Chapter XV of the United Nations Charter
division of the United Nations
Chapter XV of the United Nations Charter deals with the UN Secretariat. It designates the UN secretary-general as the chief administrative officer of the organization, which includes the staff of ECOSOC, the Trusteeship Council, and other organs. Chapter XV is analogous to Article 6 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
Article 98
Similarly to how the Constitution of the United States requires the US president to deliver a State of the Union address to the US Congress, Article 98 of the UN Charter requires the secretary-general to "make an annual report to the General Assembly on the work of the Organization."
Article 99
Article 99 empowers the secretary-general to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security". It is rarely invoked. Some of the times it has been invoked include:
1960: Invoked by Dag Hammarskjöld in regards to the Congo Crisis, leading to 20,000 UN peacekeepers being deployed there.
1971: Invoked by U Thant in regards to the Bangladesh Liberation War and its potential spread to the entire Indian subcontinent.
1979: Invoked by Kurt Waldheim in regards to the Iran hostage crisis following the Iranian Revolution.
1989: Invoked by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in regards to the War of Liberation (1989–1990) in Lebanon, resulting in a UN fact-finding mission.
2023: Invoked by António Guterres during the Gaza war, warning of a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chapter XV of the United Nations Charter” as division of the United Nations. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as division of the United Nations. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5073526. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1971, 1979 and 1989.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Chapter XV of the United Nations Charter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.