United Nations

Overview

The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 and currently made up of 193 Member States, guided by the purposes and principles of its founding Charter (United Nations). Representatives of 50 countries drafted and signed that Charter at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, held from April 25 to June 26, 1945; the UN officially began on October 24, 1945, once the Charter had been ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a majority of the other signatories (United Nations).

Most coverage of the UN falls into two buckets: civics-textbook basics, or celebrity moments like the one in this profile’s queue context. The undercovered part is the distinction the transcript itself draws: when Nicki Minaj spoke “at the UN” about Nigerian Christians on November 18, 2025, she was appearing at a U.S.-hosted side event at the United States Mission to the United Nations — not a UN-organized proceeding (News Express Nigeria). The UN was the venue and the rhetorical frame, not the convener.

What the UN is, in its own telling

The organization’s stated work is maintaining international peace and security, giving humanitarian assistance to those in need, protecting human rights, and upholding international law (United Nations). Its public face is the Secretary-General, the chief administrative officer, who is appointed by the General Assembly on the Security Council’s recommendation for a five-year renewable term (United Nations). The current and ninth occupant is António Guterres of Portugal, in office since January 1, 2017 and re-appointed to a second term on June 18, 2021 (United Nations).

The New York headquarters took physical shape early: the UN Secretariat building was under construction in New York City in 1949 (United Nations). Eight decades later the city still functions as the organization’s stage every September, when the General Assembly’s annual session turns New York into the world’s diplomatic capital for a week.

The UN is also larger than the organization itself: it sits at the center of a UN system of programmes, funds, and specialized agencies, each with its own area of work, leadership, and budget, all cooperating to help the organization achieve its goals (United Nations). The UN, its system entities, and its staff have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize more than ten times (United Nations).

November 18, 2025: the U.S.-hosted Nigeria event

The event was titled “Combating Religious Violence and the Killing of Christians in Nigeria,” and the transcript identifies it as a U.S. hosted event, courtesy of the United States Mission to the United Nations (News Express Nigeria). Welcoming the room to the U.S. Mission, Ambassador Mike Waltz called the killings “genocide, wearing the mask of chaos,” cited the nonprofit Open Doors as reporting that 80 percent of violence against Christians worldwide occurs in Nigeria, and said the United States had designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious-freedom violations (News Express Nigeria). Those are Waltz’s claims, recorded as his remarks — not this profile’s findings.

Waltz framed the issue as personal: he recounted serving in Nigeria in 2015 after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping, when a small U.S. team trained Nigerian counterparts to try to recover the girls (News Express Nigeria). The event was moderated by Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and the program also included a pastor joining remotely through the U.S. embassy in Nigeria to give firsthand testimony (News Express Nigeria). Waltz’s opening remarks welcomed ambassadors, delegates, faith leaders, and survivors of attacks in the audience (News Express Nigeria).

Minaj, introduced by Waltz as stepping onto the world stage “not as a celebrity, but as a witness,” opened by saying she was nervous and thanking Waltz for the invitation (News Express Nigeria). She thanked President Trump for prioritizing the issue, said “no group should ever be persecuted for practicing their religion,” and insisted that “protecting Christians in Nigeria is not about taking sides or dividing people. It is about uniting humanity” (News Express Nigeria). Her most institution-directed line invoked the UN itself: when a church, mosque, or place of worship is destroyed, she said, “the foundation of the United Nations, with its core mandate to ensure peace and security, should shake” (News Express Nigeria).

One consistency note matters here. The existing Nicki Minaj profile records that the factual claims about Nigeria in her remarks are contested by regional experts and the Nigerian government, and it records that she made the remarks rather than endorsing the underlying claims. This profile follows the same discipline throughout.

September 2026: UNGA week as diplomatic stage

A year later, the UN’s New York setting again framed events the organization did not itself convene. On September 15, 2026, Ambassador Waltz hosted Abraham Accords officials at his New York residence to mark six years since the original agreements — with representatives from the UAE, Bahrain, and Kazakhstan attending (The Times of Israel). On September 24, the N7 Foundation brought senior officials from Israel, the United States, Bahrain, Morocco, the UAE, and Kazakhstan together in New York for the Abraham Accords countries’ first multilateral meeting since January 2023 (The Jerusalem Post). Both gatherings rode the gravitational pull of General Assembly week without being UN proceedings — the pattern this profile keeps returning to.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not attribute any position on the November 2025 Nigeria event to the UN Secretariat or the Secretary-General; no UN-issued statement on the event was found in a full-read source. It does not specify whether the event took place inside the main headquarters complex or at the separate U.S. Mission building, which the transcript does not say. It records the speakers’ claims about Nigeria as their remarks, consistent with the existing Nicki Minaj profile’s note that those claims are contested. It does not detail the UN’s principal-organ structure beyond what UN.org’s about page states, and it makes no claim about 2026 UN action on Gaza arrangements.