77 Years Engaging Global Citizens
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015 Monday – The UN and Multilateralism On Monday, we met the students from the Research Center of United Nations and International Organizations from China. Aziel Goulandris gave them the welcome remarks, introduced the training and its objectives and WFUNA. To increase interaction within the group, we organized a “Global citizens: Who are we?” session […]
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015
On Monday, we met the students from the Research Center of United Nations and International Organizations from China. Aziel Goulandris gave them the welcome remarks, introduced the training and its objectives and WFUNA. To increase interaction within the group, we organized a “Global citizens: Who are we?” session in which the students presented themselves: names, majors, hobbies, and their expectations for the training. After that, Irene Martinetti presented the United Nations in Geneva.
In the afternoon we took the participant on a guided tour of the UN and afterwards Aziel introduced Diplomacy and Multilateralism. He explained the definition of diplomacy, presented the overview of the history of Multilateralism from congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation of the UN, and the importance of reaching a compromise.
To wrap up the first day, we conducted a quiz contest. The participants were divided into two groups, where they had to compete against each other to win the most points, by answering questions about the UN correctly. Later in the evening we hosted a welcome dinner at a Swiss restaurant.
We started the second day with a morning recap and followed up with a presentation by Lawrence Fioretta, Senior Advisor of the UNHCR, on the history of the UNHCR, conditions and obligations of the refugees, what defines a refugee, the Convention of refugees of 1951, and relevant missions in the field. He also gave an overview of the European situation and the future prospects.
After lunch in the cafeteria at the UNHCR, Naïs Mouret gave a detailed presentation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, its history and evolution and she also presented some current missions on the field, explaining the importance of the Red Cross in those areas.
Afterwards, the students visited the Red Crossmuseum. The participants were intrigued by the different database saved by all people from Red Cross and the hi-tech exhibits with meaning. We then returned to the headquarters and started “Greening the Globe” Role Play. The participants were split into 9 groups representing different states and 1 group as the journalists.
We dedicated the whole Wednesday to the “Greening the Globe” Role Play. First we started with a morning recap, and then proceeded to the role play. “Greening the Globe” is about the environment in different countries and we wanted to show how each delegate of a country has to make choices. The media journalists broadcasted their reporting and all state delegations gave conditions, made amendments, and voted on the final resolutions.
We took the participants to visit the ITU museum and office. Fernando Lagraña, Chairman Staff Council at International Telecommunication Union, presented the history of the ITU and the evolution of the telecommunication technology from the first inventions until today. He also addressed the problem of the Digital Divide and he explained the future challenges of ITU. The students were very interested to see the impact of information and communication technologies.
In the afternoon, a couple of games were held in the beautiful place of Mont Salève. The students were divided in two groups and had to answer questions about the UN history and international relations.
On the last day, we organized group presentations about the topics discussed throughout the week. The groups also had to give a personal opinion of each issue (Environment, Security, Technology, Human Rights).
Then it was time to hand out the prizes. We evaluated all the interactive sessions and finally took the winners of the quiz on the first day, the top group presentation, and the winners of the Mont Salève games. We handed them gifts from the UN gift shop. At last we gave out the certificates to each participant.
We were very happy to meet such hard-working and self-determining people!
We wish them success in their future endeavours!
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