Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
Can the United Nations General Assembly confront the resurgence of global authoritarianism, which routinely masks tyrannical rule behind the veneer of international legitimacy? This global illegitimacy, dressed in the sheepskin of various tyrannical formations, had already devastated large parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, and is well into completely self-destroying the overwhelming majority of the dictatorships, tyrannies, monarchies, and terror-based regimes themselves across the globe. Consequently, if the remaining liberal democratic states were to avoid their own self-destruction too, they must be wise enough to finally understand that the right to survive can no more be created by appeasement than a lasting peace can be forced upon their enemies by the lopsidedly sporadic use of military force.
The 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly met in New York City between the 22nd and the 28th of September 2026, under the banner headline “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations That Delivers For All.” This is also an appropriately revealing slogan for the top international organization that has suffered from the thus far incurable political disease of having been a deeply compromised forum of transactional diplomacy since its establishment on October 24, 1945. This unseemly tragedy has started with the intellectual cowardice of the victorious powers following World War II by failing to declare that they are not afraid of their victory. As a result, and in spite of the opportunity to establish peace as well as stability throughout the world, they failed to fully eliminate the great panic of military destruction and thus break the vicious circle of fear and violence once and for all. More ruinously, the Assembly has made a profession of regularly selling the founding principles of the United Nations that it created to uphold to the highest bidder. This central absurdity of the United Nations is embedded in its structure. Every state possesses one vote, regardless of its population, political legitimacy, observance of international law, or treatment of their own citizens. While sovereign equality might be a pleasant-sounding universal legal fiction, it must be fundamentally supported by the highest moral principles too.
The United Nations Charter speaks solemnly of human dignity, fundamental freedoms, equal rights, and peaceful relations among all nations. Yet, the General Assembly routinely permits governments that violate every one of these principles to present themselves as judges of countries incomparably freer and by far more democratic than their own. Tyrannies lecture democracies about justice. Aggressors invoke peace. Theocratic regimes that claim among others that the only sovereign is God and all the human beings are His and His appointed leaders’ powerless subjects, declare all those who do not belong to their religious faith inhuman and doomed to eternal slavery, censor newspapers, abundantly imprison and execute opponents, and hold fake elections, deliver full-throated sermons on liberal democracy and popular sovereignty. All this is not merely political hypocrisy. It is the institutionalization of moral inversion.
To add insult to injury, the Assembly’s political blocs have completed its moral corruption. Many delegations do not seriously consider the merits of a resolution. They vote according to regional discipline, economic dependence, diplomatic barter, or fear of retaliation. The African Group, the Arab Group, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, and other coalitions frequently transform deliberation into numerical machinery. In this manner, the substance of an issue becomes secondary to the identity of the accused, the preferences of powerful patrons, and the favors expected in return. The result is not a parliament of mankind. It is a sandbox auction conducted beneath the emblem of mankind.
No subject better reveals this abominable corruption than the treatment of the State of Israel. The General Assembly’s handling of the “Palestinian question” is statistically disproportionate, divorced from geopolitical reality, dogmatically repetitive, and politically contrived that it has become a parody of impartial international judgment. The State of Israel is condemned with ritualistic regularity, while some of the world’s worst regimes escape comparable scrutiny. The Assembly’s anti-Israel industry also demonstrates how humanitarian language can be weaponized. Terms such as “occupation,” “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “self-determination” are deployed not with legal discipline, but as instruments of hateful propaganda. In this context, history is truncated, terrorism is euphemized, rejected peace proposals disappear, and the State of Israel’s security dilemmas are treated as though they arose in a vacuum. By repeating politically useful accusations often enough, the Assembly attempts to manufacture legal reality through numerical majorities. An outrageously specific example of the fact that the United Nations Charter means nothing to the Assembly is the appointment of Francesca Albanese as a UN Special Rapporteur on the “occupied Palestinian territories” in 2022. During her unprofessionally biased activities, she has gradually lost control even of herself by building a hatefully mendacious pile of antisemitic arguments, in which she even claimed that the Nazis called the Jews in the concentration camps “Muslims.”
Yet, truth is not established by a show of hands. A hundred tyrannies voting together cannot transform a falsehood into a fact. Nor can a majority repeal history, extinguish treaty rights, or convert terrorism into national liberation. International law derives its authority from consistent principles and credible interpretation – not from the accumulated prejudices and blatant lies of governments that disregard law whenever it restrains them. The General Assembly has also cultivated an addiction to theatrical resolutions. Delegates deliver grandiloquent speeches, approve declarations, denounce enemies, and then return home having altered nothing. Tyrants acquire international legitimacy. The European democracies pretend that “the international community” has acted. To describe their collective vote as the voice of humanity is an insult to humanity. In this manner, the democratic states of Europe bear a large part of the blame. They complain privately about bias, while legitimizing it publicly.
Reform of the United Nations must begin with intellectual honesty. Most importantly, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate government must return urgently to the international political discourse. Until the democratic world confronts that whorehouse mentality, the General Assembly will remain what it has made itself: an ornate chamber, in which justice is displaced at the entrance, bartered in the corridors, and traded away on the Assembly floor for short-term diplomatic expediency .