Between the 15th and 18th November, six members of the Milestone Institute’s Model United Nations Club – Eszter D. Kovács, Dávid Francia, Martin Mayer, Antal Nagy, András Pongrácz and Emma Somos – participated in Europe’s most prestigious MUN conference in Berlin.
Founded in 1992 and welcoming approximately 700 delegates each year, BerMUN is one of Europe’s oldest and biggest MUN conferences. Every year, a banner theme is selected for the conference, which the participants debate in various UN bodies for three days. This year’s topic was “Women’s Empowerment: A Key to Good Governance and Socio-Economic Prosperity”, and playing the role of the delegation of Germany, our students had to not only prepare on the topic generally, but also thoroughly research Germany’s stance on the issue, to be able to properly represent it.
On the first day, after a rather early flight to Berlin, the Milestone MUNers attended the opening ceremony held at the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin, where they listened to the greetings of the BerMUN team, the speeches of each delegation’s ambassadors, as well as the lectures of Dr. Ursula Schäfer-Preuss, an economist and Vice President of UN Women National Committee Germany, and Ella Schwarz, an alumnus of the host school and successful businesswoman. The opening speech of the Milestone delegation was performed by Sophomore student Emma Somos.
After the opening speeches, some committees even started their lobbying time, which allowed delegates to meet each other, share their countries’ policies and start drafting resolutions in teams.
In the committee sessions, delegates had to communicate and work together to debate various political, social and economic issues around the main topic. Having a nuanced approach was critical in order to navigate between the clashing policies of many countries and reach a solution, but the Milestoners managed to stand their ground even amongst students from some of the world’s top international schools. After three days of debating, our delegates successfully passed 17 resolutions altogether, being either the main- or co-submitters of 7 of them.
Every day after the sessions ended, the Milestone team had time to extend their network of international friends and to explore the beauties of Berlin, visiting the most iconic landmarks and experiencing some truly local specialties. The last night’s BerMUN Dance was a good opportunity for students to say goodbye, and just to have fun and relax after days of hard work.