This chapter provides an original inquiry into the use of General Assembly resolutions within domestic legal systems. The scholarly literature is silent on this, being entirely focused on the use of resolutions by international courts and tribunals. As a result, this chapter supplements the current academic debate by revealing a neglected aspect of the legal significance of resolutions. It evaluates the degree of legal significance that states attach to resolutions at the implementation stage by analysing the process of incorporation of resolutions into domestic law. It shows that the source of the legal significance of resolutions can be ultimately traced back to the will of individual states to rely on resolutions depending on context and circumstances. As a result, generalizations about the legal significance of resolutions within domestic legal systems appear to be neither convincing nor useful.

This chapter evaluates the socially constructed meaning of the legal significance of resolutions at the adoption stage. It provides an empirical analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of the relationship between the content of selected resolutions and the level of state support for those resolutions with a view to facilitating the discovery of emergent analytics – that is to say, key concepts shedding light on the scope, limits and intensity of the perceived binding character of resolutions at the adoption stage. The contention is that the text of resolutions cannot be taken at face value, hence it is not determinative of the legal significance of resolutions. It demonstrates that the concept of legal significance of resolutions at the adoption stage is determined by the characteristics of the General Assembly as a self-contained political system. It is therefore likely to differ from the concept of legal significance at the implementation stage.

The Introduction provides an overview of the four streams of thought about the legal significance of resolutions. It shows that General Assembly resolutions do not fit the paradigm of Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and, in any case, the traditional signposts contained in that provision do not explain the basis of legal obligation in the contemporary international society. It provides an argument for developing an empirically grounded analysis of how resolutions acquire legal significance in different contexts through state practice. It subsequently outlines the structure of the analysis, which culminates with the formulation of an original theory of legal significance of resolutions. The latter develops in three different contexts – namely, at the adoption stage, within domestic law and in international practice.

This chapter examines the different functions that resolutions serve in state submissions before international courts and tribunals. The analysis revolves around two interrelated issues. On the one hand, it discerns between instances in which states treat resolutions as evidence of state practice and instances in which states treat resolutions as the practice of the General Assembly. On the other hand, the analysis evaluates the extent to which states and judges hold different views on the legal significance of resolutions. It demonstrates that issues relating to the legal significance of resolutions revolve around a double dichotomy generated by the different positions taken by states and judges in relation to assertion and attribution of the source of the legal significance of resolutions to state practice or the separate will of the General Assembly. It contends that it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about the legal significance of resolutions given the character of international polyarchy of the General Assembly. It then offers insights into the concept of autonomy of the General Assembly from its member states.

This chapter provides an innovative analysis of the concept of legal significance of resolutions. It evaluates the common traits of state practice related to the attribution of legal significance of resolutions in relation to three contexts – at the adoption stage, within domestic law and in international practice. Subsequently, it evaluates whether it is possible to predict the presence of legal significance of resolutions by providing a critique of the existing tests of legal significance devised by scholars. It concludes by arguing that there is a significant discrepancy between the findings of this study and scholarly positions on the normative value of resolutions. The latter tend to focus on the legal significance at the adoption stage, thus underplaying the relevance of state practice as a signpost of legal significance at the implementation stage – both domestic and international.