What level of participants is this competition designed for?

The University of Denver Denver Duels Invitational 2026 is open to college-level participants.

University of Denver Denver Duels Invitational 2026

Jan 17–18, 2026Denver, United StatesIn-person

ConcludedRegistration closed

The University of Denver Denver Duels Invitational 2026 is a collegiate mock trial competition hosted in Denver, USA. This event provides a platform for college-level participants to engage in simulated courtroom proceedings, honing their legal argumentation and public speaking skills. The competition is structured to challenge students in a realistic legal environment, fostering critical thinking and analytical abilities.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the dominant committee topic. Click through for the full country profile.

United States

As the host nation, the USA provides the legal framework and educational institutions that foster mock trial competitions.

Role in topic

The USA is the setting for the University of Denver Denver Duels Invitational 2026, reflecting its strong tradition of collegiate mock trial programs. These programs are integral to legal education and skill development within the country's academic landscape.

Topics & background

The history behind each committee topic and the states that shape it.

World Health Organization (WHO)

Established in 1948 as the UN's specialized agency for international public health, the WHO sets global health norms, coordinates outbreak response, and supports member states in strengthening health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed serious gaps in early warning, equitable access to vaccines and therapeutics, and the binding force of the International Health Regulations (2005), prompting member states to negotiate a new pandemic instrument and a parallel package of IHR amendments. In May 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the first treaty negotiated under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution in over two decades. Its core compromise links pathogen access with benefit sharing (the PABS system), commitments on technology transfer, and a target that manufacturers reserve a share of pandemic products for WHO allocation. Implementation now turns on the annex negotiations, financing, and how to reconcile intellectual property rules with equity goals. In parallel, the 2025 UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs reset targets toward 2030, but uneven progress on tobacco, obesity, mental health, and access to essential medicines persists. WHO 2026 must reconcile pandemic-era investments with chronic underfunding for non-communicable diseases, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Key players

Food and Agriculture Organisation

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Founded in 1945, the FAO is the UN's lead agency on food security, agriculture, fisheries, and rural development. It sets international standards (jointly with WHO through Codex Alimentarius), monitors global food markets through tools like the Food Price Index and GIEWS, and coordinates responses to transboundary pests, animal diseases, and acute hunger crises. After decades of progress, global undernourishment has risen since 2019 due to the compounding shocks of COVID-19, conflict, and climate disruption. The war in Ukraine, export restrictions across major producers, fertilizer market volatility, and droughts across the Horn of Africa, Sahel, and Central America have driven food insecurity to levels not seen in a generation, with the IPC classifying multiple regions — Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, parts of South Sudan — at catastrophic or famine levels. The FAO's Strategic Framework 2022–2031 ("Four Betters": better production, nutrition, environment, life) anchors its current agenda alongside the UN Food Systems Summit follow-up process. Key contested issues include agricultural subsidies and WTO disciplines, the role of biotechnology and gene editing, sustainable fisheries and IUU fishing, climate-resilient agriculture, and the financing of the Black Sea grain corridor's successor arrangements. Delegates will weigh how the FAO can translate normative guidance into operational impact amid donor fatigue.

Key players

Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

ECOSOC, one of the six principal UN organs created by the Charter, coordinates the economic, social, and environmental work of the UN system and oversees follow-up to major development summits, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Its annual High-Level Political Forum is the principal global venue for SDG review. With under half the SDG targets on track midway to 2030, ECOSOC's relevance hinges on whether it can drive financing and policy coherence at scale. A central concern is the deepening sovereign debt distress across the developing world. The G20 Common Framework, launched in 2020, has produced slow and uneven results for Zambia, Ghana, and Ethiopia, while many middle-income debtors are excluded entirely. African and Latin American governments, backed by UNCTAD and UN DESA, are pressing for a UN-anchored debt workout mechanism, an agenda elevated by the 2025 Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville. In parallel, ECOSOC is operationalizing commitments from the 2024 Global Digital Compact, particularly on digital public infrastructure (DPI) — identity, payments, and data exchange systems — as enablers of the SDGs. Disputes center on data governance, interoperability, cross-border data flows, and how to prevent DPI from becoming an instrument of surveillance or exclusion.

Key players

Disarmament and International Security Committee

Disarmament & International Security Committee (DISEC / GA First Committee)

The First Committee of the UN General Assembly addresses disarmament, global challenges, and threats to peace. While its resolutions are non-binding, the committee sets the normative agenda that feeds the Conference on Disarmament, the UN Disarmament Commission, and treaty review conferences. Long-standing files — nuclear non-proliferation under the NPT, the CWC, BWC, and CCW — increasingly compete for attention with emerging-technology arms control. Debates over Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) have intensified since the 2023 Group of Governmental Experts meetings under the CCW, with a growing majority of states backing a legally binding instrument requiring "meaningful human control," while a small group of advanced military powers prefers non-binding principles. UNGA Resolution 78/241 (2023) mandated the Secretary-General to seek member-state views, accelerating treaty momentum. A second priority is the outer space arms race. Destructive ASAT tests by Russia (2021) and earlier by China, India, and the United States have generated dangerous debris, while proliferation of dual-use satellites and rendezvous-and-proximity operations blurs offense-defense lines. Negotiations on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) remain blocked at the Conference on Disarmament, even as the Outer Space Treaty's 1967 framework looks increasingly thin against modern capabilities.

Key players

United Nations Security Council (UNSC)

The Security Council holds primary responsibility under the UN Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security, with binding authority under Chapter VII. Its work is shaped — and frequently constrained — by the veto power of its five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the post-October 2023 Gaza war, the Council has been visibly polarized, raising recurrent questions about reform, the "veto initiative" of GA Resolution 76/262, and Uniting for Peace procedures. The situation in Sudan is among the gravest items on the Council's plate. Since fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces erupted in April 2023, more than 10 million people have been displaced, famine has been declared in parts of Darfur, and the 2005 ICC referrals have been reactivated by new evidence of atrocities. The Council's 1591 sanctions regime and Darfur arms embargo are widely seen as under-enforced, with weapons flows reported from external backers on both sides. In parallel, the Council has begun normative work on cyber threats to international peace and security. Building on the OEWG on ICTs and the 2015 GGE norms, members are debating how state-sponsored cyber operations against critical infrastructure — energy, finance, health — fit into existing Charter prohibitions on the use of force and obligations of due diligence.

Key players

Historical Security Council

The Historical Security Council recreates the UNSC at a defining moment of the past, asking delegates to weigh decisions with the information, ideologies, and constraints of that period rather than today's hindsight. Since its founding in 1946, the Council has confronted crises that reshaped the international order: the Berlin Blockade (1948), the Korean War (1950), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Six-Day War (1967), the Iranian hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–80), the Iran–Iraq War, the dissolution of Yugoslavia (1991–95), the Rwandan genocide (1994), and the post-9/11 interventions. Throughout the Cold War, the Council's work was repeatedly blocked by US–Soviet rivalry, with the veto used hundreds of times and the General Assembly's 1950 "Uniting for Peace" resolution offering a workaround that itself remains contested. The post-1990 "unipolar moment" briefly expanded the Council's activism — authorizing the Gulf War coalition, peace enforcement in the Balkans, and humanitarian interventions — before the Iraq War of 2003 reopened deep divisions over the legality of force. Delegates in a Historical Security Council session must reason from the documents, intelligence, and norms available at the chosen freeze date: pre-Charter customary law, evolving doctrines of self-defense and humanitarian intervention, and the political logic of each era's blocs. The exercise illuminates how procedure, personality, and timing — as much as principle — determine whether the Council acts.

Key players

International Criminal Court (ICC)

The International Criminal Court was established by the 1998 Rome Statute, which entered into force in 2002, as the first permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and — since the 2010 Kampala amendments — the crime of aggression. The Court exercises jurisdiction when a situation is referred by a State Party or the UN Security Council, or when the Prosecutor opens an investigation proprio motu, subject to the principle of complementarity with national courts. The ICC's docket has expanded dramatically since 2020, with active investigations or proceedings concerning Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan/Darfur, Libya, Venezuela, the Philippines, Myanmar/Bangladesh, and the Central African Republic. High-profile arrest warrants — including those issued in 2023 against President Vladimir Putin and in 2024 against Israeli and Hamas leaders — have sharpened debates over the Court's reach, the obligations of States Parties, and head-of-state immunity under customary international law. The Court faces persistent structural challenges: non-cooperation by non-States Parties (notably the US, China, Russia, India, and Israel), threatened or imposed sanctions against its officials, withdrawals (Burundi, the Philippines), accusations of selectivity from African and Asian states, and chronic funding constraints. Delegates will navigate questions of jurisdiction, victims' rights, witness protection, and how the Court interacts with parallel mechanisms such as the IIIM for Syria and the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.

Key players

Crisis Committee

Crisis committees simulate fast-moving decision-making bodies — cabinets, juntas, war rooms, or revolutionary councils — in which delegates represent individuals rather than states and respond in real time to evolving updates from a crisis staff. Unlike standing GA or ECOSOC committees, the pace is measured in hours, directives and communiqués replace lengthy resolutions, and outcomes depend heavily on the interplay between public debate and private back-channel notes. The format draws on real historical patterns of crisis management: the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the British War Cabinet during the Falklands War (1982), the US National Security Council after 9/11, and contemporary crisis cells convened in response to coups, pandemics, and cyber incidents. Effective crisis diplomacy requires balancing operational decisions (military movements, sanctions, evacuations) with strategic communication, alliance management, and domestic political constraints. Whatever scenario the committee receives, delegates should expect incomplete information, adversarial joint crisis dynamics, and the possibility that early decisions cascade into unintended consequences. Familiarity with relevant international law — the UN Charter on the use of force, IHL, sanctions regimes, and the law of state responsibility — provides essential guardrails, even as committee mechanics reward initiative, coordination, and creativity.

Key players