 As you certainly know, the General Assembly of the United Nations consists of all the member states, each having one vote at the Assembly. The General Assembly has very wide functions and as under Article 10 of the Charter it may I quote, discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter. And of course, later in the course when discussing the rules relating to international peace and security, we shall see the interplay between the General Assembly and the Security Council. And we shall also closely study the powers and the functions of the Security Council and the legal effects of its resolutions. In contrast with its very wide functions, the General Assembly has limited powers. Of course, it has some administrative powers on matters internal to the UN and for instance, under Article 17 of the Charter the General Assembly approves the budget of the organisation. Under Article 18 and Article 23 it elects non-permanent members of the Security Council. Under the statute of the ICJ, which is part of the Charter, it takes part to the election of the judges of the Court. However, outside those few internal administrative powers, the General Assembly has no power to take binding measures on member states. The General Assembly is not a parliament of the world, it does not make law for the planet as it may only make recommendations to member states, not decisions, recommendations. As we shall see later in the course, this is in sharp contrast with the powers of the Security Council. Therefore as a matter of principle and outside the internal administrative scope of its responsibilities, the General Assembly and the resolutions it adopts are not binding under international law. Therefore, they should be considered as political documents rather than as legal instruments. Resolutions of the General Assembly offer a clear example of unilateral acts of an international organisation lacking any legal effect because the basic instrument establishing the organisation, in this case the UN Charter, because that basic instrument says so. Of course resolutions of the General Assembly can have an important political impact and this is why states often spend a considerable amount of time and energy lobbying and negotiating every single word of certain resolutions addressing a specific crisis in the world or a specific subject in more general terms. But as such, again, those resolutions are not binding as such. However, and despite being deprived of any binding character as unilateral acts of the UN, some resolutions adopted by the General Assembly may nevertheless convey rules of international law and this is because they reflect pre-existing customary rules. In other words, some resolutions of the General Assembly can be considered as having a declaratory character. They declare, they make explicit rules of customary international law that exist already. As mentioned earlier, a clear example of this phenomenon is to be found in Resolution 2625 of 1970 which is entitled Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning friendly relations and cooperation among states. As I said earlier, that declaration has been considered in several cases by the ICJ to reflect customary international law. And of course not every resolution can be said to reflect customary rules and on a case-by-case basis one must pay special attention to the object of the resolution, the words it uses, the debates leading to its adoption and the political support it enjoyed when being adopted. Was it a unanimous or near unanimous vote or were states deeply divided along political or geographical lines? Did they make declarations about the legal content of the resolution and what did they say? Does the resolution use verbs like must or rather encourages, shall rather than should, etc. On the other hand, some General Assembly resolutions may not reflect customary international law on the very day of their adoption, but they may help to bring about new customary rules by the fact that they encourage states to behave in a certain way while at the same time expressing a certain collective opinion-yuris. For instance, it may be argued that Resolution 1514, on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples, that this resolution was not really conveying existing customary rules when it was adopted back in December 1960. However, it expressed a strong collective opinion-yuris of states and encouraged the practice of decolonisation that was already underway. So much so that 10 years later, when Resolution 2625 was adopted in October 1970, it was very clear by then that the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples understood as the right of colonial peoples to become independent states, as we have seen, that this principle had undoubtedly become a principle of international law, that is the basic rule of customary international law. To conclude this video, let me sum up by quoting from an advisory opinion of 1996 relating to the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, where the ICJ said the following, and I quote, the court notes that General Assembly resolutions, even if they are not binding, may sometimes have normative value. They can, in certain circumstances, provide evidence important for establishing the existence of a rule or the emergence of an opinion-yuris. To establish whether this is true of a given General Assembly resolution, it is necessary to look at its content and the conditions of its adoption. It is also necessary to see whether an opinion-yuris exists, as to its normative character, or a series of resolutions may show the gradual evolution of the opinion-yuris required for the establishment of a new rule.