A leak from the Secretariat describes any situation in a Model UN conference where confidential information held by staff — crisis arcs, backroom directives, upcoming crisis updates, vote counts, or another delegate's private notes — is disclosed to delegates who were not meant to receive it. In crisis committees this is the more serious variant, because the Secretariat (Crisis Director, backroom staffers, and sometimes the Chair) controls the narrative timeline and any premature disclosure can collapse the gameplay loop.
Leaks usually fall into three categories:
- Accidental leaks, where a staffer reads a note aloud, leaves a backroom laptop open, or sends a directive response to the wrong delegate.
- Strategic leaks, where staff deliberately feed information to a delegate to escalate a stalled arc — a grey-area practice that some circuits tolerate and others forbid.
- Cross-committee leaks, where information from a joint crisis (JCC) bleeds between rooms outside the sanctioned mechanism, common in Ivy-circuit and NAIMUN-style JCCs.
Most major conferences treat leaks under their staff conduct policy rather than parliamentary rules. Secretariats at conferences like HNMUN, WorldMUN, NAIMUN, and ChoMUN publish internal handbooks instructing backroom staff to keep notes paper-only, shred discarded drafts, and avoid discussing arcs in public spaces. When a leak occurs mid-conference, the standard remedies are: retconning the leaked information, issuing a corrective crisis update, reassigning the staffer, or — rarely — voiding a directive.
For delegates, exploiting a known leak is generally considered an ethics violation and can affect awards. The conventional norm, reinforced by most Secretariats' awards rubrics, is that delegates should flag suspected leaks to the Chair or USG rather than act on them. In real UN practice the analogue is unauthorized disclosure of Secretariat documents — addressed under ST/SGB bulletins on confidentiality — though the MUN usage is far broader and more informal.
Example
At a 2023 collegiate crisis committee, a backroom staffer accidentally CC'd all delegates on a private directive response from the Russian delegate, forcing the Crisis Director to retcon the leaked arc.