It’s Tuesday again in the third week of September. And that is an important day on the political agenda every year. Indeed, the start of a new session of the United Nations General Assembly.
This year, the General Assembly, the only UN body in which all member states are represented, has a special character. It is the 75th session – the UN was founded in 1945 – but for the first time the meeting is also largely virtual because of the corona crisis.
“That makes it less interesting,” said former top diplomat Robert Serry, who also worked in New York. “The most important thing about the General Assembly is that delegations from countries that would not speak so quickly meet each other in the corridors.”
Speeches from world leaders
Normally, all major world leaders come to the UN headquarters in New York. In long columns of vehicles, they travel through streets closed to other traffic to 760 United Nations Plaza, a piece of international territory in New York.
A week after the opening of the meeting, a series of speeches by presidents, prime ministers, monarchs or ministers of foreign affairs begins, in which they are allowed to discuss a topic of their choice. This regularly produces historical moments.
Think of Fidel Castro, who spoke for so long in 1960 The Irishman looks like a short film. The Cuban leader spoke for 4 hours and 29 minutes. Or take Libyan leader Gaddafi who tore a page from the UN charter in 2009, or Donald Trump who threatened North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with total annihilation in 2017. and called him “rocket man”.
Watch the footage from Trump’s 2017 speech here:
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