An emergency special session is an unscheduled meeting of the United Nations General Assembly to make urgent recommendations on a particular issue. They are typically rare — a fact reflected in there being only 10 in the history of the United Nations. Most emergency special sessions run for a single "meeting", which itself can run over a number of days — the Tenth, however, is the only emergency special session to be resumed more than once (the Seventh emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly was resumed once), meaning that that Session has spanned across a number of "meetings".
The UN General Assembly's 'Uniting for Peace' resolution (A/RES/377 A) demands a majority—procedural—vote of the Security Council, or a request by a majority of UN Member states being received by the Secretary-General, for the convocation of an emergency special session, within 24 hours.
| Emergency special session | Topic | Convened by | Date | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First | Suez Crisis | Security Council | 1–10 November 1956 | A/3354 |
| Second | Soviet invasion of Hungary (Hungarian Revolution) | Security Council | 4–10 November 1956 | A/3355 |
| Third | Lebanon crisis | Security Council | 8–21 August 1958 | A/3905 |
| Fourth | Congo Crisis | Security Council | 17–19 September 1960 | A/4510 |
| Fifth | Six-Day War | Soviet Union | 17 June-18 September 1967 | A/6798 |
| Sixth | Soviet invasion of Afghanistan | Security Council | 10–14 January 1980 | ES-6/1, 2 |
| Seventh | Israeli-Palestinian conflict | Senegal |
22–29 July 1980 |
ES-7/1, 2, 3 |
| Eighth | South African occupation of Namibia (South West Africa) | Zimbabwe | 3–14 September 1981 | ES-8/1, 2 |
| Ninth | Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights (Golan Heights Law) | Security Council | 29 January-5 February 1982 | ES-9/1 |
| Tenth | Israeli-Palestinian conflict (East Jerusalem and Israeli-occupied territories) | Qatar |
24–25 April 1997 |
ES-10/1, 2 |
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“I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
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but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically”; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“O my Brothers! love your Country. Our Country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others; a family which by its concentration upon a given spot, and by the homogeneous nature of its elements, is destined for a special kind of activity.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
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—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“One general builds his success on ten thousand bleaching bones.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)