Hohenheim Castle MUN 2015

Last Saturday, the delegation completed its second Model United Nations with a great success and as promised, we bring you a short report from it.

The Hohenheim Castle MUN, organised by the Club of Hohenheim every year since 2001, was already the next-to-last opportunity to gain a firsthand experience with a Model UN. In total, 60 students from University of Tübingen, Heidelberg, Hohenheim, and Stuttgart participated. The simulation was therefore much larger than our own first try-out model and no major player in the international arena was missing, as every delegate represented one UN member state.

The agenda of the HCMUN 2015 consisted of three diverse and highly up-to-date topics:

1. The Control of Biological Weapons in Today’s Modern Era
2. Women in Development
3. The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age

It was not long after the beginning of the meeting, that the agenda order of 1-2-3 was adopted, which effectively meant that the whole body would be dealing with the issue of biological weapons and their proliferation for the rest of the day. The main discussions revolved around the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

The negotiations were challenging, as all working papers had to be conceived and agreed upon in a single day. Five draft resolutions emerged in the end, most of them dealing with the issues of transparency, exchange of information, support of peaceful research and the danger of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to non-state actors. The BWC served as a main focus for all draft resolutions and states that did not ratify it were urged to do so. In the final voting procedure, four out of five resolutions were adopted.

The HCMUN was another priceless experience in preparing for the final MUN in New York. Our delegation is also proud to have received the awards for the 2nd and 3rd best delegate, acquired respectively by Ina Majewski and Sahana Sreedar (both member of the General Assembly First Committee in New York).

We would like to thank the team of organisers very much for preparing this year’s HCMUN and we will do our best to make the Tübingen MUN at least as interesting and pleasant an experience for everyone as the Hohenheim organisers managed to do.