Conclusion

• Author: Alexandre Tavadian
• Pages: 499-508

499

CONCLUSION

When the Security Council held its rst meeting in the Bronx campus

of Hunter College in March 1946, it found in the newly built ballot

box of the Council a note on which was written:

May I, who have had the privilege of fabricating this ballot box, cast

the rst vote?

May God be with every member of the United Nations Organiz-

ation and through your noble eorts bring lasting peace to us all —

all over the world.

Paul Antonio, Mechanic1

This message embodied humankind’s hopes and expectations for the

recently established United Nations Organization and for a better

world through the prevention of conict. The perennial question is

whether or not the UN lives up to these expectations. To measure the

UN’s success, we rst need to determine the evaluation criteria or yard-

sticks. As we have seen in Chapter 2 of this book, Article1 of the UN

Charter identies the following four purposes of the United Nations:

1. To maintain international peace and security . . . ;

2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect

for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of

peoples . . . ;

1 Trygve Lie, In the Cause of Peace (New York: Macmillan Company, 1954) at 67.