Dear BERMUN participants,
Welcome to the 2024 Human Rights Committee! I am delighted to greet you and cannot wait to meet you all this year in November.
This year’s conference theme “Fostering Global Citizenship among Identities and Responsibilities” will focus on bringing people from different cultures and with different backgrounds together to form a collective global identity. It is not clear whether attaining something as abstract as a state of “global citizenship" is even possible. With many individual identities across the globe, people have isolated themselves into groups, making it challenging to develop a global community that is capable of tackling the countless pressing global issues.
One of the topics we will be debating in the Human Rights Committee is “Addressing the Role of Social Media amidst Rising Xenophobia”. Social media has opened up a completely new environment where information is both produced and consumed in a way it has never been before. With few regulations in place, it is practically a free field ready to scheme, lure in and deceive. Amongst many things, social media has contributed tremendously to the rising xenophobia across our societies and is feeding into the beast of discrimination and nationalism by many means (ex. fake news, connecting xenophobic people with anonymous room to spread hate, etc.). This is harming our global community by making it easier to be hateful and to lure a more vulnerable audience into getting stuck in algorithms that encourage only one strong point of view. This raises the question of whether or not we could reach a universal consensus on how to regulate our social media interactions across diverse cultures if we have opposing values and priorities. Working together despite opposing values ties back directly to our second topic: “Reaffirming the Universality of the UN Declaration of Human Rights”. Here we will discuss how human rights can be adjusted to fit global cultural values, which the international community supports.
I was indoctrinated into the BERMUN cult at the ripe age of 13 and have been an active member ever since. Soon after, I joined our Student Officer team and since then have had the honor of chairing at various conferences, and attending a few international ones as a delegate. At the beginning of this year, I helped lead the BERMUN2 conference as Deputy-Secretary General. Model UN has always been one of my favorite activities; it brings intelligent students together to discuss the critical issues of our time and most importantly connects international students to have fun.
Besides MUN I enjoy doing sports, especially swimming, running, and whatever going to the gym qualifies as. Aside from politics, I am interested in neuroscience, psychology, and synthetic biology, and could imagine myself going into a scientific field in the future.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me over the platform.
See you in November!
Mila Ward
