Assessing 16,000 UN General Assembly resolutions
On Second of March 2022, the UN General Assembly voted the resolution A/ES-11/L.1 "deploring ‘in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine’ in violation of the UN Charter and demanding that Russia ‘immediately cease its use of force’ against eastern European country." The resolution was passed with 141 positive votes, 5 nos, and 35 abstentions. I was curious to see who those five nos were and turns out it was Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Belarus and of course Russia. If these countries have anything in common is their poor record in Human Rights and Democratic institutions. Actually, by many standards this group of countries had one of the lowest possible democratic scores any random group of five countries could have in the world, even historically. This group of five was so exceptional, that I decided to analyse the vote from a data point of view. The first thing I did was to download all the UN General Assembly votes since its incepti
