The UN and Its Specialised Agencies: Organs, Headquarters and PYQs

The correct answer is B, Six. The Charter of the United Nations establishes six principal organs: the General Assembly, in which every member state has one vote; the Security Council, which carries the primary responsibility for international peace and security; the Economic and Social Council; the Trusteeship Council; the International Court of Justice; and the Secretariat. Option A, five, is the number a candidate reaches by forgetting the Trusteeship Council, which suspended its work on 1 November 1994 after Palau became independent but was never abolished, since abolishing it would need an amendment to the Charter. Option C, seven, is wrong, and is usually reached by counting a fund or a programme such as UNICEF or UNDP as an organ; those bodies were created by the General Assembly and are not principal organs. Option D, four, is simply too few. Remember also that five of the six sit in New York and only the International Court of Justice sits at The Hague.

The correct answer is B, 24 October 1945. The Charter entered into force on that day, once the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the other signatories had ratified it, and the day is observed every year as United Nations Day. Option A, 26 June 1945, is the day the Charter was signed at the close of the San Francisco Conference by fifty nations; Poland signed later and is counted among the fifty-one founding members, so the signing and the coming into force are four months apart and both are examined. Option C, 1 January 1942, is the date of the Declaration by United Nations, signed at Washington by twenty-six nations including India, on which the name was used for the first time. Option D, 10 January 1946, is the day the General Assembly held its first session, at Methodist Central Hall in London, before the move to New York.

The correct answer is C, Paris. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has had its headquarters in Paris since it began work; its constitution was adopted in November 1945 and came into force in November 1946, and it is the agency that maintains the World Heritage List. Option A, Geneva, is wrong for UNESCO but is the seat of a cluster of other agencies that papers pair with it, among them the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Option B, Rome, is the seat of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Programme, the three food bodies of the system. Option D, Vienna, is the seat of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is a related organisation rather than a specialised agency.

The correct answer is C, the International Court of Justice. The Court sits at the Peace Palace in The Hague in the Netherlands, where it took over the premises of the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations era. It has fifteen judges elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and the Security Council voting separately, and a third of the bench is renewed every three years. Option A is wrong; the Economic and Social Council, with fifty-four members elected for three years, meets at United Nations Headquarters in New York, though it also holds sessions at Geneva. Option B is wrong; the Trusteeship Council chamber is in the New York headquarters building, and the Council suspended its work there in 1994. Option D is wrong; the Secretariat is the New York headquarters itself, headed by the Secretary-General, even though the United Nations maintains large offices at Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi.

The correct answer is B, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Set up in 1957 with its headquarters at Vienna, the IAEA is an autonomous intergovernmental organisation that reports to the General Assembly and, when nuclear safeguards are at issue, to the Security Council; the United Nations describes it as a related organisation, not a specialised agency, because it was not brought in by an agreement with the Economic and Social Council under Article 63. Option A is wrong as an answer because the International Labour Organization, founded in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles and seated at Geneva, is indeed a specialised agency and was the first to be brought into the new system in 1946. Option C is wrong because the World Health Organization, which began on 7 April 1948, is a specialised agency. Option D is wrong because the Universal Postal Union of 1874, at Bern, is also one. The World Trade Organization is a still safer trap: it is outside the United Nations system entirely.

The correct answer is B, the International Telecommunication Union. It was founded at Paris in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union to standardise telegraphy across borders, took its present name in 1932 as radio and telephony were added, moved to Geneva, and became a specialised agency of the United Nations in 1947; it now allocates the global radio spectrum and satellite orbits. Option A, the Universal Postal Union, is the second oldest, founded at Bern in 1874 by the Treaty of Bern so that a letter could travel between countries on a single payment, and it remains at Bern. Option C, the International Labour Organization, dates from 1919 and is the oldest body to come from the League of Nations period, but it is half a century younger than the ITU; it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. Option D, the World Meteorological Organization, was created in 1950 from the older International Meteorological Organization of 1873.

The correct answer is B, the Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO was founded on 16 October 1945 at Quebec City, and World Food Day has been observed on that anniversary since 1981; the agency has its headquarters at Rome and runs the global work on hunger, nutrition and food statistics. Option A is wrong; the World Food Programme, also at Rome, is the food assistance arm of the United Nations, a programme rather than a specialised agency, and it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. Option C is wrong; the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the third Rome-based food body, was set up in 1977 after the World Food Conference and lends for rural development, but no day is tied to its founding. Option D is wrong; the World Health Organization came into being on 7 April 1948, and that date is observed as World Health Day, a pairing examiners like to swap with this one.

The correct answer is A, ten, for two years. The Security Council has fifteen members in all: five permanent members, namely China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, five of them retiring each year, with a retiring member not immediately re-eligible. Option B is wrong today but is the historical figure: the Council had six non-permanent members until a Charter amendment raised the number to ten with effect from 1965, so a question that mentions the original composition may use it. Option C is wrong because three years is the term of members of the Economic and Social Council, not of the Security Council. Option D confuses the total strength of the Council, fifteen, with the number of non-permanent seats, and no member of the Council is elected for five years; five years is the term of the Secretary-General.

The correct answer is B, fifteen judges for nine years. The judges of the International Court of Justice are elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council voting independently of each other, a candidate needing an absolute majority in both, and five seats fall vacant every three years so that the bench is renewed in thirds. No two judges may be nationals of the same state, and a retiring judge may be re-elected. Option A reverses the two numbers, the commonest error in this question, and candidates who remember only the pair nine and fifteen fall into it. Option C is wrong because five years is the term of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, not of a judge of the Court. Option D is wrong; twenty-one is not the strength of this Court, and the figure usually comes from confusing it with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which does have twenty-one members and sits at Hamburg.

The correct answer is B, Palau. Palau, in the Pacific, was the last of the eleven trust territories placed under the international trusteeship system, administered by the United States as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands; it became independent on 1 October 1994, and the Trusteeship Council suspended its operations on 1 November 1994, having completed its work. The Council remains a principal organ, because removing it would require an amendment to the Charter, but it meets only as occasion demands. Option A is wrong; Namibia became independent in 1990 and had been a mandate rather than an ordinary trust territory, its status the subject of long argument at the United Nations. Option C is wrong; Nauru, also a trust territory, became independent in 1968. Option D is wrong; Western Samoa, now Samoa, was the first trust territory to gain independence, in 1962.

The correct answer is B, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. She presided over the eighth session of the General Assembly in 1953, the first woman to hold that office, and she had already led the Indian delegation to the United Nations in its earliest years; she was also the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru and later India envoy to Moscow, Washington and London. Option A is wrong; Sarojini Naidu was the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, in 1925, and the first woman Governor of an Indian state, but she died in 1949 and never held office at the United Nations. Option C is wrong, though Hansa Mehta has a real United Nations distinction: as India delegate to the Commission on Human Rights she had the phrase all men changed to all human beings in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration. Option D is wrong; Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister of India and never President of the Assembly.

The correct answer is B, the United Nations Environment Programme. UNEP was created by the General Assembly in 1972 following the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and its headquarters at Nairobi made it the first United Nations body to be seated in a developing country, a point examiners like. It is a programme of the United Nations and not a specialised agency, and it publishes the Emissions Gap and Adaptation Gap reports. Option A is wrong; UNESCO, the educational, scientific and cultural organisation, is at Paris. Option C is wrong; the United Nations Industrial Development Organization is at Vienna, in the same complex as the International Atomic Energy Agency. Option D is wrong; the World Intellectual Property Organization, which administers the Paris and Berne Conventions and the Patent Cooperation Treaty, is at Geneva. Nairobi also hosts UN-Habitat, the human settlements programme.