47th General Assembly: increased responsibilities, a wider, more practical role - becoming a functional world parliament.

• Position: Includes related article on Gloria Estefan and Narcisa de Leon Escaler

With unprecedented responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security being thrust upon the UN, the forty-seventh General Assembly was summoned to take a more dynamic and practical role in mapping the political, economic and social activities of the post-cold-war world.

"The General Assembly is facing a historic challenge: to truly become a functional world parliament on the basis of the United Nations Charter", asserted Assembly President Stoyan Ganev of Bulgaria, before suspending the 14-week session on 23 December.

"Clearly, one of the more significant implications of the post-cold-war geopolitical realignment presently under way is an increased practical role for the General Assembly in world activities", he told the world body, whose membership had reached 179, with the addition of 20 States between September 1991 and September 1992.

"The countries of the world", he said, "have assigned to the United Nations the heavy responsibilities of maintaining international peace and security, as well as of addressing a wide range of global, regional and local problems."

The long-awaited global chemical weapons ban--the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and Their Destruction--was commended by the Assembly.

The new treaty, which was elaborated for more than 10 years by the 40-member, Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, was opened for signature in Paris on 13 January 1993 at a ceremony attended by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

"The Convention on Chemical Weapons is the first disarmament agreement negotiated within a multilateral framework", said Mr. Boutros-Ghali at the signing ceremony. "The scope of this multilateral Convention, the obligations assumed by the States parties, and the system of verification envisaged for its implementation are unprecedented."

The bulk of the session's substantive work was accomplished in the Assembly's seven main committees. Continuing a trend that has been building in recent years, committee debate was "without exception ... characterized by an atmosphere of cooperation", said Mr. Ganev. "Even discussions on subjects that traditionally have been most contentious, such as those involving the Middle East conflict, were marked by a new, more conciliatory tone."

Some three quarters of the 276 resolutions adopted during 94 plenary meetings were approved by consensus, roughly the same proportion as in the two previous sessions.

Continuing crises

The forty-seventh session, which opened on 15 September, witnessed the continuing horrors of famine in Somalia and the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Crises like these, said Mr. Ganev, "ceaselessly tear at people's hearts and they, in turn, look to their respective leaders and to the United Nations for solutions".

Taking action towards those solutions, the Assembly welcomed the convening of an international conference on Somalia and called for the Security Council to consider the use of "all necessary means" to restore sovereignty to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The first resolution of the session (47/1), adopted by recorded vote on 19 September, had contained the unusual decision to bar Yugoslavia from participating in the work of the Assembly. In 1974, South Africa was the first State to be barred from participation by a President's ruling.

In other important action, the Assembly: dispatched an observer team to monitor elections in Eritrea; called for aid efforts to be maintained in Mozambique, where a new UN peace-keeping operation--known by the acronym ONUMOZ--was launched on 16 December; and again supported the convening of an international peace conference on the Middle East, under UN auspices and with equal participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which would contribute to the promotion of peace in that region.

The Assembly called for respect for the commitments of the Peace Accords in Angola in a text reaffirming a zone of peace and cooperation in the South Atlantic--the region situated between Africa and South America.

New and ongoing political, humanitarian and human rights problems around the globe were also addressed, including, for the first time, the situation in Estonia and Latvia--two former Soviet republics.

Strong ties between the UN and regional organizations were of increasing importance to peace-keeping and related efforts. For example, the...