represented by Anna Bronevytska and Alexandra Vasileva

The General Assembly (GA) Plenary has a membership of 192 states plus 71 observing organisations. It supervises 6 further GA main committees, founded to conduct work and carry out substantive discussions among states on specific issues in order to attune them before debating them at the GA Plenary. The topics before the General Assembly Plenary at NMUN 2010 were:

1. 10-Year Review of the Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs);

2. Elimination of International Terrorism;

3. Climate Change/ Environmental Degradation as a Source of Conflict.

The first formal procedure after the NMUN Opening Ceremony was the agenda setting. Spain’s priority for the agenda setting was to maintain the MDGs on the first place and to change the order to have Climate Change on the second place and Elimination of International Terrorism on the third. The reason for that was that the review of the MDGs was very important for the world community and the topic of Climate Change has been recently discussed during the Copenhagen Summit while the issue of terrorism was too controversial for Spain. We structured our negotiation efforts in a way that we spoke with the leaders of the regional groups, such as African, Latin American, and Small Islands Countries to know their positions and advocated our approach, so that they could promote it within their regional groups. This working strategy proved to be effective and the body managed to adopt the agenda in line with our preferred order. Quite a successful first day!

Spain is dedicated to multilateral approaches within the framework of the United Nations towards the advancement of global sustainable development, which includes the achievement of the MDGs and the fight against Climate Change. Thus at the NMUN conference, Spain very soon positioned itself as a link between the Latin American countries and the European Union. Since Spain holds the EU Presidency in the first six months of 2010, we seized the chance of acting as ‘a voice of the EU to the rest of the world’. Germany turned out to be a crucial, but difficult partner. Moreover, the very experienced and charismatic Delegates from Germany were taking over the job of bringing the EU together, which was in our interest. Most of the delegates acted highly professionally and were very much ‘in character’, which helped to establish multiple regional working groups. Nevertheless, acting in character turned out to be controversial for some delegations, meaning they chose to leave the conference room every time the Delegation of the USA held a speech. Nevertheless, in our view it contributed well to the ‘real life’ spirit of NMUN. The Spanish Delegation also tried to spice up the informal part of the conference and suspended the meetings for the purpose of siesta during the lunch hours. Staying in character was definitely a fun part of the conference. Fortunately, there were no cases of rules violation and no delegations were unprepared or left the conference tone.

The body started to work on draft resolutions earlier than we expected, right in the beginning of the second day. For this day, we agreed on the strategy of finding out what the different groups were actually working on, in order to bring similar positions together and to integrate them as far as possible into the EU resolutions. Unfortunately, the EU could hardly agree on a common position and did not produce one EU resolution. Another disappointing fact was that dozens of groups started to work on draft resolutions dedicated to separate MDGs, like health or gender equality, instead of actually reviewing all MDGs.

After this fruitful, but somewhat surprising day we realised that we had to adapt our strategy and to advocate the Spanish holistic approach as effectively as possible: during informal caucuses we started to persuade all delegations of the responsibility of the GA Plenary to come up with one comprehensive document like the historical Millennium Declaration from 2000. In addition to our negotiating efforts, we managed to hold two good speeches during the following days, calling for one comprehensive resolution, which seemed to have reached many countries. This helped us to identify unexpected partners in the course of the ‘meltdown Thursday’ when the pressure to complete and merge the draft resolutions was rising: Mongolia and Tajikistan turned out to be the most committed proponents of the one-resolution approach. In the end, we managed to merge many resolutions into one review of the MDGs. Although we did not merge all resolution into one big comprehensive document, we are quite sure that this could have been possible if we had had more time – the pressure seemed to grow.

Parallel to those efforts, Spain started to work closely with Switzerland on a resolution dedicated to financing for the achievement of MDGs. Switzerland had an idea similar to the UNDP/Spain MDG Achievement Fund – one of the Spanish UN projects Spain is most proud of – and was glad to integrate Spain into its work. We were surprised at how good the text of the draft resolution was and how many innovative ideas Switzerland and their partners had. Later on during negotiations, our team convinced many European and other countries of our approach and merged many good ideas from other resolutions, mostly thanks to the efforts of Germany and France. The only controversial point was the reduction of the agricultural subsidies – this issue divided the developing and the developed countries. Emerging economies like China and India were clearly advocating the reduction of the agricultural subsidies, which distort free markets according to them. Industrialised countries, however, insisted on the maintenance of the subsidies as a crucial part of their domestic agricultural policy. The result was a mild wording in the form of a recommendation. Another truly innovative idea was the introduction of an international tax on financial transactions dedicated to provide money for the global MDG Achievement Fund.

At the end of the fourth day, 14 draft resolutions were submitted to the dias. The GA Plenary passed all of them, including our financing resolution and the big merged review of the MDGs. Spain was a sponsor or a signatory of many other resolutions. Unfortunately, no resolution was passed by acclamation. The biggest success for Spain was definitely the adoption of the big MDGs-review resolution, which was a common struggle to merge as many drafts as possible into one big universal document to show the unity of the world when discussing such a global promise as the Millennium Development Goals.

All in all, both of us were very proud and happy to be selected to represent Spain in the General Assembly Plenary. We were thrilled by the opportunity to take on the role of the Spanish Diplomats in the committee of the UN which is very often referred to as ‘the voice of the world’. It was quite overwhelming and extremely difficult to position ourselves among 192 countries right away. Nevertheless, we managed to maintain one clear policy line throughout the conference and definitely stayed committed to our country priorities. The chairman of the committee stated several times that the GA Plenary is viewed as ‘the committee for the most experienced delegates and the one which is looked upon by others’. We did our best to live up to those expectations. As we learned during negotiations, many delegates were returning delegates and have participated in multiple UN simulations before taking on the role in the GA Plenary.

The last day at UN Headquarters was definitely the highlight – both the voting procedure in the temporary new building of the GA and the closing ceremony in the famous General Assembly Hall, which was fortunately renovated very quickly. We did not regret lining up early enough and entering the GA Hall among the first delegations. Our whole Delegation enjoyed ‘breathing the UN air” and exchanging our experience after four exhausting, but unique and intensive days. Finally, receiving two NMUN awards in probably one of the most significant halls of the world was a true honor and a moment to remember.