The UN General Assembly could be a chance to realign some of the world's values

A new session of the UN General Assembly opens on September 10. Reuters

The UN General Assembly Hall’s rostrum often doubles as a stage for theatrics. At the opening of UNGA’s 67th session, in 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of fellow world leaders with a doodle of a bomb, meant to illustrate Iran’s nuclear programme. A few years earlier, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi delivered a one-hour-40-minute diatribe on matters ranging from the Iraq war to swine flu to the assassination of John F Kennedy.

UNGA presidents, who serve a one-year term, have the task of getting past these histrionics to focus efforts on larger, more consequential issues – like war, poverty and climate change. It’s a tough job. Two gavels have been broken by presidents trying to keep order – the most recent incident was last year.

On Tuesday the UNGA convenes for its 79th session, at a time when crises seem to be proliferating along with their consequences. The war in Gaza has dragged on for 11 months, having killed almost 41,000 Palestinians. The war in Sudan is in its second year, the war in Ukraine in its third and the war in Syria is more than a decade old. In none of these examples are peace talks progressing. All told, this year has seen six major armed conflicts, in which at least 10,000 people have been killed since the start of the year, spread across four continents.

Other crises are more pernicious. The developing world, the UN says, currently faces the worst medium-term economic outlook in a generation. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one of the UNGA’s signature initiatives, are in bad shape. Only 17 per cent of the SDGs’ 169 targets are on track to be achieved by the end of this decade; more than a third of them have either stalled or regressed.

Considering all of this, those convening in New York this week for the new UNGA session should be under enormous pressure. But unlike its leaner, superpower-heavy counterpart the UN Security Council, the UNGA’s resolutions are not legally binding. And with 193 members, each with an equal vote, the UNGA is not agile.

In an essay for The National over the weekend, outgoing UNGA President Dennis Francis wrote that the multilateral system “has often been found wanting, unable to proactively respond with the speed, decisiveness and unity that the times demand”.

Big-tent forums can make decisions quickly if their participants embrace a sense of urgency. Climate summits provide an example – Cop28 in Dubai convened all UNGA member states and a handful of others, and resulted in the concrete, groundbreaking UAE Consensus covering several highly contentious climate change issues.

But maintaining a unity of values in the longer term is a bigger problem in global governance. Ostensibly universal principles are fading as superpower rivalries grow. At an economic conference in Italy this week, Jordan’s Queen Rania called for a return to the principles enshrined in the UN Charter as she highlighted western double standards over the plight of Palestinians compared with Ukrainians.

In the end, if values are ever to become universal again, the UN General Assembly remains the best venue we have for such a realignment; it is where global consensus and new international norms are forged. In many cases, these norms eventually form the basis for new (and binding) areas of international law. Whatever antics ensue from time to time, that process is not mere theatre.