“Of nations large and small”: an overview of multilateral law-making processes in the United Nations Organisation

Who speaks for the peoples of the world? The United Nations Organisation (UN), founded in 1945 in the wake of World War II, was created with the idea that it would serve to represent the globe's population – just as a domestic parliament can agglutinate the general will of any given nation. This “international parliament,” just as the League of Nations which preceded the UN, has had the gargantuan task of harmonising global plurality into a common horizon of international legal standards, while at the same time respecting the diversity of each of its member states. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the processes of multilateral law-making that quotidianly unfold within the UN. In particular, I focus on the organs involved in the process and the different law-making and law-enforcing mechanisms they can use. In this way, I hope this chapter provides either an introduction – or a friendly reminder – of the importance of nominally non-hierarchical ways of international law-making, precisely at a time in which the UN system seems to be under threat by the return of blatant unilateralism.