represented by Sheena Purohit and Emre Karaca

The General Assembly Third Committee (GA 3rd) is one of the main committees of the General Assembly and deals primarily with social, humanitarian, human rights issues and cultural affairs. Just like in the General Assembly Plenary, the GA 3rd Committee consists of all 192 Member States of the UN. Observers can also attend and participate in meetings of the committee, however do not have the right to vote. The Third Committee collectively agrees on and then drafts resolutions, which are then either passed or rejected. If a resolution is approved by a majority of the Member States of this committee, it then passes to the General Assembly which votes on the resolution. It sometimes also works with other UN organs which deal with similar work such as the Human Rights Council (HRC).

This year the committee was dealing with the following topics:

1. Advancing Technology to Progress Development and Peace;

2. The Implementation of a Global Standard of Education;

3. Implementing the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development.

The Conference began with the setting of the agenda. Although all three topic areas were of great importance to Spain, we felt that education was a priority area and so should take the first position on the agenda, particularly as the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is a key goal to be met within the Spanish Master Plan for Co-operation 2009-2012. As education is one of the MDGs and plays a fundamental role in eradicating poverty and thus achieving many of the other MDGs, the Spanish position was that it should therefore be available to everyone. As Delegates of Spain, we believed that greater emphasis needed to be placed on the importance of the access to basic primary education. Ensuring that this topic was discussed first on the agenda was of utmost importance as we knew we had a limited time frame and realistically not all topics would be discussed during the course of the conference. Following this topic on the agenda, the advancement of technology was our second preference; the implementation of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development ultimately taking third position.

Right from the outset a number of states was proposing the same order of topics. Although the majority of the EU Member States had formed an agreement on the agenda setting, a divide in consensus still existed among some of the Member States and so we needed to negotiate with them in order to ensure a unified European Union position. After some deliberation, we were successful in reaching a consensus and went on to convince non-EU states to align with our position. In the end, after several hours of tiresome but fruitful negotiations, our preferred agenda setting was adopted by a large majority.

By the second day of the conference the agenda had been set and we began the morning devising a strategy concerning which Member States and regional groups to approach and form alliances with for writing working papers. Being the holder of the European Union Presidency, our first port of call was obviously the European Union and ensuring that we achieved a common position. This proved to be more difficult than initially anticipated. There appeared to be a lack of unity and certain Member States had already drafted their own working papers the night before, something we were unaware of and excluded from which we found immensely frustrating. Due to our lack of knowledge of the informal meeting which had occurred the previous night (and the lack of invitation!), this rendered us somewhat unable to participate in discussions with those states. However, we did not allow this to hinder our work and in order to overcome the situation we approached the Delegates from the Netherlands who were the main initiators of the working paper. The main topic of focus within the paper was improving access to and the quality of basic primary education through a number of initiatives. This was very much a topic which interested Spain and we were more than enthusiastic to sponsor the paper. Once we had made our presence and interest in the paper evident, we played a dominant role in determining which points should be included within the final resolution as well as how the operative and perambulatory clauses should be phrased.

After much discussion we were able to incorporate an operative clause within the resolution which endorsed the continuation of the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, something which Spain wholeheartedly supports and whose aims Spain wishes to further. In addition, we ensured that the importance for ODA donors to reaffirm their commitments of ensuring a total ODA of 0.7% is achieved by 2012 was emphasised within the resolution.

Our greatest triumph, however, was raising awareness of and incorporating the support and advancement of the Alliance of Civilisations into the resolution. The Alliance of Civilisations is an initiative co-founded by Spain and Turkey which aspires to encourage religious and cultural tolerance among different nations. Through this initiative, we aimed to foster respect and understanding through the amendment of education systems and curricula making them more culturally sensitive thus in the long term helping to overcome the causes of inter-cultural conflict. As it was an initiative few countries were aware of, we needed to explain what it was and why it was so important. The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Portugal, among several others, were enthusiastic and very supportive of the concept and agreed that it should be included in the resolution.

In addition to becoming a sponsor to the above resolution, we made sure to approach other Member States outside of the EU in order to learn what they were hoping to achieve and to read the working papers they had been preparing. Due to the cultural, historical and economic ties which Spain shares with the regional group, the Latin American & Caribbean countries were strong partners to work with after the European Union. Through the relations we had built with many of them, we were able to introduce them to our resolution with the Netherlands and encourage the majority of them to become signatories to it. In order to do this we had to ensure that their interests were represented within the resolution and that it would confer benefits upon them, something we were able to do.

In return we agreed to offer our support and become a sponsor to a resolution the Latin American countries had been working on together. It concerned the topic of gender equality and non-discrimination of indigenous groups within education systems. The resolution discussed the need to promote education and gender equality through national campaigns, ensuring that at least 40% of scholarships for higher education are granted to women and to formulate specific policies to help indigenous people.

We went on further to become signatories to several other resolutions with an array of different countries which dealt with topics ranging from educational review committees to encouraging initiatives to reduce primary school ‘drop-out rates’. Resolutions which we avoided were those which focussed mainly on higher education as this was not a priority area for Spain.

The final day of the conference was dedicated to voting on the draft resolutions. Although this was a very long and duelling process as every draft needed to be printed, read, amended and then voted on, we were very pleased with the final outcome as all of the resolutions that we voted for were passed. Before the voting had begun, we had called for a meeting of the European Union in order to ensure we voted collectively as a group. This proved to have a major influence on the voting outcome as the 27 Member States always voted in unison.

All in all we feel we were most definitely successful in achieving all that we had set out to achieve at the conference. We were able to incorporate the initiatives and programmes which were of the utmost importance to Spain in several of the resolutions and were able to work with countries which we initially hadn’t anticipated would have common interests with us. We were also able to build a bridge between the Latin American countries and the EU thus putting us in a strong position when negotiating with countries from these groups.

The NMUN conference was undoubtedly an enriching and unique experience which enabled us to gain a deeper insight into the processes within the United Nations system. In addition, the entire experience allowed us to acquire invaluable skills and above all to meet fascinating people from all walks of life.