Office of the Historian

IO Files: A/1167

Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly at Its 261st Plenary Meeting, 1 December 19491

[New York,] 1 December 1949.

[290(IV)]

Essentials of Peace2

the general assembly

1. Declares that the Charter of the United Nations, the most solemn pact of peace in history, lays down basic principles necessary for an enduring peace; that disregard of these principles is primarily responsible for the continuance of international tension; and that it is urgently necessary for all Members to act in accordance with these principles in the spirit of co-operation on which the United Nations was founded;

Calls upon every nation

2. To refrain from threatening or using force contrary to the Charter;

3. To refrain from any threats or acts, direct or indirect, aimed at impairing the freedom, independence or integrity of any State, or at fomenting civil strife and subverting the will of the people in any State;

4. To carry out in good faith its international agreements;

5. To afford all United Nations bodies full co-operation and free access in the performance of the tasks assigned to them under the Charter;

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6. To promote, in recognition of the paramount importance of preserving the dignity and worth of the human person, full freedom for the peaceful expression of political opposition, full opportunity for the exercise of religious freedom and full respect for all the other fundamental rights expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

7. To promote nationally and through international co-operation, efforts to achieve and sustain higher standards of living for all peoples;

8. To remove the barriers which deny to peoples the free exchange of information and ideas essential to international understanding and peace;

Calls upon every member

9. To participate fully in all the work of the United Nations;

Calls upon the five permanent members of the Security Council

10. To broaden progressively their co-operation and to exercise restraint in the use of the veto in order to make the Security Council a more effective instrument for maintaining peace;

Calls upon every nation

11. To settle international disputes by peaceful means and to cooperate in supporting United Nations efforts to resolve outstanding problems;

12. To co-operate to attain the effective international regulation of conventional armaments; and

13. To agree to the exercise of national sovereignty jointly with other nations to the extent necessary to attain international control of atomic energy which would make effective the prohibition of atomic weapons and assure the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes only.

  1. The General Assembly considered the report of the First Committee approving the “Essentials of Peace” resolution (A/1150) and the draft resolution reintroduced by the Soviet Union (A/1149) at its 257th–261st Plenary Meetings, November 29–December 1. The 257th Meeting was largely devoted to addresses by Vyshinsky and Austin in support of the resolutions proposed by their respective delegations; for the record of that meeting, see GA(IV), Plenary, p. 385. At the 261st Meeting, December 1, the General Assembly adopted the “Essentials of Peace” resolution paragraph by paragraph and then as a whole by 53 votes to 5 with one abstention. The Soviet proposal was then rejected by votes of 51–5–2 (paragraph 1), 39–5–15 (paragraph 2), 21–13–23 (first sentence of paragraph 3), and 41–5–10 (the remainder of paragraph 3). For the record of the 261st Meeting, see ibid., p. 430.↩
  2. This title was adopted by the General Assembly at its 261st Meeting, December 1, by a vote of 51 to 5.↩