99 Fun Facts About United Nations

The Charter of the United Nations was signed in 1945 in which city?

San Francisco hosted delegates of 50 nations for two months; Poland, whose new government was formed too late to send anyone, signed the Charter afterwards and still counts among the 51 founding members.

Which US president is credited with coining the term 'United Nations' to describe the wartime Allies?

Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase first appeared officially on 1 January 1942, when 26 Allied governments signed a declaration pledging to fight on together and make no separate peace.

United Nations Day, 24 October, marks the anniversary of which 1945 event?

The UN Charter taking effect had to wait four months after the signing, until the five permanent Security Council powers and a majority of the other signatories had ratified it.

A tapestry copy of which Picasso painting was hung outside the Security Council chamber in 1985?

Guernica's tapestry was hidden behind a curtain in February 2003, when Colin Powell came to the UN to argue for war in Iraq in front of the cameras that usually face it.

Which country joined the UN in July 2011, becoming its 193rd member state?

South Sudan took its seat five days after independence, which followed a referendum in which almost 99 percent of voters chose to break away from Sudan.

Where is the headquarters of the United Nations?

New York City has housed the UN since the early 1950s; before the riverside towers were ready, most of its work was done in a gyroscope factory at Lake Success on Long Island.

Which family donated the money to buy the East River site for the UN headquarters?

The Rockefellers stepped in late: the UN was leaning towards Philadelphia until John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered $8.5 million in 1946 to buy the East River land from a developer.

Which neighbourhood's name is sometimes used as a nickname for the UN itself?

Turtle Bay, the neighbourhood surrounding the UN headquarters, is often used as shorthand for the organisation; slaughterhouses occupied the site before it was bought in 1946.

Which two architects' merged schemes became the final design of the UN headquarters?

Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier merged their plans only after Le Corbusier leaned on the younger Brazilian, whose own scheme the design board had already approved.

Which European country joined the United Nations only in 2002?

Switzerland's voters had rejected membership by three to one in 1986; a second referendum in March 2002 reversed that, and the country took its seat in September.

Which principal organ suspended its operations in 1994 after Palau gained independence?

The Trusteeship Council had run out of work: Palau was the last of the trust territories it supervised, so it suspended operations on 1 November 1994, though it still exists on paper.

Which of the UN's six principal organs sits in the Netherlands, away from UN headquarters?

The International Court of Justice sits in the Peace Palace at The Hague, which opened in 1913 as a home for a court meant to end war, a year before the First World War began.

Which language was added in 1973 as the sixth official language of the United Nations?

Arabic joined Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish after the Arab member states agreed to pay the costs themselves for the first three years; speeches are now interpreted live between all six.

Which Soviet leader is remembered for banging his shoe at the UN?

Khrushchev was protesting in October 1960 at a Philippine delegate who accused Moscow of denying freedom to Eastern Europe; witnesses disagree on whether the shoe was banged or only waved.

Which of these countries holds one of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council?

France has held its seat since 1945 as one of the victorious Allies; Germany, Japan, India and Brazil, the 'G4', have campaigned together for permanent seats of their own.

Which Secretary-General shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations?

Kofi Annan had headed UN peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide, a failure he later said he regretted; seven years on, he and the organisation shared the prize.

In 1971 the PRC took the Chinese Security Council seat from the government based where?

Taiwan had been the Nationalists' base since they lost the mainland in 1949, so for 22 years a government ruling one island held a permanent seat and its veto; the Assembly voted 76 to 35 to seat Beijing.

Where did the first session of the General Assembly convene in January 1946?

London lent the Assembly Methodist Central Hall in Westminster; the very first resolution adopted there, on 24 January 1946, set up a commission to work towards ridding the world of atomic weapons.

Which Norwegian was the first elected secretary-general of the United Nations, in 1946?

Trygve Lie, as Norway's justice minister in the 1930s, let the exiled Leon Trotsky settle in the country, then forced him out again under pressure from Stalin.

Which secretary-general died in a 1961 plane crash on a Congo peace mission, winning a posthumous Nobel?

Dag Hammarskjöld was flying to ceasefire talks when his plane came down near Ndola; the cause has never been settled, and in 2015 the UN appointed a new panel to examine fresh evidence.

Which country vetoed a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996?

America (the United States) cast the lone veto against a second term for Boutros-Ghali in November 1996, with the other 14 Council members supporting him.

In 1981 China cast 16 vetoes to stop which secretary-general winning a third term?

Kurt Waldheim was blocked round after round by Beijing, which wanted a Third World candidate, while Washington blocked Tanzania's Salim Ahmed Salim; the deadlock ended with a compromise choice from Peru.

António Guterres, who became UN secretary-general in 2017, is from which country?

Portugal's prime minister from 1995, Guterres resigned midway through his second term after a drubbing in local elections, saying he wanted to keep the country out of a 'political swamp'.

Which country walked out of the UN in 1965 in protest at Malaysia's seat on the Security Council?

Indonesia's President Sukarno even set up a rival body, CONEFO; the UN treated the walkout as a pause in cooperation, and Jakarta took its seat back in 1966 after power changed hands.

What colour are the helmets that give UN peacekeepers their nickname?

Blue helmets or berets are the only UN kit most peacekeepers wear: troops keep their own countries' uniforms, and the headgear and a badge mark them out. The forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize.

The UN's first armed peacekeeping force was created in November 1956 in response to what?

The Suez Crisis ended with UN troops replacing the invading British, French and Israeli forces; Canada's Lester Pearson, who proposed the force, won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for it.

UNTSO, the UN's oldest peacekeeping mission, has monitored ceasefires since 1948 in which region?

The Middle East received unarmed UN observers in May 1948 to supervise a truce in the first Arab-Israeli war; within months the UN's own mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem.

The 1950 resolution authorising a US-led force in Korea passed only because which member was absent?

The Soviet Union was boycotting the Council over the PRC's exclusion, so it could not veto the June 1950 resolution that authorised force in Korea.

Who chaired the committee that drafted the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt steered the drafting for nearly two years; when the Assembly adopted the text in Paris in December 1948, with no votes against, the delegates gave her a standing ovation.

The Human Rights Council, which replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006, meets in which city?

Geneva hosts the 47-member Council, created after the old Commission was discredited for letting states with poor human rights records sit in judgment on others.

UNICEF was created in 1946 originally to help children where?

UNICEF was set up in December 1946 to feed and care for children in post-war Europe; it became a permanent agency in 1953 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965.

In 1980 the World Health Organization announced the global eradication of which disease?

Smallpox was beaten with the first vaccine ever made, which Edward Jenner devised in 1796 from the country belief that people who had caught cowpox were spared; the last natural case was in Somalia in 1977.

The World Food Programme and FAO are based in which capital?

Rome hosts all three UN food agencies; the World Food Programme won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for feeding people in war zones and for working to stop hunger being used as a weapon.

The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and which other UN body?

UNEP, the UN Environment Programme, co-founded a panel that does no research of its own: thousands of scientists volunteer their time to assess published studies for its reports.

Which set of eight global development targets was due to be met by 2015?

The Millennium Development Goals were agreed in 2000; their headline target, halving the share of people living in extreme poverty, was met five years ahead of the 2015 deadline.

Which US president first took the United States out of UNESCO, complaining of mismanagement and political bias?

Ronald Reagan's administration left at the end of 1984, and Britain followed a year later; the United States then stayed out for 19 years before returning in 2003.

The 1975 General Assembly resolution repealed in 1991 had declared what to be a form of racism?

Zionism was the target of Resolution 3379; Israel made its repeal a condition of attending the 1991 Madrid peace conference, and the Assembly revoked it that December by 111 votes to 25.

Sixteen of the 17 states that joined the UN in 1960 came from which continent?

Africa's newcomers, most of them former French colonies, were joined only by Cyprus; that December the enlarged Assembly passed a declaration calling for a speedy end to colonial rule.

The white emblem on the UN flag shows a world map surrounded by branches of which tree?

Olive branches, an old symbol of peace, wrap a world map drawn as if looking down on the North Pole; the design began as a lapel pin for delegates at the 1945 founding conference.

The knotted-gun sculpture 'Non-Violence' at UN headquarters was made by an artist mourning which murdered musician?

John Lennon was a friend of the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, who began the revolver with a knotted barrel after the 1980 shooting; Luxembourg bought it and gave it to the UN in 1988.

Which UN body has won the Nobel Peace Prize twice, in 1954 and 1981?

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, won first for helping the displaced of Western Europe to go home, emigrate or settle where they were, and again for bringing refugees home on three continents in the 1970s.

The failed predecessor to the UN, which the United States never joined, was called what?

The League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's project and won him the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, yet the US Senate rejected the treaty that created it, so his own country stayed outside.

What name was given to the statement of post-war aims that Churchill and the US president issued in August 1941?

The Atlantic Charter came out of meetings aboard warships off Newfoundland; the United States put its name to these war aims while still out of the war, four months before Pearl Harbor.

Which American media mogul pledged $1 billion to United Nations causes in 1997?

Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, made the pledge while his own government was deep in arrears on its UN dues; the money set up the UN Foundation the following year.

At which 1944 conference did the Allied Big Four negotiate the aims and structure of the new world organisation?

Dumbarton Oaks, a mansion in Washington, hosted the talks from 21 August to 7 October 1944; they ran in two rounds because the Soviet delegates would not sit down with the Chinese.

As of 2025, which two entities hold non-member observer state status at the UN?

The Holy See and Palestine are the two; Palestine gained the status in November 2012 by an Assembly vote, where no veto applies, while full membership must first pass the Security Council.

UNMOGIP, a UN observer mission set up in 1949, watches a ceasefire line in which region?

Jammu and Kashmir has had UN observers since January 1949; India has argued since the 1972 Simla Agreement that their mandate has lapsed, but the UN holds that only the Security Council can end it.

Which three words open the preamble to the UN Charter?

We the peoples was borrowed from the opening of the US Constitution at the suggestion of the American delegation at the 1945 founding conference.

Which Hollywood star spent her last years as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, visiting famine-hit Ethiopia and Somalia?

Audrey Hepburn took the role in 1988 and went straight to Ethiopia; she was still travelling for the fund in 1992, though ill with cancer, and died early the next year.

The knotted-gun sculpture outside UN headquarters was made after the murder of which musician?

John Lennon was an acquaintance of the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, who answered the shooting by tying the barrel of a .357 Magnum in a knot. Luxembourg bought the bronze and gave it to the UN in 1988.

Which comic-book hero did the UN name an honorary ambassador in 2016, then drop after staff protests?

Wonder Woman got the title on the 75th anniversary of her first appearance, to champion the empowerment of women and girls. A staff petition called the character overtly sexualised, and the role ended within two months.

The UN observes 19 November each year as a world day dedicated to which household fixture?

The toilet has had an official UN day since 2013, after Singapore tabled its first ever resolution to create one. The date marks the founding of the World Toilet Organization by a Singapore philanthropist in 2001.

Which leader spoke for about four and a half hours, the longest address ever made to the UN's full membership?

Fidel Castro spent most of the marathon denouncing Washington's policies towards its southern neighbours. During the same trip he held a meeting with Malcolm X.

A tapestry of which Picasso painting hangs at the entrance to the UN Security Council chamber?

Guernica, Picasso's protest at the 1937 bombing of a Basque town, greets diplomats on their way in. A collector commissioned the woven copy in 1955 after the painter refused to sell him the original.

Which Cold War leader is said to have pounded his shoe on a desk during a heated UN debate?

Nikita Khrushchev was protesting at a Philippine delegate who said Moscow had swallowed up its satellite peoples. Eyewitness accounts conflict over whether the shoe ever actually struck the desk.

Since 1951 the United Nations has enjoyed which privilege once reserved for sovereign states?

Issuing stamps began under a deal with the US Post Office, and collectors can buy them priced in dollars, Swiss francs or euros. They are valid only on mail posted from UN offices.

By long tradition, which country gives the first speech at the UN's annual gathering of world leaders?

Brazil has spoken first at the opening debate for decades. In 2011 Dilma Rousseff used the slot to become the first female leader ever to open it.

A greeting recorded by a UN secretary-general is leaving the solar system aboard which twin NASA probes?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry a golden record on which Kurt Waldheim speaks in English, ahead of greetings in 55 languages and a hello from Carl Sagan's young son.

Which staple crop did the United Nations honour with its own International Year in 2008?

Potato growers got the spotlight because the crop is a staple that can strengthen food security for the world's poor. The tuber shared 2008 with the International Year of Sanitation.

Since 1950, children have carried small orange UNICEF collection boxes from door to door on which holiday?

Halloween fundraising for UNICEF began when a Philadelphia family sent their children out to collect nickels and dimes in decorated milk cartons. By 1969 some 3.5 million children were taking part.

Which film star earned the US Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador?

Audrey Hepburn said she took the role out of gratitude for the international aid she received as a child under wartime occupation. Her first field mission for the agency was to Ethiopia in 1988.

Which activist addressed the United Nations on her 16th birthday in 2013, a day the UN named after her?

Malala Yousafzai used the speech, less than a year after a Taliban gunman shot her on a bus home from an exam, to call for worldwide access to education.

Which British actress launched the UN Women campaign HeForShe with a widely shared speech in 2014?

Emma Watson, newly appointed a goodwill ambassador, invited men and boys to join the push for gender equality. Twitter painted the campaign's hashtag on a wall at its headquarters.

Which former US vice president shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN's climate science panel?

Al Gore took one half of the prize and the IPCC the other, for building up and spreading knowledge about man-made climate change.

The United Nations marks 18 July, his birthday, as an international day honouring which Nobel Peace laureate?

Nelson Mandela is honoured with action rather than a holiday: people are asked to give 67 minutes to helping others, one for each year he spent fighting injustice.

Goal 1 of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, calls for an end to what?

Poverty in all its forms, everywhere, is the full target, and like the other 16 goals it carries a 2030 deadline.

The United Nations has kept a major office in the Palais des Nations since 1946 in which Swiss city?

Geneva hosts the office even though Switzerland itself stayed outside the organisation until 2002. When finished, the palace was the continent's second-largest building complex by volume, after Versailles.

UNESCO, the UN agency behind the World Heritage List, has its headquarters in which capital city?

Paris has housed UNESCO's secretariat since 1958 in a seven-storey building shaped like a three-pointed star.

UN peacekeepers have patrolled a buffer zone known as the Green Line on which Mediterranean island?

Cyprus has hosted the force since 1964, when it arrived to stop fighting between the island's Greek and Turkish communities. The demilitarised zone it patrols runs for more than 180 km.

The UN's scandal-hit Oil-for-Food Programme let which country under sanctions sell oil to buy humanitarian supplies?

Iraq could trade crude for food and medicine without rebuilding its military, under a scheme set up in 1995. It became notorious for widespread corruption and the abuse of its funds.

In 1995 lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to stop a massacre at which Bosnian 'safe area'?

Srebrenica had been declared a UN-protected enclave two years earlier, yet 370 Dutch soldiers could not prevent its capture. Judges in the Netherlands later held the state liable for failing to prevent some of the deaths.

Which city hosted the UN's 1992 Earth Summit, where the climate convention behind the Kyoto Protocol was born?

Rio de Janeiro welcomed the summit exactly 20 years after Stockholm staged the first global conference on the environment.

Which 1987 agreement to protect the ozone layer became the first treaty ratified by every UN member state?

The Montreal Protocol has phased out about 98% of the chemicals that eat away at the ozone layer. Kofi Annan called it perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.

Which UN ranking, launched in 1990, scores countries on life expectancy, schooling and income?

The Human Development Index was devised by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul-Haq to shift attention from national income to people's lives. It sorts countries into four tiers.

Which kingdom's pursuit of 'gross national happiness' led the UN to create an International Day of Happiness?

Bhutan has chased the idea since the 1970s, and its prime minister steered a 2011 UN resolution calling for a more holistic approach to growth. The day itself falls on 20 March.

Which 1967 agreement, drafted under UN auspices, stops any country claiming the Moon as its own territory?

The Outer Space Treaty also bans nuclear weapons from orbit and keeps the Moon for peaceful purposes. Its bar on sovereignty has stirred arguments over mining celestial bodies for profit.

The UN's World Heritage system grew from a campaign to save which Egyptian temples from the Aswan Dam?

Abu Simbel was among 22 historic sites threatened by the dam's rising waters, and the rescue went so well that it led to the World Heritage Convention of 1972.

Which 2005 Nicole Kidman thriller was the first film ever shot inside United Nations headquarters?

The Interpreter got in only after its director Sydney Pollack appealed to Kofi Annan in person. Earlier requests had been refused, and the fallback was a costly set in Toronto.

Which language was the last to be added to the official languages of the United Nations, in 1973?

Arabic joined the five languages in use since the UN's founding, and 18 December, the date of the vote, is now marked as UN Arabic Language Day.

The world map on the United Nations emblem is centred on which point of the globe?

The North Pole sits at the centre of a projection made popular by the wartime maps that the cartographer Richard Edes Harrison drew for Fortune and Life magazines.

In Model United Nations, which document do delegates usually write and hand in before the conference begins?

A position paper sums up a delegate's research and the line their country will take. Delegates write it after studying the guides that organisers prepare for each committee.

Kofi Annan, who shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations itself, came from which country?

Ghana was still the Gold Coast when he was born in Kumasi. He became the first secretary-general to be chosen from the ranks of the UN's own staff.

Which Burmese diplomat became the first Asian to lead the United Nations, taking office in 1961?

U Thant had been in the job for less than a year when he helped to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two months later he ordered the UN operation that ended Katanga's secession from the Congo.

Which UN-linked nuclear watchdog shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize with its director, Mohamed ElBaradei?

The IAEA grew out of President Eisenhower's 'Atoms for Peace' speech to the UN, which called for a body to watch over the spread of nuclear technology.

At which February 1945 summit did Stalin accept the veto formula that brought his country into the United Nations?

Yalta produced a secret understanding that each permanent member of the Security Council could block decisions it disliked, which secured Stalin's commitment to join.

Which 1944 conference at a New Hampshire hotel created the IMF, now part of the United Nations system?

Bretton Woods drew 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations to the Mount Washington Hotel. Its formal name was the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, a year before the UN itself existed.

Which US ambassador confronted Moscow's envoy over missiles in Cuba at an emergency UN Security Council session?

Adlai Stevenson showed aerial photographs of the launch sites and told his opposite number not to wait for the translation before answering yes or no. The exchange later inspired a courtroom scene in a Star Trek film.

Which territory did the United Nations govern directly from 1999 until it became an independent state in 2002?

East Timor was run by a UN transitional administration under the diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello, which handed most of its functions to the new government on 20 May 2002.

The Japanese Peace Bell at UN headquarters was cast from what, gathered from more than 60 countries?

Donated coins, among them gold pieces from the Pope, were gathered over three years by Chiyoji Nakagawa, who had paid his own way to a UN session to pitch the idea.

Which UN agency, the oldest in the UN family, began in 1865 as a union to standardise telegraph traffic?

The ITU started out as the International Telegraph Union, formed in Paris by 20 European states, and now shares out the radio spectrum and satellite orbits.

Which UN agency, created by the Treaty of Versailles, gives employers and workers a say alongside governments?

The ILO won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969, half a century after its founding, and its three-way structure of governments, employers and workers is unique in the UN system.

Before its permanent headquarters opened in 1952, the UN worked from a converted gyroscope factory in which village?

Lake Success lent the UN part of the Sperry Gyroscope plant from 1946, and even the Security Council met there. In 2005 officials explored setting up a temporary base on the old site.

What French name is given to the travel document the United Nations provides to its own officials?

The laissez-passer has two grades: the standard issue works like a service passport, while a red version for the most senior officials carries the standing of a diplomatic passport.

Which Polish-Jewish lawyer invented the word 'genocide' and lobbied the UN to outlaw the crime in 1948?

Raphael Lemkin built the word during the Second World War from the Greek for a people and the Latin for killing. Many clauses of the UN's Genocide Convention were based on his proposals.

In 2011 the UN's food agency declared which livestock disease only the second ever eradicated worldwide?

Rinderpest was last confirmed in 2001, the end of an eradication campaign that had run since the middle of the 20th century. Its name is simply a borrowed word meaning cattle plague.

Which country donated the UN Security Council chamber, whose mural shows a phoenix rising from its ashes?

Norway offered in 1950 to decorate and furnish the room, and one of its artists, Per Krohg, painted the mural as a symbol of the world's rebirth after war. It later paid $5 million to renovate the chamber.

Which UN mediator became the first Black winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950?

Ralph Bunche took over the mediation after his chief, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem, and went on to negotiate the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbours.

Which Canadian general commanded the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide?

Roméo Dallaire led an ill-equipped mission that had been sent to help carry out a peace accord, not to fight. He told the story in his memoir Shake Hands with the Devil.

Which former Latin American president became the first head of UN Women in 2010?

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile, took charge of an agency that had just been formed by merging four smaller UN bodies working for women.