Hampton’s young debaters added to their haul of awards at this year’s LEH Model United Nation conference, as nineteen delegates and five chairs had a very enjoyable and successful weekend of debating at neighbouring school LEH.
The conference opened on Friday evening with time for delegates to lobby each other in their committees, attempting to garner support for their proposed resolutions. This was followed by an inspirational talk from Seema Malhotra MP who spoke passionately about her work for the Feltham constituency and the Labour Party. The MP gave a fascinating insight into the challenges faced by politicians in fulfilling their parliamentary and constituency duties.
On Saturday our delegates began debating their assigned topics in committees, covering rising populism, the gender pay gap, human trafficking, election interference and pandemic prevention. It was great to see so many Hamptonians fully immersed in debate and passing amendments to improve resolutions on such topical issues. Once again, we were impressed with the standard of debate across the year groups, from beginner First Year delegates focused on trying to make points of information, to experienced Sixth Formers challenging other delegates with expert precision. MUN is a fantastic opportunity for vertical collaboration between our pupils. Our Hampton Chairs (James Darke, Aadam Shahzad, Adam Sizoo, Lucas Cairnes and Luke Trotman) thoroughly enjoyed overseeing debate and bringing their years of MUN experience to bear on committee command and control.
On Sunday, delegates moved into General Assembly format and debated two topics: the Question of Global Recession and Combating Climate Change and the Question of maintaining the International Criminal Court. This was followed by a crisis scenario about rising sea levels on the island of Tuvalu – delegates had to lobby and form alliances to produce clauses.
All the Hamptonians were superb ambassadors for their respective countries, and several of our delegates picked up awards at the conference including:
Outstanding Delegate
Vishal Saha (USA human rights committee)
Isaac Crowhurst (China human rights committee)
Finn Watton (USA special committee)
Highly Commended
Sam Trotman (Spain Economic & Social Committee)
Theo Elliott (USA Security Council)
Leander Koutsoudis-Bhuller (Japan Economic & Social committee)
