On Saturday 5th of March, Marylebone students attended a Model United Nations conference at the American School London. The following article is written by N. Seddat Y11 who attended.
On Saturday 5th of March, me and a handful of other students had the privilege of attending a Model United Nations conference at the American School London! I won’t be able to talk on behalf of others’ experiences but I can confidently say that we all had mammoths of fun. It was extremely beginner-friendly and for most of us attending, it was our first conference so it was perfect!
My experience went like this:
In the run-up to the conference, we were given a list of committees (the group you’re in) and countries to pick from, all the way in November/ December. Once we had all picked what we wanted to do it was preparation time! To be quite honest, I didn’t do much preparation until a couple of weeks before the conference- you really don’t need to do extensive amounts of research to take part in MUN. Just make sure you’re well-read on the topic you’re discussing, and know a good amount of info about your country and committee and you’ll be flying! Anyway, so after I had done a bit of research, I mentally prepared myself for the nerves that would inevitably arrive on the day of the conference…
Except they never came! I will admit, having debating experience really helped me calm my nerves because, in my opinion, MUN is really just debating with a nice twist to it, but even if you haven’t debated, I believe that facilities that host MUNs make sure that you’re not overrun by anxiety while participating. And your friends will be there to experience it with you- that’s what helped me through the conference!
So, in the conference I represented Latvia and I was in the committee ECOSOC, and our assembly discussed the topic of Big Tech Censorship – so basically tech companies like Google, Twitter, Instagram etc. being in charge of deciding what gets to stay up on their platform worldwide and what gets taken down. Before I carry on, I will be referring to myself as the delegation/delegate of Latvia in the context of the conference as the opinions that the Latvian government may have about censorship may not necessarily reflect my own. A lot of the countries in ECOSOC including the delegation of Latvia actually disagreed with the notion of these companies deciding what gets censored. During my preparation, I actually found out that censorship as of now occurs under UN Law meaning that countries don’t get that direct of a say in what gets censored. In response to this, I wrote a resolution (a solution to the problem at hand) beforehand which highlighted the fact that UN Law isn’t a good enough reflection of countries’ opinions and therefore censorship should occur under regional laws. Luckily, upon reading my resolution, the rest of the countries somewhat agreed on my original resolution, however, in order to make some countries like China and Cuba satisfied with the paper (as they have very strict censorship values) some edits had to be made. If you would like to view the resolution, you can see it here!
The conference was a massive success and many awards were won by St Marylebone students!
L. Seddat won Most Diplomatic in the Security Council
N. Seddat won Best Speaker in ECOSOC
I. Perera won Best Speaker in the UNHRC
A. Pye won Best Speaker for UNICEF
R. Glynn and C. Carrigan won honourable mentions
Here are some pictures of our winners (in order of the list above), we hope to attend another conference soon!
