Where is the VII Galicia Pre-Moot held?

The VII Galicia Pre-Moot is held in Mexico City, MEX.

What is the eligibility level for participants in this event?

This event is open to participants at the college level.

What is the format of the VII Galicia Pre-Moot?

The VII Galicia Pre-Moot is a pre-moot court competition, designed to simulate the Willem C. Vis Moot.

VII Galicia Pre-Moot

Feb 26–28, 2026Mexico City, MexicoIn-person

ConcludedRegistration closed

The VII Galicia Pre-Moot, hosted in Mexico City, MEX, offers a vital preparatory platform for participants in the Willem C. Vis Moot. This event is designed to refine advocacy skills and deepen understanding of complex international commercial arbitration issues within a simulated arbitration environment. It provides an opportunity for college-level teams to engage with legal professionals and receive feedback on their arguments.

Country perspectives

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

Mexico

Host nation, promoting legal education and international arbitration.

Role in topic

As the host country for the VII Galicia Pre-Moot in Mexico City, MEX, this nation plays a significant role in fostering legal education and promoting expertise in international commercial arbitration. Hosting such events helps to develop local legal talent and integrate the country's legal community more deeply into global arbitration networks.

Topics & background

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

United Nations Security Council

Established under Chapter V of the UN Charter in 1945, the Security Council holds primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Its fifteen members — five permanent (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States) wielding the veto, and ten elected on a rotating basis — can authorize sanctions, peacekeeping, and the use of force under Chapter VII. Since the end of the Cold War, the Council has expanded its agenda from interstate conflict to terrorism, proliferation, climate-security linkages, and cyber norms, but it has also been recurrently paralyzed when permanent members' interests diverge. The contemporary agenda is dominated by two clusters. First, active armed conflicts: Russia's war in Ukraine, the Gaza war and its regional spillover, Sudan's civil war between the SAF and RSF (the world's largest displacement crisis since April 2023), and instability in the Sahel. Second, transversal threats: cybersecurity and attacks on critical infrastructure following the OEWG ICT process, sanctions regimes such as those on the DPRK and Sudan (Resolution 1591), and the use of the veto, now subject to General Assembly scrutiny under Resolution 76/262 (the 'veto initiative'). Reform pressure is mounting. The L.69 group, the African Union's Ezulwini Consensus, and the G4 (Brazil, Germany, India, Japan) all press for enlargement and curbs on the veto, while the P5 remain divided. Delegates should expect debate to oscillate between immediate crisis management and the structural legitimacy of the Council itself.

Key players

Future Security Council: Anticipating Tomorrow's Threats

The 'Future' Security Council is a forward-looking simulation of the UNSC asked to deliberate on threats that are emerging rather than fully crystallized. Its intellectual grounding lies in the UN's 'Our Common Agenda' (2021) and the 2024 Pact for the Future, both of which call on the Council to better integrate horizon-scanning, complex risks, and the security implications of technology and climate into its work. The Council has only episodically engaged such issues — climate-security debates since 2007, the Arria-formula meetings on AI in 2023 and 2024, and the OEWG on ICTs — without producing a settled doctrine. The core dispute is jurisdictional and political. Russia and China have historically resisted broadening the Council's mandate into areas they regard as socioeconomic (climate) or sovereign (cyber, AI governance), arguing that such matters belong to the General Assembly or specialized agencies. Western and many elected members counter that the Charter's Article 39 already permits the Council to determine any threat to peace, including novel ones such as cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, weaponized AI, pandemics, space-based weapons, or climate-driven state collapse. A Future Security Council typically takes up scenarios: a major orbital ASAT incident, an AI-enabled cyber strike on a power grid, a sudden-onset climate displacement crisis, or a synthetic biology release. Delegates are expected to draft resolutions that stretch — but do not break — the Charter's framework while anticipating the geopolitical alignments of the late 2020s and 2030s.

Key players

Historical Committee: Crisis Cabinet at a Turning Point

Historical committees freeze the international system at a chosen moment and ask delegates to deliberate with only the information, actors, and tools available at that time. Common settings include the 1945 San Francisco Conference that drafted the UN Charter, the 1956 Suez Crisis that exposed the limits of P5 cooperation, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1990–91 Gulf War Council, or the 1994 deliberations on Rwanda — each a documented inflection point in collective security. The analytical value of a historical committee lies in confronting decisions under uncertainty: incomplete intelligence, fixed alliance structures, and the absence of later normative developments such as the Responsibility to Protect (2005) or the Arms Trade Treaty (2013). Delegates are expected to argue in character and within period-accurate constraints, while crisis updates — fabricated dispatches, communiqués, and battlefield reports — drive the pace. Whichever moment is chosen, the underlying dispute is the same: how great powers reconcile national interest with the collective machinery they themselves designed. The committee tests whether better diplomacy, at the time, could have averted the outcomes history records — and what that implies for the institutions delegates inherit today.

Key players

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was founded in 1969 in Rabat following the arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, with the protection of Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause as its founding mission. Renamed from the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in 2011, it now groups 57 member states across four continents, making it the second-largest intergovernmental body after the UN. Its principal organs are the Islamic Summit, the Council of Foreign Ministers, and a permanent General Secretariat in Jeddah; affiliated institutions include the Islamic Development Bank and the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission. The OIC's contemporary agenda is shaped by overlapping crises in the Muslim world: the Gaza war and the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the conditions of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (on which the OIC backed The Gambia's ICJ genocide case), the situation in Afghanistan under the Taliban, the war in Sudan, and the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang — the last a recurring source of internal disagreement given members' economic ties to China. The organization also coordinates positions on Islamophobia, having sponsored the General Assembly resolution establishing 15 March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. The core tension within the OIC is between its declared unity and the deep political fissures among its members — Saudi–Iranian rivalry (partially eased by the 2023 Beijing-brokered rapprochement), the Qatar–Gulf reconciliation, the Abraham Accords' normalization track, and divisions over political Islam. Delegates should expect debate to balance consensus-driven diplomacy with these underlying cleavages.

Key players

World Health Organisation

Established in 1948 as the UN specialized agency for health, the WHO sets international health norms through the World Health Assembly, monitors disease outbreaks under the International Health Regulations (revised in 2005 after SARS), and coordinates responses to global health emergencies. Its authority rests largely on technical legitimacy and convening power rather than enforcement: it cannot compel states, only declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEICs) and issue recommendations. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed structural weaknesses — delayed information sharing, vaccine inequity, and politicized funding — and triggered two parallel reform tracks. The first produced amendments to the IHR adopted in 2024; the second culminated in the WHO Pandemic Agreement adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2025, which now enters its contentious implementation phase. Core disputes include the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system, technology transfer obligations, and how to reconcile the agreement with sovereignty concerns raised by several member states. Beyond pandemics, the WHO's 2026 docket includes implementation of the 2025 UN High-Level Meeting outcomes on non-communicable diseases, antimicrobial resistance, mental health, climate-health linkages, and continuing humanitarian health emergencies in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and the DRC. Financing — long dependent on a handful of large voluntary donors — remains a vulnerability following the 2025 US funding decisions.

Key players

United Nations Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Council was created by General Assembly Resolution 60/251 in 2006 to replace the discredited Commission on Human Rights. Composed of 47 member states elected by the General Assembly on a regionally balanced basis, it meets in Geneva and exercises three principal functions: the Universal Periodic Review of every UN member state's human rights record, the appointment of Special Procedures (rapporteurs and working groups), and the adoption of country- and thematic resolutions. It works alongside, but is institutionally distinct from, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The Council operates under chronic political strain. Critics — including states that have withdrawn or boycotted at various points — point to the election of members with poor records, the asymmetric focus on Israel under the standing Agenda Item 7, and selective country mandates. Defenders argue it remains the only standing universal human rights body and has produced landmark mechanisms, including commissions of inquiry on Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, the Iranian protests, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The current agenda is dominated by the human rights dimensions of generative AI (following the 2024 OHCHR work on technology and rights), the operationalization of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment recognized by GA Resolution 76/300, climate-induced displacement, civic-space restrictions, and accountability for violations in active conflicts. Delegates should expect normative debate to collide with hard geopolitical fault lines between the Western Group, the Like-Minded Group, and shifting regional blocs.

Key players

United Nations Economic and Social Council

ECOSOC is one of the six principal organs of the UN established by the Charter in 1945. Its 54 members, elected by the General Assembly for three-year terms, coordinate the economic, social, and related work of fourteen UN specialized agencies, ten functional commissions, and five regional commissions. Following the 2013 reform of its working methods and the adoption of the 2030 Agenda in 2015, ECOSOC has become the central platform for follow-up on the Sustainable Development Goals, hosting the annual High-Level Political Forum. The Council's agenda has been reshaped by overlapping shocks: the COVID-19 fiscal aftershock, rising sovereign debt distress across the Global South, the climate financing gap, and the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence and digital public infrastructure as development variables. The G20 Common Framework for debt treatment has largely stalled, prompting African and Latin American debtors to call for a UN-led sovereign debt restructuring mechanism — a proposal advanced through the 2025 Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville. In parallel, the 2024 Global Digital Compact, adopted as part of the Pact for the Future, has placed digital public goods, AI governance, and data governance squarely on ECOSOC's development docket. The unifying question is whether the multilateral economic architecture built in 1944–45 can be adapted — through ECOSOC, the IFIs, and a possible UN tax convention — to deliver the SDGs by 2030.

Key players

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women)

UN Women was established by General Assembly Resolution 64/289 in July 2010, consolidating four pre-existing entities — DAW, INSTRAW, OSAGI, and UNIFEM — into a single composite agency that became operational in January 2011. Its mandate combines normative support to intergovernmental bodies (notably the Commission on the Status of Women), UN system coordination on gender mainstreaming, and operational programming in over 90 countries. Its work is anchored in the 1979 CEDAW Convention, the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security, and SDG 5. The 2025 Beijing+30 review confirmed that no country has achieved full gender equality and that progress on several indicators has stalled or reversed. Particular concerns include rollbacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence in conflict (Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, Tigray, the DRC), the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan under Taliban edicts — described by the UN Special Rapporteur and others as gender persecution — and the gendered impacts of climate change, displacement, and digital technologies including online violence and AI-generated abuse. The core political contest at UN Women is normative: a coalition of states and civil society pushes to expand protections (including SOGI rights and comprehensive sexuality education), while a counter-coalition invoking 'traditional values' and sovereignty resists such language. Funding remains heavily voluntary and concentrated among a small group of donors, leaving the agency vulnerable to political shifts.

Key players

Key terms & resources

The concepts worth knowing before VII Galicia Pre-Moot, plus lessons and profiles to go deeper.

Committee on the Status of Women in India (Towards Equality Report 1974)Ambedkar on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity Article 14 (Equality Before Law)Article 16 — Equality of Opportunity in Public Employment Article 23 — Prohibition of Traffic in Human Beings and Forced Labour Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

Frequently asked questions

Related conferences

VII Galicia Pre-Moot

Feb 26–28, 2026Mexico City, MexicoIn-person

ConcludedRegistration closed

Country perspectives

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

Mexico

Host nation, promoting legal education and international arbitration.

Role in topic

Topics & background

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

United Nations Security Council

Key players

Future Security Council: Anticipating Tomorrow's Threats

Key players

Historical Committee: Crisis Cabinet at a Turning Point

Key players

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

Key players

World Health Organisation

Key players

United Nations Human Rights Council

Key players

United Nations Economic and Social Council

Key players

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women)

Key players

Key terms & resources

The concepts worth knowing before VII Galicia Pre-Moot, plus lessons and profiles to go deeper.

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Key terms & resources

Frequently asked questions

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Country perspectives

Topics & background

Key terms & resources

Frequently asked questions

Related conferences

23rd edition MOOT Mexico

Concurso Internacional de Arbitraje Comercial (MOOT México) XXIII edición 2026

Moot Court Ius Mundi 2026

NLS-Trilegal International Arbitration Moot 2026 (XIX Edition)

Central and Eastern European Moot Court Competition (CEEMC) 2026

XXIV Edición de la Competencia Internacional “Víctor Carlos García Moreno” (2026)

Related conferences

23rd edition MOOT Mexico

Concurso Internacional de Arbitraje Comercial (MOOT México) XXIII edición 2026

Moot Court Ius Mundi 2026

NLS-Trilegal International Arbitration Moot 2026 (XIX Edition)

Central and Eastern European Moot Court Competition (CEEMC) 2026

XXIV Edición de la Competencia Internacional “Víctor Carlos García Moreno” (2026)