The General Assembly and the Formation of International Law in Recent Years

In the first 77 years since the creation of the UN, the General Assembly has contributed to the formation of international law and its evolution. If the codification of customary norms of international law constituted the primary activity of the ILC in its first 50 years, the General Assembly as such has always contributed directly to the affirmation and consolidation of international law. This is especially true in some sectors, such as decolonization, self-determination of peoples, law of the sea. The rules of international law that have established themselves in these matters cannot be defined as new in any circumstances, but there is no doubt that in several cases their content has been clarified thanks to the General Assembly, and their relevance has been further strengthened by judgments and advisory opinions of the judicial and arbitral instances which recalled General Assembly resolutions as an important expression of the will of the international community on these norms of international law. The above leads to the conclusion that General Assembly resolutions have had an impact on the formation and strengthening of international law and have acquired autonomous legal value as essential elements of the practice of the United Nations, differing from the practice of individual UN member states. At the same time, the General Assembly has also served as the "reservoir" of the practice of the member states, in the sense that it is the forum for discussion and comparison in which norms of international law are developed, and it is therefore there that states must assert their points of view and interests with respect to the individual aspects of international relations. In this context, despite numerous criticisms aimed at the General Assembly, this remains the main forum for world discussion with tendentially universal competence and it is therefore above all in that forum that states must make their voices heard in relation to the formation (or the contestation) of international law, since its resolutions are relevant elements of practice.