MUNOL structure today
Since 2008 the MUNOL Rules of Procedure foresee the simulation of at least nine UN forums, including all six Committees of the General Assembly (GA), the Security Council (SC), the Human Rights Council (HRC) and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). It is at the discretion of the respective team of student officers to yearly add further bodies like the UN Environment Program or other specialized commissions, if the number of participants or the conference's mission statement so require.
The number of delegates in the committees ranges from 15 in the SC to 53 in the HRC. Since regular sessions generally take place in class rooms of the Thomas-Mann-Schule, the average size of the GA committees is about 35 state representatives. Given that this is less than a fifth of their actual number of participants, our committees' composition is assured to be proportional to the regional strengths of the real bodies. Each forum's agenda is set in function of its overall themes as they were adopted by the GA plenary. For example, the first committee of the GA is supposed to deal with “Disarmament and International Security” and is therefore also called the DISEC. Others are “Economic and Financial”, “Humanitarian and Cultural”, or “Legal”. The three to four issues on the agenda that are to be dealt with in each forum are then chosen by the Secretary-General after consideration of the current UN's topics and actual international developments.
MUNOL also simulates a GA plenary session as it is this body, which actually and finally adopts or rejects draft resolutions. The plenum gathers in the last two days of the conference and is composed of those delegates that have processed and debated resolutions in the GA committees before. Due to the restraints of time, not all the drafts that have been given a positive vote in the committees can possibly be re-debated in the plenary session. Therefore, each committee chooses one resolution among all those that were passed to be submitted for consideration by the GA and for inclusion into the official MUNOL resolution booklet. The councils and specialized commissions are not part of this procedure, their work continues independently of the GA’s requirements.
Where we come from
After the Model United Nations of Lübeck was founded in 1997, these features were all but institutionalized. When MUNOL's founding members opened the first conference at the Thomas-Mann-Schule, about 80 students from in and around Lübeck assembled for a three-day pioneering session with only rudimentary Rules of Procedure and much organizational improvisation. Yet Axel Dierich, first and last Conference Manager and Secretary-General at the same time, and his team already had MUN experience. Prior to its own MUN conference, the Thomas-Mann-Schule had started to send delegations to THIMUN (The Hague Model United Nations), one of the world's largest students' congresses in the Netherlands. The idea was born to build up an own conference in Lübeck, albeit in a more familiar setting with less delegates facilitating more interpersonal exchange.
The first foreign guests, who could be welcomed at MUNOL in 1999 came from Italy and Sweden and have been and continue to be faithful participants in the conference. The number of delegates at MUNOL rapidly grew and reached a preliminary maximum of around 350 students from 11 different European countries in 2002. Since then, the congress has been in a constant process of internationalization, but there are also more and more German schools taking an interest in MUNOL. In 2010, the conference will, for the first time, reach a total number of around 400 delegates and therefore (in addition to technical reasons) transfer the plenary meetings to a venue outside the school.
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