Report on the participation of the MIREES students at the SEIMUN event in Seville, Spain

written by Davide Ruoppo, BA
MIREES’ student, University of Bologna, Forlì-Campus


From the 21st to the 24th of April, 2016, the Loyola University of Seville hosted a new model of MUN (Model United Nations), the so called SEIMUN, entirely planned and organized by the Andalusian students. We could resume the SEIMUN spirit with two words: internationalism and interdisciplinarity.
The event was divided in 3 days. The first day was hosted in the hall of the foundation De Las Tres Culturas. The opening ceremony gathered important guests such as Josè Manuel Cervera, the director of the foundation; Eduard Sagarra, president of the United Nations Spain (ANUE), and Enrique Baron, the 16th president of the European Parlament (1989-1992). At the end of the ceremony, participants had a chance to meet consules from countries like Malta, Lebanon and Luxembourg. By the second day, the participants could choose to represent which of several options such as the Union for the Mediterranean, the World Bank, the UNESCO, the Security Council of the UN and the Human Rights Council to represent at the SEIMUN. There were two chairs for each commission who were regulating the inflow of questions and activities, and the attendees had two main tools of participation: the moderated and the unmoderated caucus. With the former, they had a specific amount of time for speaking - either for debating (above all if the first person to talk was a councilman from a country in evident contrast with his opponent as for example in the case of Cyprus and Turkey), while with the latter, the participants started to deal with each other in order to plan a joint international proposal. When the main topic was fully discussed, the chairs started voting for the joint proposals and their amendments. If they succeeded in passing them, they would be officialy included in the legislation of the commision.This kind of organization let both the leaders of bigger and of smaller countries play the same role in the commission because of a clear and fair voting system.
The University of Bologna sent a delegation of the 1st year students of the MA MIREES. We have been proud to represent the University and the MIREES program at such an important event. The students Ciro Sarno, Adrian Stano, Marta Bollito, Arianna Scroccaro, Li Peng, Aleksandra Klipa, Davide Ruoppo and Francesca Barbino prepared their official position papers and participated in the work of different commissions. Marta Bollito and Adrian Stano have been singled out as “Distinguished Delegates” by the SEIMUN organizational board.
Stano, acting as a spokesman of the Russian Federation at the UN Security Council, organized his position paper around the topic of the reform of the UN Security Council and, in the second part, around the topic of lethal drones. He first advised on a need for reform that has not been made since 1965, as well as an urgency to broaden the commission base through opening up to Latin America and African countries with guarantees of worldwide representation based upon the “block approach” that would imply the rotation of the incoming members but still maintain the right of veto for the five permanent members. Moreover, he advocated for the creation of a collective mechanism that would hasten the efficiency of the peace keeping missions. Concerning the lethal drones, Stano inferred that Russia would actively support the legal framework in order to define the necessary regulation for the utilization of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAS) for national defense but not for any other purpose.
Marta Bollito represented Albania in the UNESCO strongly advocating for the preservation of the cultural heritage in Syria and the international control over the ongoing situation in the “Balkan route” and in the Nagorno-Karabakh. In the second topic, Bollito recalled the art. 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights that provides for the defense of the freedom of expression. She discussed the treatment reserved to the French journalist Florence Hartmann, something that according to Marta is undermining previous UNESCO statements such as the one of 1997 which formally condemned the “violence against the journalists”. Bollito expressed concern for the freedom of press in Albania, the tension which is inherited from the country’s political past.
At the closing ceremony, we listened to Czech activist Vit Jedlicka, the founder of Liberland - a portion of territory at the border within Serbia and Croatia, where this libertarian politician has founded a new micronation that saw 30000 requests for citizenship by the date of the official foundation in March 2015. The last event has been a Gala dinner which gathered all the delegates in a relaxed and classy manner.