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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“Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal-passers—all.”
—Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)
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—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
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—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“Passengers in 1937 totaled 270,000; so many of these were celebrities that two Newark newspapers ran special airport columns.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)
“Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves on every occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us.”
—George Canning (1770–1827)
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—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)