Лекция: The UN family

2. In 1945 the six principal organs of the UN were the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council,International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. With the exception of the Trusteeship Council, which became obsolete with the completion of the decolonization process, these organs still constitute the basic structure of the UN. The functions of these organs are vastly different: while the GA is basically the parliament of the UN and the Security Council its executive committee, the Secretariat is the bureaucracy that runs the UN.

3. The UN «family,» though, is much larger, encompassing fifteen agencies and several programs and bodies. Some of the organizations, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), were founded during the League of Nations era in the 1920s. Many more have been created since 1945 to address the specific problems that the UN has been called to solve.

4. To top it all off, the UN has a set of «subsidiaries» and partners. Throughout its history, the UN has associated withalmost three thousand NGOs. This was already envisioned in 1945: article 71 of the UN Charter explicitly states that the UN «may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations [NGOs] which are concerned with matters within its competence[6].» In practice this means that every year the UN works together with hundreds of NGOs to undertakehumanitarian tasks in the world's conflict zones.