Difficulty in Researching Country Positions
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Delegates,
Several of you have either emailed me or posted inquiries on this blog, expressing concerns that you cannot grasp specific policy positions for your delegation in some of these topics. I understand why this may be the case, especially given that both topics deal with specific issues that many nations may not have had previous experience with. Hence, I would like to offer you some guidelines to help you in writing your Position Papers.
1) The first thing I suggest would be to try to look into the history of your nation and see if there were any remotely similar conflicts. Obviously, it does not have to be necessarily coincide with the Turkey/Cyprus Border Dispute or Japanese War Crimes.
2) With regards to the Turkey/Cyprus Dispute, see if there were border conflicts at all in your country. See if your nation itself was colonized by imperial powers. Look into how the borders of that country was established in the first place. If your country is relatively small, then try to figure out if there had been any conflicts in the past against big states with regards to territorial issues. Go back 10, 30, 50, 100 years. There are very few countries that have been perfectly peaceful with regards to border issues when they are i) completely surrounded by different states or ii) dominate a natural resource such as ocean route, river (trade route), minerals, and so forth.
3) With regards to the Japanese War Crimes issue, try to find out if there had been any human rights violation imposed in your country throughout history. Delegates have actually been very good at this (as I observed in your submitted position papers). Try to place yourself in the shoes of either party and assess which position must be the most appropriate for you. If you have been victimized in any human rights issues in the past, for example, it would be appropriate for your nation to demand reparations from Japan, as opposed to some of the nations that have never experienced such issue. If you have been a nation that has violated human rights in the past, based on how you dealt with it, you may take a specific position either for or against this resolution. For example, I am very much interested in how Germany will officially establish its position in this conference.
4) Now, if everything fails, you can think what their opinion would be if they were in a similar situation. Some delegations have been establishing their country position based upon how their allies vote. It is necessary that you include some nations with similar voting history as your country within the topic synopsis, but this is not a sufficient way to establish your position. Of course, if you ultimately cannot find any information. you cannot make things up. In the case that you will have to rely only on countries with similar vote history, I will have to see a detailed analysis in which why you believe your delegation will end up voting like these countries again on these issues.
Now with that said, I want you to keep in mind that the goals of this year’s Legal Committee is not mainly to have a debate between nations, but to approach a single topic as a whole international body. As mature global citizens, how can we go about solving issues such as the border dispute and the reparations needed for past war crimes? I want to see you offering positions that are relevant to providing a resolution with an international approach at large. You will mainly be assessed with the depth of your knowledge in how international law works and how they can be applied (and should be applied) in our two topics. I want to keep this debate as professional and analytical as possible.
I wish you all good luck with your research. See you in about three weeks.
Hyo Jeong Kwon
Head Chair, 6th Legal Committee
University of California, Berkeley