Which of the following UN specialized agencies has completed 100 years of its formation ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), the International Labour Organization. The ILO was founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, its constitution forming Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles, and it therefore completed a hundred years in 2019. That centenary was a substantial international event rather than a date on a calendar: the International Labour Conference met for its 108th session in June 2019 and adopted the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, and the year's work was built on the report of the Global Commission on the Future of Work, which recommended among other things a universal labour guarantee, social protection from birth to old age and an entitlement to lifelong learning. The organisation is the oldest of the bodies now attached to the United Nations and the first to be brought into the UN system as a specialised agency, in 1946, having survived the League that created it. Two features of the ILO are worth holding because questions are repeatedly built on them. The first is its tripartite structure, unique in the UN system: each member State is represented not by governments alone but by two government delegates, one employers' delegate and one workers' delegate, each of the last two entitled to speak and vote independently of their own government. The second is the character of its output — international labour standards adopted as Conventions, which bind the States that ratify them, and Recommendations, which guide without binding; the 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work classified eight of the Conventions as fundamental, and the 110th session of the International Labour Conference in June 2022 — two months before this paper was written — amended the Declaration to add a fifth category, a safe and healthy working environment, so that the fundamental Conventions now number ten, Nos. 155 and 187 having joined them, covering freedom of association and collective bargaining, the abolition of forced labour, the abolition of child labour, and the elimination of discrimination in employment. The ILO is headquartered at Geneva, it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969 in its fiftieth year, and India has been a member from its foundation in 1919. Of the four bodies offered, it is the one whose hundredth anniversary was a live international event, and option (1) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The FAO belongs to the post-war generation of agencies, not to the League of Nations generation. It was founded on 16 October 1945 at a conference in Quebec City, and that founding date is the reason 16 October is observed each year as World Food Day. It is headquartered in Rome, its mandate is to defeat hunger and to improve nutrition, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and it is the body behind the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report and the Codex Alimentarius food standards maintained jointly with the WHO. Counting from 1945, the FAO's own centenary is still some way off, and in 2022 it had completed rather more than seventy-five years. The useful discipline behind this option is to fix the founding years of the principal agencies as a short list — ILO 1919, FAO 1945, UNESCO 1945, WHO 1948 — because commissions test them in exactly this substitutable way.  (c) The WHO is younger still. It was agreed at the International Health Conference held in New York in 1946, and its constitution came into force on 7 April 1948, which is why 7 April is observed every year as World Health Day. It is headquartered at Geneva, its governing body is the World Health Assembly, and it is the agency behind the International Health Regulations, the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern, and the eradication of smallpox certified in 1980. In 2022 the organisation had completed rather less than seventy-five years, so it cannot answer a question about a hundred-year anniversary. It is worth noting that the paper prints the name with an s, as World Health Organisation, while the organisation's own name is spelt with a z; the same question prints the other two organisations with the z, so the inconsistency is the printer's and not a signal about the answer.  (d) The Universal Postal Union is the one option that is older than the keyed answer rather than younger, and it is included precisely to catch a candidate who is guessing by age. It was established in 1874 by the Treaty of Bern as the General Postal Union, took its present name in 1878, and is among the oldest surviving intergovernmental organisations; it operated independently for three-quarters of a century and became a specialised agency of the United Nations only in 1948. Its hundredth year therefore fell in 1974, a full generation before this paper, and by 2022 it was approaching a hundred and fifty. The question is asking about the agency whose centenary was a matter of contemporary record, and that is the International Labour Organization, whose hundred years were completed in 2019 and marked by the Centenary Declaration; the UPU's antiquity is a fact worth knowing in its own right — it is headquartered at Bern and coordinates postal policy among its member States — but it does not answer this question.

Concept: The specialised agencies are autonomous international organisations linked to the United Nations by agreement rather than departments of it, each with its own membership, budget, governing conference and constitution. Because they were founded at different moments and for different purposes, their dates form a small chronology that examiners find convenient. The oldest of them predate the United Nations altogether: the Universal Postal Union of 1874 and the International Telecommunication Union, whose ancestor dates from 1865, were nineteenth-century unions of States created to solve practical problems of cross-border traffic, and were absorbed into the UN system in the late 1940s. The International Labour Organization belongs to the next layer, created in 1919 alongside the League of Nations by Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles, on the argument written into its constitution that universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice. It outlived the League, was the first body brought into the new United Nations system as a specialised agency in 1946, and reached its centenary in 2019 with the adoption of the Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work. The third layer is the post-war creation of 1945 to 1948 — the FAO in 1945, UNESCO in 1945, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, and the WHO whose constitution entered into force in 1948. Knowing which layer an agency belongs to answers most questions that can be asked about its age.

State PCS 2022 Q82 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q82 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer