UN floor
The UN floor is the term used to describe the official debate on any United Nations resolution or repeal. The official debates are held in the UN Headquarters and can be viewed on Jolt's UN forum. UN Delegates, UN Members, and non-members are all allowed to participate (post) in the official debates.
Between 2002 and mid-2004 the UN resolution debates were often held in a number of open threads, but nations participating in a debate in one of those threads did not always see comments on the same debate in the other threads. In mid-2004 the UN Secretariat started pinning a single thread and treating that thread as the official debate. Sometimes official debate would simply continue from the draft proposal thread, and other times a new thread would be created to separate the proposal discussions from the official resolution debate. Typically the UN Secretariat simply pin the draft proposal thread unless there is a specific request from a nation to create a new thread for the official debate.
The UN floor debates have been useful in helping repeal sponsors build arguments to include in their repeal text. The debates are also helpful in determining the intent of short and lengthy resolutions alike.
Participation in UN floor debates
The length of threads on the UN floor will typically range between 10 and 20 pages in length. For extremely contraversial resolutions the threads will exceed 20 pages in length. Only a small number of nations actually visit the UN forum, though it is believed that many of the nations that visit the UN forum tend to actually officially announce their position (for, against, or abstain) on the UN floor. Unlike the official UN voting options, many nations that have minor reservations with a resolution use the UN floor debate as a chance to state those reservations. These nations will state their weak support, weak opposition, or abstention on the resolution, and sometimes add what they would like to see changed in possible future proposals dealing with similar subjects.
Voting trends on UN forum
Frequently the request to start a new thread for the official debate is made when somebody is interested in attaching a Jolt poll to the new thread. The results of these official UN floor polls are often compared to the official UN vote results. In general, comparisons of the voting behaviors of nations and NGOs that participate in the UN floor debates relative to the overall UN vote suggest that the UN floor debates are more conservative in nature. This trend was first shown in the voting analysis of the Mitigation of Large Reservoirs resolution. In other words, nations that voice their opinions in the UN forum are more likely to vote against a resolution and in favour of a repeal, than the general membership in UN.
