment refers to "a universe of rights, possessed by the people – latent rights, still to be evoked and enacted into law ... a reservoir of other, unenumerated rights that the people retain, which in time may be enacted into law". Similarly, journalist Brian Doherty has argued that the Ninth Amendment "specifically roots the Constitution in a natural rights tradition that says we are born with more rights than any constitution could ever list or specify."

Robert Bork, often considered an originalist, stated during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing that a judge should not apply a constitutional provision like this one if he does not know what it means; the example Bork then gave was a clause covered by an inkblot. Upon further study, Bork later ascribed a meaning to the Ninth Amendment in his book The Tempting of America. In that book, Bork subscribed to the interpretation of constitutional historian Russell Caplan, who asserted that this Amendment was meant to ensure that the federal Bill of Rights would not affect provisions in state law that restrain state governments.

A libertarian originalist, Randy Barnett has argued that the Ninth Amendment requires what he calls a presumption of liberty. Barnett also argues that the Ninth Amendment prevents the government from invalidating a ruling by either a jury or lower court through strict interpretation of the Bill of Rights. According to Barnett, "The purpose of the Ninth Amendment was to ensure that all individual natural rights had the same stature and force after some of them were enumerated as they had before."

According to professor and former Circuit Judge Michael W. McConnell,

[T]he rights retained by the people are indeed individual natural rights, but those rights enjoy precisely the same status and are protected in the same way, as before the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. They are not relinquished, denied, or disparaged. Nor do natural rights become "constitutional rights." They are simply what all retained rights were before the enactment of the Bill of Rights: a guide to equitable interpretation and a rationale for the narrow construction of statutes that might be thought to infringe them, but not superior to explicit positive law. This understanding of the relation of unenumerated natural rights to a positive law closely resembles the relationship between common law and legislation: the common law governs in the absence of contrary legislation, and sometimes even guides or limits the interpretation of ambiguous or overbroad statutes, but does not prevail in the teeth of specific statutory overrides.

This mode of interpretation offers a middle way between the two usual poles of unenumerated rights jurisprudence. One pole

maintains that if a claimed right cannot be found in the Constitution, even applying a liberal construction to its terms, it is entitled to no protection at all ... The other pole maintains that there are unwritten natural rights whose content must inevitably be determined, finally and without the possibility of legislative override, by judges. These rights then receive full constitutional protection even when the representatives of the people have reached the contrary conclusion ... If I am correct about the meaning of the Ninth Amendment, neither of these approaches is entirely correct. Rather, an assertion of a natural right (generally founded on common law or other long-standing practice) will be judicially enforceable unless there is specific and explicit positive law to the contrary. This allows the representatives of the people, rather than members of the judiciary, to make the ultimate determination of when natural rights should yield to the peace, safety, and happiness of society.

Still others, such as Thomas B. McAffee, have argued that the Ninth Amendment protects the unenumerated "residuum" of rights which the federal government was never empowered to violate.

According to lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jesup Stimson, the framers of the Constitution and the Ninth Amendment intended that no rights that they already held would be lost through omission. Law professor Charles Lund Black took a similar position, though Stimson and Black respectively acknowledged that their views differed from the modern view, and differed from the prevalent view in academic writing.

Gun rights activists in recent decades have sometimes argued for a fundamental natural right to keep and bear arms in the United States that both predates the U.S. Constitution and is covered by the Constitution's Ninth Amendment; according to this viewpoint, the Second Amendment only enumerates a pre-existing right to keep and bear arms.

Recapitulation

The Ninth Amendment explicitly bars denial of unenumerated rights if the denial is based on the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution, but this amendment does not explicitly bar denial of unenumerated rights if the denial is based on the enumeration of certain powers in the Constitution. It is to that enumeration of powers that the courts have pointed, in order to determine the extent of the unenumerated rights mentioned in the Ninth Amendment.

 

United Nations General Assembly

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly 

United Nations General Assembly

United Nations (UN) General Assembly hall at the UN Headquarters, New York City
Abbreviation	GA UNGA AG
Formation	1945
Type	Principal organ
Legal status	Active
Head	Volkan Bozkır (President)
Parent organization	United Nations
Website	un.org/ga

Membership and participation
For two articles dealing with the membership of and participation in the General Assembly, see: General Assembly members General Assembly observers

Principal organs of the
United Nations System
Secretariat
Secretary-GeneralSelection · Headquarters
General Assembly
President · Member countriesRepresentatives · Resolution · Groups
International Court of Justice
President · JudgesJurisdiction · Cases · Headquarters
Security Council
Presidency · MembersResolution · List of resolutions · Veto
Economic and Social Council
President · MembersCommissions · Committees · Agencies
Trusteeship Council
Trust territoriesNon-self-governing territories
Website · WikisourceUnited Nations Charter

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; French: Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policy-making, and representative organ of the UN. Its powers, composition, functions, and procedures are set out in Chapter IV of the United Nations Charter. The UNGA is responsible for the UN budget, appointing the non-permanent members to the Security Council, appointing the Secretary-General of the United Nations, receiving reports from other parts of the UN system, and making recommendations through resolutions. It also establishes numerous subsidiary organs to advance or assist in its broad mandate. The UNGA is the only UN organ wherein all member states have equal representation.

The General Assembly meets under its president or the UN secretary-general in annual sessions at UN headquarters in New York City; the main part of these meetings generally run from September to part of January until all issues are addressed (which is often before the next session starts). It can also reconvene for special and emergency special sessions. The first session was convened on 10 January 1946 in the Methodist Central Hall in London and included representatives of the 51 founding nations.

Voting in the General Assembly on certain important questions—namely recommendations on peace and security; budgetary concerns; and the election, admission, suspension or expulsion of members—is by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. Other questions are decided by a simple majority. Each member country has one vote. Apart from the approval of budgetary matters, including the adoption of a scale of assessment, Assembly resolutions are not binding on the members. The Assembly may make recommendations on any matters within the scope of the UN, except matters of peace and security under the Security Council consideration.

During the 1980s, the Assembly became a forum for "North-South dialogue" between industrialized nations and developing countries on a range of international issues. These issues came to the fore because of the phenomenal growth and changing makeup of the UN membership. In 1945, the UN had 51 members, which by the 21st century nearly quadrupled to 193, of which more than two-thirds are developing. Because of their numbers, developing countries are often able to determine the agenda of the Assembly (using coordinating groups like the G77), the character of its debates, and the nature of its decisions. For many developing countries, the UN is the source of much of their diplomatic influence and the principal outlet for their foreign relations initiatives.

Although the resolutions passed by the General Assembly do not have the binding forces over the member nations (apart from budgetary measures), pursuant to its Uniting for Peace resolution of November 1950 (resolution 377 (V)), the Assembly may also take action if the Security Council fails to act, owing to the negative vote of a permanent member, in a case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression. The Assembly can consider the matter immediately with a view to making recommendations to Members for collective measures to maintain or restore international peace and security.

History

Methodist Central Hall, London, the location of the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946.

The first session of the UN General Assembly was convened on 10 January 1946 in the Methodist Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations. The next few annual sessions were held in different cities: the second session in New York City, and the third in Paris. It moved to the permanent Headquarters of the United Nations in New York City at the start of its seventh regular annual session, on 14 October 1952. In December 1988, in order to hear Yasser Arafat, the General Assembly organized its 29th session in the Palace of Nations, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Membership

All 193 members of the United Nations are members of the General Assembly, with the addition of Holy See and Palestine as observer states. Further, the United Nations General Assembly may grant observer status to an international organization or entity, which entitles the entity to participate in the work of the United Nations General Assembly, though with limitations.

Agenda

The agenda for each session is planned up to seven months in advance and begins with the release of a preliminary list of items to be included in the provisional agenda. This is refined into a provisional agenda 60 days before the opening of the session. After the session begins, the final agenda is adopted in a plenary meeting which allocates the work to the various Main Committees, who later submit reports back to the Assembly for adoption by consensus or by vote.

Items on the agenda are numbered. Regular plenary sessions of the General Assembly in recent years have initially been scheduled to be held over the course of just three months; however, additional workloads have extended these sessions until just short of the next session. The routinely scheduled portions of the sessions normally commence on "the Tuesday of the third week in September, counting from the first week that contains at least one working day", per the UN Rules of Procedure. The last two of these Regular sessions were routinely scheduled to recess exactly three months afterwards in early December, but were resumed in January and extended until just before the beginning of the following sessions.

Resolutions

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev addresses the 64th session of the UN General Assembly on 24 September 2009

The General Assembly votes on many resolutions brought forth by sponsoring states. These are generally statements symbolizing the sense of the international community about an array of world issues. Most General Assembly resolutions are not enforceable as a legal or practical matter, because the General Assembly lacks enforcement powers with respect to most issues. The General Assembly has authority to make final decisions in some areas such as the United Nations budget.

The General Assembly can also refer an issue to the Security Council to put in place a binding resolution.

Resolution numbering scheme

From the First to the Thirtieth General Assembly sessions, all General Assembly resolutions were numbered consecutively, with the resolution number followed by the session number in Roman numbers (for example, Resolution 1514 (XV), which was the 1514th numbered resolution adopted by the Assembly, and was adopted at the Fifteenth Regular Session (1960)). Beginning in the Thirty-First Session, resolutions are numbered by individual session (for example Resolution 41/10 represents the 10th resolution adopted at the Forty-First Session).

Budget

The General Assembly also approves the budget of the United Nations and decides how much money each member state must pay to run the organization.

The Charter of the United Nations gives responsibility for approving the budget to the General Assembly (Chapter IV, Article 17) and for preparing the budget to the Secretary-General, as "chief administrative officer" (Chapter XV, Article 97). The Charter also addresses the non-payment of assessed contributions (Chapter IV, Article 19). The planning, programming, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation cycle of the United Nations has evolved over the years; major resolutions on the process include General Assembly resolutions: 41/213 of 19 December 1986, 42/211 of 21 December 1987, and 45/248 of 21 December 1990.

The budget covers the costs of United Nations programmes in areas such as political affairs, international justice and law, international cooperation for development, public information, human rights, and humanitarian affairs.

The main source of funds for the regular budget is the contributions of member states. The scale of assessments is based on the capacity of countries to pay. This is determined by considering their relative shares of total gross national product, adjusted to take into account a number of factors, including their per capita incomes.

In addition to the regular budget, member states are assessed for the costs of the international tribunals and, in accordance with a modified version of the basic scale, for the costs of peacekeeping operations.

Elections

Division of the General Assembly by membership in the five United Nations Regional Groups:

   The Group of African States (54)

   The Group of Asia-Pacific States (54)

   The Group of Eastern European States (23)

   The Group of Latin American and Caribbean States (33)

   The Group of Western European and Other States (28)

   No group

The General Assembly is entrusted in the United Nations Charter with electing members to various organs within the United Nations system. The procedure for these elections can be found in Section 15 of the Rules of Procedure for the General Assembly. The most important elections for the General Assembly include those for the upcoming President of the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice. Most elections are held annually, with the exception of the election of judges to the ICJ, which happens triennially.

The Assembly annually elects five non-permanent members of the Security Council for two-year terms, 18 members of the Economic and Social Council for three-year terms and 14–18 members of the Human Rights Council for three-year terms. It also elects the leadership of the next General Assembly session, i.e. the next President of the General Assembly, the 21 Vice-Presidents and the bureaux of the six main committees.

Elections to the International Court of Justice take place every three years in order to ensure continuity within the court. In these elections, five judges are elected for nine-year terms. These elections are held jointly with the Security Council, with candidates needing to receive an absolute majority of the votes in both bodies.

The Assembly also, in conjunction with the Security Council, selects the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. The main part of these elections are held in the Security Council, with the General Assembly simply appointing the candidate that receives the Council's nomination.

Regional groups

Division of seats of the Economic and Social Council based on regional grouping:

  African States (14)

  Asia-Pacific States (11)

  Eastern European States (6)

  Latin American and Caribbean States (10)

  Western European and Other States (13)

The United Nations Regional Groups were created in order to facilitate the equitable geographical distribution of seats among the Member States in different United Nations bodies. Resolution 33/138 of the General Assembly states that "the composition of the various organs of the United Nations should be so constituted as to ensure their representative character." Thus, member States of the United Nations are informally divided into five regions, with most bodies in the United Nations system having a specific number of seats allocated for each regional group. Additionally, the leadership of most bodies also rotates between the regional groups, such as the presidency of the General Assembly and the chairmanship of the six main committees.

The regional groups work according to the consensus principle. Candidates who are endorsed by them are, as a rule, elected by the General Assembly in any subsequent elections.

Sessions

Regular sessions

The General Assembly meets annually in a regular session that opens on the third Tuesday of September, and runs until the following September. Sessions are held at United Nations Headquarters in New York unless changed by the General Assembly by a majority vote.

The regular session is split into two distinct periods, the main and resumed parts of the session. During the main part of the session, which runs from the opening of the session until Christmas break in December, most of the work of the Assembly is done. This period is the Assembly's most intense period of work and includes the general debate and the bulk of the work of the Main Committees. The resumed part of the session, however, which runs from January until the beginning of the new session, includes most thematic debates, consultation processes led by the President of the General Assembly, and working group meetings.

General debate

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero addressing the General Assembly in New York, 20 September 2005

 

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff delivers the opening speech at the 66th Session of the General Assembly on 21 September 2011, marking the first time a woman opened a United Nations session

The general debate of each new session of the General Assembly is held the week following the official opening of the session, typically the following Tuesday, and is held without interruption for nine working days. The general debate is a high-level event, typically attended by Member States' Heads of State or Government, government ministers and United Nations delegates. At the general debate, Member States are given the opportunity to raise attention to topics or issues that they feel are important. In addition to the general debate, there are also many other high-level thematic meetings, summits and informal events held during general debate week.

The General debate is held in the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Special sessions

Special sessions, or UNGASS, may be convened in three different ways, at the request of the Security Council, at the request of a majority of United Nations members States or by a single member, as long as a majority concurs. Special sessions typically cover one single topic and end with the adoption of one or two outcome documents, such as a political declaration, action plan or strategy to combat said topic. They are also typically high-level events with participation from heads of state and government, as well as by government ministers. There have been 30 special sessions in the history of the United Nations.

Emergency special sessions

In the event that the Security Council is unable, usually due to disagreement among the permanent members, to come to a decision on a threat to international peace and security, the General Assembly may call an emergency special session in order to make appropriate recommendations to Members States for collective measures. This power was given to the Assembly in Resolution 377(V) of 3 November 1950.

Emergency special sessions can be called by the Security Council, if supported by at least seven members, or by a majority of Member States of the United Nations. If enough votes are had, the Assembly must meet within 24 hours, with Members being notified at least twelve hours before the opening of the session. There have been 10 emergency special sessions in the history of the United Nations.

Subsidiary organs

The United Nations General Assembly building

 

Panorama of the UNGA

The General Assembly subsidiary organs are divided into five categories: committees (30 total, six main), commissions (six), boards (seven), councils (four) and panels (one), working groups, and "other".

Committees

Main committees

The main committees are ordinally numbered, 1–6:

• The First Committee: Disarmament and International Security (DISEC) is concerned with disarmament and related international security questions
• The Second Committee: Economic and Financial (ECOFIN) is concerned with economic questions
• The Third Committee: Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian (SOCHUM) deals with social and humanitarian issues
• The Fourth Committee: Special Political and Decolonisation (SPECPOL) deals with a variety of political subjects not dealt with by the First Committee, as well as with decolonization
• The Fifth Committee: Administrative and Budgetary and general deals with the administration and budget of the United Nations
• The Sixth Committee: Legal deals with legal matters

The roles of many of the main committees have changed over time. Until the late 1970s, the First Committee was the Political and Security Committee (POLISEC) and there was also a sufficient number of additional "political" matters that an additional, unnumbered main committee, called the Special Political Committee, also sat. The Fourth Committee formerly handled Trusteeship and Decolonization matters. With the decreasing number of such matters to be addressed as the trust territories attained independence and the decolonization movement progressed, the functions of the Special Political Committee were merged into the Fourth Committee during the 1990s.

Each main committee consists of all the members of the General Assembly. Each elects a chairman, three vice chairmen, and a rapporteur at the outset of each regular General Assembly session.

Other committees

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev addressing the UN General Assembly in December 1988

These are not numbered. According to the General Assembly website, the most important are:

• Credentials Committee – This committee is charged with ensuring that the diplomatic credentials of all UN representatives are in order. The Credentials Committee consists of nine Member States elected early in each regular General Assembly session.
• General Committee – This is a supervisory committee entrusted with ensuring that the whole meeting of the Assembly goes smoothly. The General Committee consists of the president and vice presidents of the current General Assembly session and the chairman of each of the six Main Committees.

Other committees of the General Assembly are enumerated.

Commissions

There are six commissions:

• United Nations Disarmament Commission, established by GA Resolution 502 (VI) and S-10/2
• International Civil Service Commission, established by GA Resolution 3357 (XXIX)
• International Law Commission, established by GA Resolution 174 (II)
• United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), established by GA Resolution 2205 (XXI)
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, established by GA Resolution 194 (III)
• United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, established by GA Resolution 60/180 and UN Security Council Resolutions 1645 (2005) and 1646 (2005)

Despite its name, the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) was actually a subsidiary body of ECOSOC.

Boards

There are seven boards which are categorized into two groups: a) Executive Boards and b) Boards

Executive Boards

1. Executive Board of the United Nations Children's Fund, established by GA Resolution 57 (I) and 48/162
2. Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme and of the United Nations Population Fund, established by GA Resolution 2029 (XX) and 48/162
3. Executive Board of the World Food Programme, established by GA Resolution 50/8

Boards

1. Board of Auditors, established by GA Resolution 74 (I)
2. Trade and Development Board, established by GA Resolution 1995 (XIX)
3. United Nations Joint Staff Pension Board, established by GA Resolution 248 (III)
4. Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters, established by GA Resolution 37/99 K

Councils and panels

The newest council is the United Nations Human Rights Council, which replaced the aforementioned UNCHR in March 2006.

There are a total of four councils and one panel.

Working Groups and other

There is a varied group of working groups and other subsidiary bodies.

Seating

Countries are seated alphabetically in the General Assembly according to English translations of the countries' names. The country which occupies the front-most left position is determined annually by the Secretary-General via ballot draw. The remaining countries follow alphabetically after it.

Reform and UNPA

On 21 March 2005, Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented a report, In Larger Freedom, that criticized the General Assembly for focusing so much on consensus that it was passing watered-down resolutions reflecting "the lowest common denominator of widely different opinions". He also criticized the Assembly for trying to address too broad an agenda, instead of focusing on "the major substantive issues of the day, such as international migration and the long-debated comprehensive convention on terrorism". Annan recommended streamlining the General Assembly's agenda, committee structure, and procedures; strengthening the role and authority of its president; enhancing the role of civil society; and establishing a mechanism to review the decisions of its committees, in order to minimize unfunded mandates and micromanagement of the United Nations Secretariat. Annan reminded UN members of their responsibility to implement reforms, if they expect to realize improvements in UN effectiveness.

The reform proposals were not taken up by the United Nations World Summit in September 2005. Instead, the Summit solely affirmed the central position of the General Assembly as the chief deliberative, policymaking and representative organ of the United Nations, as well as the advisory role of the Assembly in the process of standard-setting and the codification of international law. The Summit also called for strengthening the relationship between the General Assembly and the other principal organs to ensure better coordination on topical issues that required coordinated action by the United Nations, in accordance with their respective mandates.

A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, or United Nations People's Assembly (UNPA), is a proposed addition to the United Nations System that eventually could allow for direct election of UN parliament members by citizens all over the world.

In the General Debate of the 65th General Assembly, Jorge Valero, representing Venezuela, said "The United Nations has exhausted its model and it is not simply a matter of proceeding with reform, the twenty-first century demands deep changes that are only possible with a rebuilding of this organisation." He pointed to the futility of resolutions concerning the Cuban embargo and the Middle East conflict as reasons for the UN model having failed. Venezuela also called for the suspension of veto rights in the Security Council because it was a "remnant of the Second World War [it] is incompatible with the principle of sovereign equality of States".

Reform of the United Nations General Assembly includes proposals to change the powers and composition of the U.N. General Assembly. This could include, for example, tasking the Assembly with evaluating how well member states implement UNGA resolutions, increasing the power of the assembly vis-à-vis the United Nations Security Council, or making debates more constructive and less repetitive.

Sidelines of the General Assembly

The annual session of the United Nations General Assembly is accompanied by independent meetings between world leaders, better known as meetings taking place on the sidelines of the Assembly meeting. The diplomatic congregation has also since evolved into a week attracting wealthy and influential individuals from around the world to New York City to address various agendas, ranging from humanitarian and environmental to business and political.