Why did the legal principle of sovereign equality of States need a restatement in 1970? After all, it was not only expressly declared in the UN Charter (‘The Organization is based on the sovereign equality of its members’, Article 2(1)) but also deeply embedded in the conceptual structure of international law. One could say (and some have said) that the restatement was simply a redundancy. To be a ‘State’ was to possess sovereignty, and ‘sovereignty’ meant that one was not subordinated to another entity. All sovereigns would thus be equal in their non-subordination to each other. But whatever purists might say, the Friendly Relations Declaration was intended by its initiators neither as an exercise around the meaning or logic of the key concepts of the Charter nor as a formal celebration of their 25-year-old existence. It was instead part of the push by the decolonised world, the majority of the UN members that had not participated in the drafting of the Charter, to give its major provisions a meaning that would better include their objectives.