International Organisations and the UN

No nation, however powerful, can solve the world's problems alone. War, poverty, disease and climate change cross all borders. To cooperate on these, nations build international organisations, and the greatest of them is the United Nations. Understanding why such bodies exist and how the UN works is essential to international relations and current affairs.

International organisations are bodies that bring countries together to cooperate. They are helpful because they:

• provide a forum for nations to talk and settle disputes peacefully rather than by war,
• help tackle shared problems (security, trade, health, poverty, the environment) that no country can solve alone, and
• create rules and trust that make cooperation possible.

They cannot force sovereign nations to obey, but they shape behaviour through agreement, pressure and assistance.

The United Nations (UN) was founded on 24 October 1945, after the Second World War. That was when the UN Charter (signed in San Francisco in June 1945) came into force. It replaced the failed League of Nations, which had been set up after the First World War. The UN's headquarters is in New York. It began with 51 founding members. Membership today is 193 states. India was a founding member. It signed the Charter in 1945, even before formal independence.

The Charter establishes six principal organs:

• the General Assembly, the main deliberative body. All 193 member states sit in it, and each has exactly one vote, regardless of size or wealth. Important decisions (peace, budget, new members) need a two-thirds majority. Others require a simple majority. It can only recommend, not bind.
• the Security Council, responsible for international peace and security and the only organ whose decisions are binding on members (covered below).
• the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which coordinates economic, social and development work and the specialised agencies.
• the Secretariat, which runs the UN's daily work. It is headed by the Secretary-General, the UN's chief administrative officer. The Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. This means a P5 veto can block a candidate. The term is a renewable five-year term. The current Secretary-General is António Guterres of Portugal (since 2017).
• the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN's principal judicial organ. It is seated at The Hague in the Netherlands. It has 15 judges, elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and Security Council. It settles legal disputes between states, not individuals.
• the Trusteeship Council, which once supervised territories moving toward self-government. It suspended operations in 1994 after the last trust territory (Palau) became independent.

It also works through specialised agencies, each an autonomous body with its own membership and budget:

• WHO (World Health Organization, Geneva): global public health, disease control, pandemics.
• UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund): children's health, nutrition and education.
• UNESCO (Paris): education, science, culture. It runs the World Heritage Sites list.
• ILO (International Labour Organization, Geneva): labour rights and standards. It is the only UN body with a tripartite (three-party: governments, employers, workers) structure. It sets standards through numbered conventions. Two of these target child labour: Convention 138 fixes the minimum age for employment, and Convention 182 demands the elimination of the worst forms of child labour.
• FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome): food security and agriculture. It runs the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) initiative. GIAHS identifies and safeguards eco-friendly traditional farm practices along with their landscapes, agricultural biodiversity and local knowledge systems. It does not aim to modernise farming, and it does not confer Geographical Indication status on any product.
• IMF and the World Bank (both Washington, D.C.): the Bretton Woods institutions, set up at the 1944 New Hampshire conference. The IMF handles monetary stability and balance-of-payments support. The World Bank funds long-term development.

The UN also works on cities and housing. UN-Habitat (the United Nations Human Settlements Programme) is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities that provide adequate shelter for all. Its partners are not limited to governments and local urban authorities. They also include NGOs and the private sector. Through its housing and sanitation work, UN-Habitat contributes to the wider UN goals of poverty reduction and access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

A related regional forum is the Asia Pacific Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (APMCHUD). It is linked to UN-ESCAP, the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Three traps recur about it. First, India hosted the first conference in New Delhi in 2006, but it does not host every annual conference; the venue rotates among member countries. Second, APMCHUD is not run in partnership with the ADB, APEC or ASEAN. Third, the 2006 conference's theme was a vision for sustainable urbanisation in the Asia-Pacific, not "Emerging Urban Forms".

The most powerful UN body is the Security Council. It has fifteen members:

• Five permanent members (the P5): the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France, the victors of World War II. Each holds a veto. A single "no" from any one of them blocks any substantive decision, even if every other member agrees.
• Ten non-permanent members, elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, with five replaced each year. They are distributed by region. They have no veto. India has been a non-permanent member several times, most recently in 2021–22.

A substantive decision needs nine of fifteen votes, and no veto from any permanent member. Only the Security Council can authorise binding action. This includes sanctions, peacekeeping missions and the use of force.

This structure has been frozen since 1945 and no longer reflects today's world. Many countries argue it is undemocratic and outdated. They call for reform, chiefly expanding the permanent membership to include rising powers. India is a leading candidate. It is the world's most populous democracy, a major economy and a major troop contributor to UN peacekeeping. India strongly seeks a permanent seat. It often works with the G4 (India, Brazil, Germany and Japan), whose members back one another's bids. Reform is hard. Any Charter amendment needs the agreement of all five existing veto-holders. Making the Council fairer and more representative remains one of the major debates in world politics.

The two Bretton Woods institutions deserve a closer look, because exams test their instruments in detail. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) safeguards monetary stability and lends only to its member countries, never to non-members or directly to a central bank. Its emergency lending tools include the Rapid Financing Instrument and the Rapid Credit Facility, which meet urgent balance-of-payments needs. The Reserve Tranche, historically called the Gold Tranche, is the portion of a member's quota that it can draw on demand, without conditions. The IMF's accounting unit is the Special Drawing Right (SDR), a basket of major currencies. The Chinese Renminbi joined the basket in October 2016, alongside the US dollar, euro, pound and yen. The IMF publishes the biannual Global Financial Stability Report. Its advisory body is the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), which guides the Fund's work on the global economy; the World Bank attends IMFC meetings as an observer. Raghuram Rajan, later Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, served as the IMF's Chief Economist (2003–2006). Note that the price of a currency in the international market is set by market forces, chiefly demand for the country's goods and services and the stability of its government, not by the World Bank.

The World Bank funds long-term development. It compiled the Ease of Doing Business Index, whose sub-indices cover matters such as paying taxes, registering property and dealing with construction permits; maintenance of law and order is not one of them. It also leads the Global Infrastructure Facility, an open platform that prepares and structures complex infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) so that private and institutional capital can be mobilised.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) sets the rules of world trade. Key WTO terms:

• TRIPS Agreement: the WTO pact on intellectual property. To comply with it, India enacted the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999. A Geographical Indication is a community right and cannot be licensed to outsiders, unlike a Trade Mark, which is an individual or company right that can be licensed. GIs cover agricultural goods, handicrafts and industrial products alike.
• Agreement on Agriculture: classifies farm subsidies into the amber box (trade-distorting), blue box (production-limiting) and green box (minimally distorting). The related Peace Clause shields certain farm subsidies from legal challenge. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement governs food-safety and plant-health measures.
• Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA): part of the WTO's Bali Ministerial Package of 2013, ratified by India, and in force from February 2017. It simplifies customs procedures.
• Information Technology Agreement: concluded at the first WTO Ministerial Conference at Singapore in 1996, eliminating tariffs on IT products.
• Expected benefits to India: when India joined the WTO, the expectation was that its share of world trade would roughly triple by 2000 AD, and that its agricultural exports would get a strong boost. Be precise here. The often-quoted claim that India's trade would rise from 600 million to 5 billion US dollars was not part of this expectation and is inaccurate.

Several newer bodies and arrangements also matter:

• G20: the forum of the world's largest economies. Members include Argentina, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey; Malaysia, Iran, Vietnam, Singapore and New Zealand are not members. The G20 Common Framework, endorsed by the G20 together with the Paris Club (the informal group of official creditor nations), helps Low Income Countries restructure unsustainable debt.
• Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB): a Beijing-based multilateral bank with more than 80 members, including non-Asian states. China is the largest shareholder, with India second.
• New Development Bank: set up by the BRICS countries (not APEC), headquartered in Shanghai.
• BTIA: the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement, the free-trade pact under negotiation between India and the European Union, stalled since 2013.
• Water Credit: an initiative of Water.org (not of the WHO or World Bank) that applies microfinance tools to water and sanitation, so poor households can meet water needs without subsidies.

Examiners often test which groupings India belongs to. Keep this membership map clear:

• Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB): India is a founding member and the second-largest shareholder.
• Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR): an export-control grouping that limits the spread of missile technology. India joined in 2016.
• Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO): a Eurasian security grouping led by China and Russia. India became a full member in 2017.
• Asian Development Bank (ADB): the Manila-based regional development bank. India is a founding member.
• Colombo Plan: a 1950 regional cooperation programme for economic and social development in Asia and the Pacific. India is a founding member.
• APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, limited to Pacific Rim economies) and the OECD (the Paris-based club of developed economies): India is a member of neither.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is the political and economic union of six Arab monarchies of the Gulf: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Iran is not a member; it is a regional rival of several GCC states.

The International Solar Alliance (ISA) was launched by India and France at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21, Paris, 2015). Its membership was initially limited to sunshine-rich countries lying between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, not to all UN members; a later amendment opened it to every UN member state. Its secretariat is in Gurugram, India.

Match each international agreement to its true subject, because mismatched pairs are a favourite exam trap:

• Alma-Ata Declaration (1978): committed nations to primary healthcare for all.
• Hague Convention (1980): deals with the civil aspects of international child abduction, not biological or chemical weapons.
• Talanoa Dialogue (2018): a facilitative dialogue on global climate change under the UNFCCC, the UN climate treaty.
• Under2 Coalition: a coalition of sub-national governments (states, regions, cities) pledging deep emission cuts. It concerns climate action, not child rights.

Two UN crime conventions are easily confused. The United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) is the first legally binding global anti-corruption instrument, and it is UNCAC, not UNTOC, that contains a dedicated chapter on asset recovery, returning illicitly acquired assets to their rightful owners. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), also called the Palermo Convention, targets organised crime and carries the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is mandated by member states to assist in implementing both conventions.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is the comprehensive treaty on children's rights. It guarantees, among others, the right to development (Article 6), the right to expression (Article 13) and the right to play and recreation (Article 31).