General Assembly (GA)

Contact: ga@bermun.de

The General Assembly (GA) is the main forum of the United Nations in which all 191 member states are equally represented with one vote each. According to Article 13 of the UN Charter, the GA should promote political, economic, social, and cultural cooperation of all member states through initiating studies, as well as making recommendations to other UN organs, member states and non-member states of the UN. For more information on the UN General Assembly, go to http://www.un.org/ga/61/.
At BERMUN, the GA consists of all 92 participating member states, as well as NGOs and Official Observers, each of which will have four seats. The rules of debate and the voting procedure are those of The Hague International Model United Nations, that is a modified version of Robert's Rules of Order.
The Political Committee, Disarmament Committee, Environment Committee, and Human Rights Committee are members of the GA. Only full members of the UN have voting rights, but all delegations (including NGOs and Official Observers) have full debating rights, which allows them to take the floor, as well as submit resolutions and amendments.
The Opening Ceremony of the General Assembly will take place on Wednesday. At this point, the Ambassador of each delegation, who must be in one of the four GA Committees, will deliver an opening speech, which is to be no more than one minute in length. The speech may be either general or specific in nature, but it must be representative of that nation's primary concerns about the state of the world.
On Saturday, the four GA committees will assemble once again in the gym, but unlike the past years, the delegates will not discuss one resolution submitted by each committee. Instead, the President of the Special Conference will present the Declaration on the elimination of ethnic rivalry as a means of preventing ethnic conflict, which the Special Conference will have produced during their committee session. It will be the task of the GA to discuss the Declaration and to draft resolutions on the topic of Implementing the Declaration on the elimination of ethnic rivalry as a means of preventing ethnic conflict. In order to make this work, the GA will once more split up into the four Committees in the morning for lobbying and together with the help of their chairs, will write a resolution with proposals relating to the special wishes of the respective committees. In the afternoon, the four Committees will join as one again and will debate all newly created resolution concerning the different fields of action. This new idea of having a topic solely discussed in the GA will hopefully enable all delegates to participate actively in lobbying and debate.

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