Twelve Committees, One Room: BIMUN26 Adopts Its Resolutions

BIMUN26 resolved on Wednesday morning. The closing plenary opened in the BUTH 600-seater auditorium with the receiving of the secretariat — four officials on the podium — followed by the processions of the International Court of Justice, a minute of silence, and a roll call in which delegations answered either "present" or "present and voting".

Dr. Oluseyi Soremekun of the United Nations Information Centre in Abuja delivered a special address. The floor was then opened for motions. A delegate moved to reopen the Speakers' List, suspended since Monday to make room for Peter Obi's keynote; the delegate of Djibouti countered with a motion to proceed directly to the reading of the resolutions. Djibouti's motion carried on a majority vote, and the list stayed closed.

DISEC was read first, and drew questions from two delegations. The delegate of Pakistan challenged the resolution's proposal for biometric verification and AI-aided drones at borders. arguing the provision was too vague and that biometrics would do little against fighters moving through forested terrain. DISEC's response was that the drones were intended solely for surveillance rather than border control, and that border protection itself would rest on alliances between neighboring member states.

The delegate of China questioned the intelligence-sharing provisions, asking what measures would prevent such arrangements from infringing on the sovereignty of participating states. DISEC pointed to Nigeria and Cameroon as neighboring states for whom the question would not arise, and said any disputes that did emerge could be settled between the parties involved.

The resolution went to a vote and passed.

What the tenth sessions of the Babcock International Model United Nations produced across twelve committees ranged from a proposed fifth International crime to a fund for workers displaced by artificial intelligence.

The Court that neither party came to

The International Court of Justice delivered two advisory opinions, and the more striking of them was heard in the absence of both states involved.

Armenia instituted proceedings against Azerbaijan 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. In their place, the Court heard from Russia and Israel — described in the opinion as uninterested parties — and questioned both closely.

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

The Court held that Armenia's obligations under the Convention arose on accession in June 1993 and do not apply retroactively; that systematic displacement and deliberate demographic alteration on ethnic grounds may fall within the Convention's definition of racial discrimination; and that the existence of an armed conflict does not displace the Convention, since humanitarian law and human rights law apply concurrently.

Its second opinion, on lethal autonomous weapons systems, was requested by the General Assembly on Monday and delivered on Tuesday. The Court found such systems are not inherently incompatible with the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution, provided they remain under meaningful human control, which it defined as requiring manual override capability, continuous human supervision, and mandatory deactivation of systems that malfunction or prove unable to comply with humanitarian law. On accountability, the Court was direct: autonomous systems are not legal persons and cannot bear obligations, so responsibility remains with states and with commanders and other natural persons, and may extend to those who design or programme such systems. The emergence of autonomous weapons, the Court held, creates no legal vacuum. It advised that a legally binding instrument be adopted under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

The bench was presided over by Ikanke Jimmy, with Opeoluwa Ogunyemi as Vice-President and fifteen judges.

SPECPOL, heated to the last motion

The Special, Political and Decolonisation Committee was the loudest room at BIMUN26 — heated, by its own delegates' account, from the opening of the session to the final motion. Its agenda was re-engineering UN peacekeeping: host-state expulsions, asymmetric threats and mandate security transitions.

Three blocs formed: Activee, New World and Shield.

This bloc's resolution has a huge lacuna and a very big vacuum that will cause issues.

- Delegate of Sudan

At one point the delegate of Sudan attacked a rival draft on the floor. The provision he criticised, from the New World Bloc's text, was later removed. The final resolution passed unanimously.

The resolution it produced reads as a host-state document, and its sponsors are host states: Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fiji, Guinea, Sudan and Turkmenistan, with signatories drawn almost entirely from African member states. It recommends that every future peacekeeping mandate include a transition plan negotiated jointly with the host state before any drawdown begins, and calls on the Security Council to institutionalise structured consultations with host states throughout mandate design, implementation and review, while preserving the Council's power to act in the interest of international peace and security. Delegates of Sudan, the Central African Republic and Guinea drove the room.

DISEC: whose diagnosis survived

The Disarmament and International Security Committee split three ways on Monday over whether violent extremism is a technological, legal or social problem. The adopted resolution shows which argument prevailed.

The Bloc of the Elite's technological proposals came through largely intact as operative clauses: biometric verification and advanced screening at borders, AI-aided drones for surveillance, Financial Action Task Force standards for virtual assets, and public-private partnerships with technology companies through the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

The Cooperative Bloc's central demand did not. Its working paper had called for a legally binding instrument against the accommodation and financing of designated terrorist groups. The resolution instead recommends enhanced judicial cooperation, extradition mechanisms and sanctions on member states financing such groups, in accordance with an existing Security Council resolution from 1999.

The third bloc's concerns — the misuse of firearms by minors, and poverty and unemployment being treated as secondary to military responses — appear in the resolution's preamble, with no operative clause attached to either.

The resolution was sponsored by Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, with thirty-seven signatories.

The resolution's technological provisions drew challenges on the plenary floor. the delegates of Pakistan and China both pressed DISEC on them — Pakistan on the practical limits of biometrics, China on whether intelligence-sharing could be reconciled with state sovereignty. It was the same tension the Bloc of the Elite's own working paper had hedged against repeatedly.

ECOFIN: a fund, and a bloc that stood apart

The Economic and Financial Committee's consolidation is legible in its own resolution. The sponsors run to more than thirty states, overwhelmingly from the Global South — the A3, formed when the Asian, African and American blocs merged on Tuesday. The signatories are Sweden and Germany. The European bloc, which stayed independent through negotiations, signed but did not sponsor.

The resolution establishes a Global AI Workforce Transition Fund to provide concessional financing for reskilling, social protection and labour market adjustment in developing countries, and asks the International Monetary Fund to open a dedicated financing window for it under the Resilience and Sustainability Trust. Its most striking provision is how the fund would be capitalised: a digital productivity levy on AI-intensive multinational corporations above an agreed revenue threshold, profit-sharing from public-private partnerships deploying AI in developing countries, and technology-transfer contributions from developed states under their existing TRIPS obligations.

Disbursements would be released 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.

Speaking on the floor during negotiations, the delegate of South Africa argued that international institutions exist to prevent the worst rather than deliver the ideal: "The UN wasn't created to lead us to heaven, but to save us from hell."

UN Legal asks for a fifth crime

The Sixth Committee's resolution proposes that the Assembly of States Parties amend the Rome Statute to include ecocide as the fifth crime within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It adopts the Independent Expert Panel's 2021 definition — unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge of a substantial likelihood of severe, widespread or long-term environmental damage — and defines each of those terms.

Every sponsor is a small island or developing state: 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.

The committee never debated its other agenda. A motion to take the ecocide item first carried; the committee spent its full time there, and a later motion to reopen the agenda on closing the accountability gap for wrongful acts committed through proxy and non-state armed groups — moved originally by Nauru and seconded by Eritrea — failed on a clear vote.

The rest of the floor
The World Health Organization committee finished first, adopting resolutions on both its agendas. Its preparedness resolution turns notably regional in its final clauses, proposing a Caribbean Emergency Health