Last week the News reported on the involvement of young people in the Youth UN. Youth Page reporter Claire West gives a first hand account of the project.

LAST November, myself along with a group of students from the Sir John Colfox School attended a model United Nations conference in Belfast.

The conference was at the city's Methody College and was spread over four days.

Young people between the ages of 10 and 19 from all over the UK, America and Korea attended, making for a very interesting few days.

There were different committees and these included; health, politics, human rights, Middle East, economy and environment. Each delegate was assigned a particular committee and also a country that they were representing.

Our school was assigned Lebanon and also a distant country called Turkmenistan which nobody appeared to have heard of, which was quite unfortunate.

Each committee discussed three issues and could write a resolution on one.

A resolution was a list of points about what the country felt, and what they would do, about a particular issue.

The delegates would give their resolutions to other countries to read, and they could then sign it. This was the lobbying session. The resolution with the most signatures would be the one that would be debated the next day.

The debate was started with the winning resolution being read out to the committee by a delegate from that country.

The delegate could then open themselves to points of information - this basically meant that the rest of the committee could ask the reader questions about their resolution.

The debates could get quite heated when strong differences of opinion arose, but this made the debating more interesting for everyone. In the event only four resolutions were passed by the group, one being a Japanese resolution banning smoking.

On one of the days we also had an 'emergency debate'. This meant that someone from the conference would invent something that had happened in the world and the whole conference had to come to a conclusion about what to do.

Over the few days, we all had a great time, and everyone agreed that it was a great experience.

It really gave us an opportunity to express our opinions and learn about world issues that are really quite important.