The General Assembly is the only organ to which the UN charter assigns the task of developing international law. The Sixth Committee is the primary forum for the consideration of legal questions in the General Assembly.

The General Assembly and international law

The General Assembly initiates studies and makes recommendations. It also prepares draft conventions and convenes international conferences with the task of discussing finalizing and adopting multilateral treaties. The Assembly is hereby supported by its subsidiary organs and special committees.

After their adaption, the conventions can be accepted by individual states by way of signing and ratifying.

The General Assembly also adopts declarations and resolutions. Although not legally binding, they are statements of principle. They are also a common standard of achievement with a strong moral and political value.

Conventions, Declarations and other Instruments Found in General Assembly Resolutions

The Legal Committee - Sixth Committee

The Sixth Committee is one of the main committees of the General Assembly. Entrusted with the consideration of legal matters, it submits reports to the General Assembly on items allocated to it. The Committee also transmits draft resolutions for adoption in plenary sessions.

More on UN, General Assembly and international law

• General Assembly resolutions from the 1st session (1946) onwards are published in different versions. The official text is published after each session as the last number in the series Supplements to the Official Records of the General Assembly.
• General Assembly resolutions. Information on the respective drafting Committee.

Sixth Committee

• Sixth Committee documents are identified as A/C.6.
• Summary records of meetings from the Sixth Committee are issued as A/C.6/session number/SR.meeting number.
• The Sixth Committee submits a separate report to the General Assembly on every agenda item allocated to it. The original symbol (C.6) of the Sixth Committee then disappears and the document is transformed into a session document of the General Assembly.
• Resolutions drafted by the Sixth Committee can be retrieved from the General Assembly. Official Records. Supplement VII. Resolutions adopted of the reports of the Sixth Committee.
• Sixth Committee website:
  • Information about present and previous sessions (from 1999 onwards).
  • An overview of the agenda items allocated to the Sixth Committee from 1999 onwards.
• Press releases from the Sixth Committee carry the symbol: GA/L-.
  
• Speeches held in the Sixth Committee can be found in:
  • UN Digital Library Speeches can be searched by speaker, topic and country.
  • Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly for a given year.

• References to the reports submitted by the Sixth Committee to the General Assembly are contained in the Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly, in the section Reports of the Main and Procedural Committees.