BIMUN26: The Full Record of the Tenth Session

The tenth session of the Babcock International Model United Nations convened at Babcock University from 2 to 6 August 2026 under the theme "Better Together: A Decade of BIMUN Advancing the United Nations' Vision for Peace, Development and Human Rights". Delegates arrived Sunday for accreditation and training. They departed Thursday morning.

Between those two days, twelve committees sat across two locations and seven session blocks, and produced eleven bodies of resolutions: a proposed fifth crime for the International Criminal Court, a global fund for workers displaced by automation, two advisory opinions from a court that neither party to its first case attended, and a set of texts that — taken together — say more about the conference than any single committee did.

How the week ran

The conference opened Monday morning with the first committee session, followed by the Opening Plenary in the BUTH 600-seater auditorium. The General Assembly opened with a procession of the Secretariat and guest speakers, a call to order, a minute of silence and roll call. In her opening remarks, the President of the General Assembly anchored the conference on the principle of Ubuntu — I am because you are — before delegates began filling the Speakers' List. Proceedings paused after Denmark's address, when delegates voted to suspend the list for the keynote session.

Babcock University's Vice-Chancellor welcomed delegates, congratulated BIMUN on its tenth edition, and introduced Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra State, who challenged delegates to see leadership as service, embrace competence, and take responsibility for shaping the future rather than waiting for others to do it for them. Two further committee sessions followed that afternoon and evening.

Tuesday was the conference's working day: four committee sessions between eight in the morning and quarter past six, and Negotiation Labs at nine that night for resolution finalisation, lobbying and final amendments before the closing plenary.

By the end of it the committees had moved in one direction. Monday's sessions had been marked by division — DISEC fracturing into three blocs, SOCHUM spending its opening on a contested vote between Egypt and Denmark over which agenda to take first. Tuesday's were marked by consolidation. In ECOFIN, four blocs became two when the Asian, African and American groupings merged. In SOCHUM, every bloc merged into one, the Humanitarian Non-Aligned. WHO finished its resolutions outright.

Wednesday's Closing Plenary opened at eight with the receiving of the secretariat, the procession of the International Court of Justice, a minute of silence and roll call. Dr Oluseyi Soremekun of the United Nations Information Centre in Abuja delivered a special address. The floor was opened for motions; a delegate moved to reopen the Speakers' List, the delegate of Djibouti countered with a motion to proceed directly to the reading of resolutions, and Djibouti's motion carried.

DISEC was read first and drew the plenary's only recorded challenges. The delegate of Pakistan argued its biometrics and drone provision was too vague and that biometrics would do little against fighters moving through forested terrain; DISEC replied that the drones were for surveillance rather than border control. The delegate of China asked what would prevent intelligence-sharing from infringing on state sovereignty; DISEC cited Nigeria and Cameroon as neighbours for whom the question would not arise. The resolution passed, and the committees that followed brought their own resolutions to the floor in turn.

What follows is what that record contains.

The technology nobody put on an agenda

No committee at BIMUN26 was convened to debate artificial intelligence in general. Five ended up doing it anyway.

ECOFIN took it as an economic problem, adopting a resolution premised on UNCTAD's estimate that the AI market could reach 4.8 trillion dollars while disrupting up to 40 per cent of jobs worldwide, and on the finding that over 90 per cent of specialised AI computing resources sit in two countries. UNESCO took it as an educational one, governing its use in classrooms while protecting academic integrity. The International Court of Justice took it as a question of law, ruling on whether lethal autonomous weapons can be deployed at all. DISEC took it as an instrument, urging AI-aided drones for border surveillance. UNODC took it as a tool twice over — for identifying trafficking patterns, and for detecting collusion and bid-rigging in public procurement.

Five committees, five agendas, one technology. And across them, the conference kept converging on the same two questions.

The first was accountability. The ICJ answered it most directly: autonomous systems are not legal persons, cannot bear rights or obligations, and cannot possess the intent and knowledge that criminal responsibility requires. Responsibility therefore stays with states and with commanders — and may extend to those who design or programme such systems knowing they will facilitate unlawful conduct. The emergence of autonomous weapons, the Court held, creates no legal vacuum. UNESCO reached for the same principle in a different register, requiring meaningful human oversight in the learning process. DISEC's resolution drew the sharpest challenge on the plenary floor precisely here: the delegate of China asked what would stop intelligence-sharing arrangements from infringing on the sovereignty of participating states, and the delegate of Pakistan questioned whether biometric verification would do anything at all against fighters moving through forest.

The second question was distribution. UNESCO's resolution is largely a document about who is left out — of connectivity, of electricity, of infrastructure, of teacher training. ECOFIN's is about who bears the cost of a transition they did not design. The delegate of Kenya told that committee that around forty per cent of the population of the country he represents is affected by AI-driven labour displacement.

Who wrote the resolutions

Sponsorship lists are dry reading, and at BIMUN26 they are the most revealing documents in the record.

ECOFIN's resolution establishing the Global AI Workforce Transition Fund carries more than thirty sponsors, overwhelmingly from the Global South — the coalition delegates called the A3, formed when the Asian, African and American blocs merged mid-negotiation. Its signatories are Sweden and Germany. The European bloc, which stayed independent throughout, signed but did not sponsor.

UN Legal's push to add ecocide to the Rome Statute as a fifth international crime was sponsored by fifteen states, every one of them a small island or developing country: Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Botswana, Cabo Verde, Djibouti, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Jamaica, Kiribati, Lesotho, Maldives, Nauru, Panama and Seychelles. No major power sponsored it.

SPECPOL's resolution on re-engineering UN peacekeeping was written by the states that host peacekeeping missions — the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fiji, Guinea, Sudan and Turkmenistan — with signatories drawn almost entirely from African member states. Its central demand is that host states be party to transition planning before any drawdown begins, and that the Security Council institutionalise consultation with them across the mandate cycle. Its preamble records deep concern at the limited institutional voice afforded to host states in deliberations about their own territory.

WHO's preparedness resolution begins as a global document and ends as a Caribbean one, closing with a Caribbean Emergency Health Corps, a regional medical airlift network, and a Caribbean Public Health Emergency Response Fund. Its climate resolution recognises that small island states transitioning away from fossil fuels face disproportionate burdens where restrictions take effect before affordable alternatives are in place, and asks for transitional flexibility on their behalf.

Even in the Security Council, the pattern held in miniature: China and Russia sponsored the resolution on terrorist groups in Africa. The United States, the United Kingdom and France signed it.

Almost every answer was a fund

Where the problems diverged, the instrument rarely did.

ECOFIN created the Global AI Workforce Transition Fund. WHO called for an International Climate Health Financing Fund, and separately for a Caribbean Public Health Emergency Response Fund. UNODC urged an International Anti-Trafficking Cooperation Fund by the second quarter of 2027. UNDP proposed a Community Development Matching Grant Scheme. DISEC routed its border technology proposals through the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism Trust Fund.

ECOFIN's went furthest in thinking about where money would come from rather than simply asking for it: a digital productivity levy on AI-intensive multinationals above an agreed revenue threshold, profit-sharing from partnerships deploying AI in developing countries, technology-transfer contributions from developed states under their existing TRIPS obligations, and disbursement in phased tranches against independently verified milestones — with public disclosure modelled on Nigeria's Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and tranches suspended where misappropriation is verified.

What did not get resolved

Two committees ran out of time on half their mandate. UN Legal spent its full allocation on ecocide; a motion to reopen its second agenda, on closing the accountability gap for wrongful acts committed through proxy and non-state armed groups, failed on a clear vote. SPECPOL never reached its own second agenda, on the weaponisation and commercialisation of Earth's orbit.

Not everything that was demanded survived drafting either. In DISEC, three blocs arrived at three different diagnoses of violent extremism — technological, legal, social. The technological one won: biometric verification, AI-aided drones, Financial Action Task Force standards and partnerships with technology companies all appear as operative clauses. The Cooperative Bloc's call for a legally binding instrument against states that harbour or finance terrorist groups does not. The third bloc's concerns — firearms in the hands of minors, and poverty and unemployment treated as secondary to military responses — appear in the preamble, with no operative clause attached to either.

And consensus, where it came, was not free. SPECPOL was heated from its opening to its final motion, and passed unanimously only after the delegate of Sudan attacked a rival bloc's draft on the floor as containing "a huge lacuna and a very big vacuum that will cause issues" — and the provision was cut. In UN Legal, by delegates' account, nothing passed unanimously at all.

The court nobody came to

The most unusual proceeding of the week was the one with the fewest participants.

Armenia instituted proceedings against Azerbaijan before the International Court of Justice over obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination following the depopulation of Nagorno-Karabakh. Both states filed pleadings. Neither presented its case. The Court instead heard from Russia and Israel, described in the opinion as uninterested parties, and questioned both closely.

Russia said it did not characterise the 2023 displacement of approximately 100,000 Armenians as ethnic cleansing. The Court put to Israel publicly available data indicating it accounted for roughly 69 per cent of Azerbaijan's major arms imports between 2016 and 2020, and asked whether that was consistent with its claim to represent neither party; the delegate cited strategic, economic and energy interests and defence cooperation with numerous states. Asked to reconcile Israel's recognition of Azerbaijani sovereignty with its own history of territorial disputes involving competing ethnic and historical claims, the delegate declined to answer. Both delegations declined to say why they had not used their influence over compliance with the Court's provisional measures on the Lachin Corridor.

The Court ruled that the Convention does not apply retroactively; that systematic displacement and deliberate demographic alteration on ethnic grounds may constitute racial discrimination; that a state's failure to suppress discrimination it knew of and could have acted against may itself be a violation; and that armed conflict does not displace human rights law, the two regimes applying concurrently. It closed by noting that the Convention cannot by itself resolve a dispute whose origins are also historical, political and territorial.

The tenth session

Between an opening keynote on leadership as service and a closing address from the United Nations Information Centre, twelve committees argued over borders, oceans, orbit, algorithms, and the terms on which countries that did not build a technology should have to live with it. Delegates from across Africa arrived at Babcock University to represent states not their own, and left having written a record that reads, more often than not, like their own.

The eleventh session convenes in 2027.