Security Council — restoring freedom of navigation in the Middle East

Chairing team

Questions about the Security Council before the day go to the chair or co-chair.

How this committee runs

The Security Council opens like any other committee until it is in crisis mode, beginning with immediate crisis management — for example, a US military intervention against Iran aimed at regime change, with Iran responding by restricting or closing the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil access and threatening global energy supply and maritime trade. Once the immediate crisis is handled, the committee moves to prevention, and those measures become the final resolution.

Crisis committees move fast. Expect updates mid-session that change the facts on the ground, and don't over-invest in a clause a crisis update may make irrelevant.

The Security Council is the only committee with a dedicated crisis session. It replaces part of the first session: the dais delivers a developing scenario in stages, and delegates respond in real time through short directives and rapid caucusing rather than through a drafted resolution. Standard procedure resumes afterwards, and the prevention measures agreed in the rest of the day become the final resolution.

Why Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrowest point between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman — about 33km wide at its narrowest, with shipping lanes only around 3km wide in each direction. In normal times it carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil and a similar share of its liquefied natural gas. It is shared between the territorial waters of Iran and Oman, which is the heart of the legal problem: a waterway of global importance sits inside two states' territorial seas.

Where things stand

This topic is live. As of 13 August 2026:

• 28 February 2026 — US and Israeli forces struck Iranian targets; Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed and succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei. Iran retaliated against Israel, US bases in the region and US-allied Gulf states.
• Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps issued warnings against passage, boarded and attacked merchant vessels, and laid sea mines. Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd suspended transits within days.
• 19 March — the US began an air campaign aimed at reopening the strait.
• 11 April — talks in Islamabad failed. 13 April — the US imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports.
• Mid-June — a US–Iran memorandum briefly reopened the strait toll-free, but the arrangement broke down in early July after further attacks on commercial vessels.
• August — effectively closed to routine commercial traffic. Convoys move under naval escort; transits run in single figures per day against a pre-crisis baseline of roughly 73–100. Brent crude near $89. The US estimates mine clearance alone would take around six months.

The legal argument you'll be having

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ships enjoy the right of transit passage through straits used for international navigation, and a coastal state may not suspend it. Iran signed UNCLOS but never ratified it, and argues the transit passage regime therefore doesn't bind it — that only the older, weaker right of innocent passage applies, which can be suspended. The United States also hasn't ratified UNCLOS but treats transit passage as customary international law binding on everyone. That mismatch is the legal centre of your debate.

Precedents worth knowing: the Suez Canal, nationalised by Egypt in 1956 and run by a national authority under the 1888 Constantinople Convention; the Panama Canal, transferred to Panamanian control in 1999 under a permanent neutrality treaty; the Turkish Straits, governed by the 1936 Montreux Convention which gives Türkiye control while guaranteeing civilian passage; and Bab-el-Mandeb, disrupted by Houthi attacks since 2023.

Positions to expect

• United States, United Kingdom, France — freedom of navigation is non-negotiable; favour escort operations, mine clearance and multinational task forces.
• Russia, China — sceptical of Western naval presence and of anything eroding sovereignty over territorial waters. China is also the largest buyer of Gulf oil, so it wants the strait open.
• Gulf states — existentially dependent on the strait but exposed to retaliation. Watch the bypass pipelines: the UAE's Fujairah line and Saudi Arabia's East–West pipeline, both at limited capacity.
• Importing states — care about price, insurance and supply, and may back international administration that P5 members resist.

Your resolution has to answer

• Who guarantees passage — a naval coalition, a UN mission, or a new authority?
• Where does the money and the mine-clearance capacity come from?
• Does this apply to all chokepoints, or just this one? A general rule binds your own allies too.
• What triggers action next time, and who decides the trigger has been met?
• Can anything meaningful pass a Council where two members hold vetoes and opposing interests?

Gossip box

This committee closes with the gossip box before the closing ceremony — anonymous notes on the best quote, the strangest clause and the moments of the day, read out by the chairs. About what happened, never about a person.

Economics — protectionism and primary sector goods

Chairing team

Questions about Economics before the day go to the chair or co-chair.

What the topic means

The primary sector is extraction and cultivation: agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining, oil and gas. Protectionism is any policy shielding domestic producers — tariffs, quotas, subsidies, export bans, and non-tariff barriers such as sanitary standards used as disguised trade restrictions.

Primary goods differ from manufactured goods in three ways that drive the whole debate: they are tied to land and therefore to rural political power; they are food, and food shortages topple governments; and many developing economies depend on one or two of them for most export earnings.

Background

• The WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (1995) was meant to discipline farm subsidies and tariffs. It has been only partly effective, and agriculture remains the most protected sector in world trade.
• The Doha Development Round, launched in 2001, was supposed to fix this. It stalled largely over agriculture and has never concluded.
• The EU's Common Agricultural Policy and the US Farm Bill each direct tens of billions annually to domestic producers. Japan protects rice, Canada protects dairy, India runs large public stockholding programmes.
• Tariff escalation — low tariffs on raw cocoa, high tariffs on chocolate — keeps developing countries exporting unprocessed goods.
• Export restrictions on wheat and fertiliser in 2022, and India's rice export curbs in 2023, showed how fast food protectionism spreads once one large exporter moves.
• The WTO Fisheries Subsidies Agreement (2022) is the counter-example: a multilateral deal that did curb harmful subsidies, and the closest thing to a model your resolution can point to.

The two cases

Your resolution has to answer

• Do limits apply equally, or is there special and differential treatment for developing economies?
• Are subsidies treated the same as tariffs? Rich countries prefer subsidies; poor ones can only afford tariffs.
• Is there an emergency exception for food shortages, and who declares it?
• Who enforces — WTO dispute settlement, partly paralysed since 2019, or something new?

Gossip box

This committee closes with the gossip box before the closing ceremony — anonymous notes on the best quote, the strangest clause and the moments of the day, read out by the chairs. About what happened, never about a person.

Environment — 50% nuclear electricity by 2035

Chairing team

Questions about Environment before the day  go to the chair or co-chair.

Where the world actually is

• Nuclear supplies roughly 9% of global electricity, from about 440 reactors in around 30 countries. Getting every nation to 50% within a decade would be the fastest energy transition ever attempted, by a wide margin.
• France is the proof of concept: around 65–70% nuclear, built out in roughly fifteen years from the mid-1970s. Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary are also at or near 50%.
• New Western reactors have run badly over time and budget — Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point C all took well over a decade. China and South Korea build faster and cheaper, which is itself an argument here.
• Germany shut its last reactors in 2023. At COP28 in 2023, over twenty countries pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050 — ambitious, and still far short of 50% globally.
• Small modular reactors are the technology most cited as a fix for cost and scale, but very few operate commercially anywhere.

The hard problems

• Time. Planning, licensing and construction rarely take under ten years in a country with no existing programme. 2035 is a decade away.
• Money. A single large reactor runs into the tens of billions.
• People. Regulators and operators take a decade to train. You cannot import a safety culture.
• Proliferation. Enrichment and reprocessing are dual-use — the reason Iran's programme is contested in the first place.
• Waste. Finland's Onkalo is the only deep geological repository close to operating anywhere.
• Grid size. A 1,000 MW reactor cannot safely sit on a small national grid. For many members the target is not merely expensive but physically inapplicable.

Positions to expect

France, Russia, China, South Korea and the US export reactor technology and have an industrial interest in expansion. Germany, Austria, New Zealand and Ireland lead the sceptics. Small island states want decarbonisation urgently but cannot use large reactors. Fossil fuel exporters resist binding decarbonisation targets. Non-nuclear-weapon states will resist anything widening the technological gap between them and the P5.

Your resolution has to answer

• Is 50% the right target, or should it be a clean-electricity target that nuclear can help meet?
• Do small and island states get a different pathway, or an exemption?
• Who finances it — a World Bank facility, the Green Climate Fund, export credit?
• What safeguards come attached, and does the IAEA get new powers?
• What happens to a member state that misses 2035?

Gossip box

This committee closes with the gossip box before the closing ceremony — anonymous notes on the best quote, the strangest clause and the moments of the day, read out by the chairs. About what happened, never about a person.

Health — opt-out organ donation

Chairing team

Questions about Health before the day go to the chair or co-chair.

The two systems

Opt-in (explicit consent) — you are not a donor unless you register. Opt-out (presumed consent) — you are a donor unless you register an objection. Nearly every opt-out system in practice is soft: families are still consulted and can effectively refuse. A hard opt-out, where the state takes organs over family objection, exists almost nowhere.

Background

• Demand vastly exceeds supply everywhere. Tens of thousands are on waiting lists in the US and across Europe, and people die on those lists every day.
• Spain has led the world in donation rates for over three decades. It has had presumed consent since 1979 — but rates only rose sharply after 1989, when it built the Organización Nacional de Trasplantes and put trained transplant coordinators in every hospital. The most important fact in this debate: the law changed a decade before the results did.
• Wales moved to opt-out in 2015, England in 2020 under Max and Keira's Law, Scotland in 2021, the Netherlands in 2020. Early evaluations found smaller effects than campaigners predicted, partly because family refusal rates didn't fall.
• The WHO Guiding Principles and the Declaration of Istanbul (2008) set the international framework, prohibit organ trafficking, and promote national self-sufficiency.
• Iran operates the world's only regulated, government-sanctioned market in living kidney donation — the outlier every debate eventually reaches.

The two cases

Your resolution has to answer

• Soft or hard opt-out — do families retain a veto?
• Is this a recommendation or a requirement, and what happens in states with no reliable civil registry?
• How are objections recorded for people without internet access or identity documents?
• Does it fund transplant coordinators and ICU capacity, without which the law alone does little?
• How does it handle religious exemptions, children, and non-residents?

Gossip box

This committee closes with the gossip box before the closing ceremony — anonymous notes on the best quote, the strangest clause and the moments of the day, read out by the chairs. About what happened, never about a person.

Human Rights — making the UDHR binding

Chairing team

Questions about Human Rights before the day go to the chair or co-chair.

What the UDHR is, and isn't

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1948, with 48 states in favour, none against, and eight abstentions — the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. It is a declaration: a statement of principle, not a treaty. It creates no legal obligation and no enforcement mechanism, and that was deliberate — states would not have signed a binding version in 1948.

The binding instruments came later. The ICCPR and ICESCR were adopted in 1966 and entered into force in 1976; with the UDHR they form the International Bill of Human Rights. But ratification is uneven, reservations are extensive, and enforcement runs through reporting committees rather than courts. Many lawyers argue parts of the UDHR — the prohibitions on slavery, torture and genocide — are already binding customary international law, an argument your resolution has to engage with.

The cultural objection

• The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990) frames rights within sharia, most visibly on religious freedom and family law.
• The Bangkok Declaration (1993) advanced the “Asian values” argument: rights should be read in national and regional context.
• The Vienna Declaration (1993) is the counter-position, affirming rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent, while acknowledging national and cultural particularities.
• Regional systems already do something like this — the European, Inter-American and African human rights courts each enforce a regional charter, with real judgments and real non-compliance.

The two cases

Your resolution has to answer

• Binding through what — a new treaty, an amended Charter, or a declaration that it is already customary law?
• Who adjudicates? A new court, expanded ICJ jurisdiction, or the regional courts?
• What is the consequence of a violation, given that sanctions hit populations hardest?
• Are reservations permitted, and if so, what stops them swallowing the obligation?
• Is the whole Declaration binding, or a core set of non-derogable rights?

Gossip box

This committee closes with the gossip box before the closing ceremony — anonymous notes on the best quote, the strangest clause and the moments of the day, read out by the chairs. About what happened, never about a person.