THIMUN 2018 - Day 3

Monday, 29 January 2018

Today is the first day of the 50th Anniversary session of THIMUN The Hague. I, Ryan Chua, am part of the Sustainable Development Sub-Commission 2, representing the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Sustainable development is, by definition “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs.”

Just like every other committee, we had four topics to choose from, and I chose “Promoting the development and dissemination of affordable technological solutions to achieve sustainability.” Sadly, there weren’t as many people focusing on this issue, so our group was very small compared to the others. On the very first day of every conference, all of the delegates try to congregate in an area among people working on the same topic. They will discuss things like issues in the main-submitter's resolution, and which clauses they can use from other delegates’ resolutions to merge with the main submitter's. This is called lobbying and merging. I really enjoyed today’s session since it was super efficient and we made the most out of the time we had.

At around 3 pm, we all left to either go to the theatre to watch the opening ceremony, or to another room to watch on a live stream, as I did. Victor was part of the opening ceremony as a flag-bearer. Unfortunately, I had a hard time seeing the screen; however the audio quality was decent, so I could enjoy the wonderful speeches made by the guest speakers.

Ms Fidalgo managed to catch a glimpse of Victor Skjoldby, our ambassador, carrying a flag in the opening ceremony!

A lot of the the speeches had a specific theme and mentioned a lot of the same points such as education, human rights, civil society, etc. This all correlates to the theme of the conference, which is “building civil society through education.”

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands opens the 50th annual session of The Hague International Model United Nations conference.

Overall, today was a great first day. I got to meet a lot of people, had a very efficient lobbying and merging session, and I got to watch many well known guest speakers go up on stage to deliver a speech. This is my first conference out of Asia, and I have to say that this is very impressive and I am looking forward to debate on Tuesday.

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

- Ryan Chua