International Organizations and Alliances MCQs with Explanations

Article 7 of the Charter names six principal organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, the International Court of Justice and the Trusteeship Council. The Trusteeship Council is the only one to have ceased working, suspending its operational activities in 2005.

The ICJ Statute provides fifteen judges elected for nine-year terms by the General Assembly and the Security Council, with five seats renewed every three years. Nine judges constitute a quorum, and no two judges may be nationals of the same state.

The UPU was created by the Treaty of Bern in 1874 and still sits in Bern, becoming a United Nations specialised agency in 1947. Geneva hosts the WHO, ILO, ITU and WMO, Paris hosts UNESCO, and Vienna hosts the IAEA and UNIDO.

ICAO was created by the 1944 Chicago Convention and is headquartered in Montreal; it issues Standards and Recommended Practices for aviation and developed the phonetic alphabet and airport code system. IATA, the most tempting distractor, is not a UN body but a trade association of airlines.

The IMO, established by a convention adopted in 1948 and known until 1982 as the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization, is headquartered in London. SOLAS deals with the safety of life at sea, while MARPOL addresses pollution from ships.

The WTO was established by the Marrakesh Agreement, signed in April 1994 to conclude the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, and replaced the GATT system. The Havana Charter of 1948 was the failed attempt to create an International Trade Organization, while Bretton Woods in 1944 produced the IMF and the World Bank.

The Treaty on European Union, signed at Maastricht in 1992 and in force from November 1993, created the European Union and introduced EU citizenship. Paris in 1951 established the European Coal and Steel Community, Rome in 1957 the European Economic Community, and Lisbon in 2007 amended rather than founded the union.

ASEAN was founded by the Bangkok Declaration of 8 August 1967, but its permanent Secretariat is in Jakarta, Indonesia, hosted by the founding member. The five original members were Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

The SCO was proclaimed at Shanghai on 15 June 2001 by the leaders of the six states, with Uzbekistan acceding to the original Shanghai Five of 1996. Pakistan and India were admitted much later, as full members at the 2017 summit.

The first Non-Aligned Movement summit was held at Belgrade in September 1961, convened largely on the initiative of Tito, Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno. Bandung is the classic trap: it hosted the 1955 Asian-African Conference, which was the precursor rather than the founding summit.

The London Declaration of 1949 dropped the requirement that members owe allegiance to the Crown, so India stayed in the Commonwealth when it became a republic in 1950, and the British sovereign took the title 'Head of the Commonwealth'. Pakistan, also a republic from 1956, similarly remained a member.

South Africa was admitted to the BRIC grouping in 2010, and from the 2011 summit the acronym was written BRICS. The original four were Brazil, Russia, India and China, a grouping whose label was coined in 2001.

Twelve countries signed the Washington Treaty in 1949: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal and Italy. Greece and Turkey acceded in 1952 and West Germany in 1955.

The G20 was created in September 1999, bringing finance ministers and central bank governors together after the Asian financial crisis exposed the limits of the existing forums. Heads of state first met at summit level in Washington in November 2008 in response to the global financial crisis, which is why 2008 is the distractor.