UN General Assembly
1987

We can have no truck with the suggestion that small States should be United in the exercise of their sovereignty by some diminished status in the United Nations system. Such an idea is antediluvian and regressive in the extreme. The notion of sovereign equality and the principle of majority rule are the very foundations of the moral authority of the United Nations system. And the right of developing countries to use their numerical strength to influence the world view expressed by this forum is the essence of an attempt at global democracy. Nevertheless, it is a truism that every right carries a corresponding responsibility. Accordingly, the equality principle which informs the conceptual basis of our Organization must go hand in hand with the responsibility principle, which ought to underpin our decisions, resolutions and programmes of action.