Which of the following is NOT a specialised agency of the United Nations?

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 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.