SC Procedure

Now posted on our website: "As Secretary-General candidates are encouraged to act under Article 99, how frequently has this power been used?" LINK: scprocedure.org/chapter-3-sect…

March 2025 presidency assessment by @Denmark_UN is now out, bringing to 5 the assessments for last year. Cover letter notes that while consultations were held, the assessment "should not be considered a consensus document." This is in keeping with purpose set out in S/1997/451.

@GermanAmbTTO @GermanyUN And we in the Secretariat really appreciated working together with you!

Happy Security Council Political Coordinators Day! As UNSC Political Coordinator for Germany (2011/12) I do remember the great rapport we had amongst ourselves and with the Secretariat colleagues! @SCProcedures @GermanyUN

@PJohnstonFCDO @NDeRiviere @UKUN_NewYork Yes you did, and are still remembered fondly by all in the Secretariat who worked with you. And this background to the position came directly from Norma Chan herself!

I did that job for three years and had no idea we had a day named after us! @NDeRiviere @UKUN_NewYork

Today is SECURITY COUNCIL POLITICAL COORDINATORS DAY! We celebrate on 15 May since it's the birthday of the UK's David Gore-Booth who in 1985 unintentionally began coordination activities which eventually evolved into the irreplacable role which political coordinators play today!

**China has asked for further clarity on his remarks to media: 1) He was speaking in his national capacity, saying that the "content" and "timing" of the draft text on the Strait of Hormuz are not right for the co-pens to present the text to the Security Council for consideration 2) As the president of the Security Council, it is our responsibility to arrange a meeting for adoption of the text if co-pens request a vote. There is no request so far.

In tribute to Judge Kenneth Keith, the AVL invites you to watch his lecture entitled “Openness in International Law”, here: legal.un.org/avl/ls/Keith_R…

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

In a new letter, @UN_PGA urges member states to nominate any additional candidates for Secretary General "in a timely manner" to give everyone a fair hearing before the General Assembly. un.org/pga/80/2026/05…

The AVL pays tribute to Judge Kenneth Keith who generously supported the United Nations’ efforts in the teaching and dissemination of international law. We invite you to watch his lecture “Interpreting in International Courts and Tribunals” here: legal.un.org/avl/faculty/Es…

NEW: The United States government’s abrupt cuts to nearly all US foreign aid in 2025 harmed the global human rights movement and put countless people at risk. While no government is obligated to provide foreign aid, the way the US terminated assistance caused foreseeable harm and demands accountability. Learn more: bit.ly/4novSgZ

This is excellent news. Having read the decision, though, I fear it won't survive on appeal.

Minelaying and Mine-clearing in the Strait of Hormuz Iran reportedly laid mines and European States are preparing a mine-clearing operation. The (il-)legality of minelaying and the legal bases for mine-clearing are far from clear. Read my assessment at ssrn.com/abstract=67337…

The number of settlers has grown steadily over time. What has changed under the current Israeli government is the scale of land grabbing. In the past 4 years alone, the government has established 102 new settlements, nearly as many as were built in the previous 50 years.

🚨Russia & China still have “serious concerns” about US-Bahrain draft UNSC resolution demanding Iran stop obstructing shipping in Strait of Hormuz, remove sea mines & halt "illegal tolls”, according to letter seen by @TheNationalNews thenationalnews.com/news/us/2026/0…

I appreciate the intense interest in my column. For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian "security" prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?

Scary in so many levels: it's hard to find a lot of humans these days who can express themselves in a more clear, reflective, and morally nuanced way

The nomination pattern: 2 candidates nominated by their own govt: Grossi (Argentina) Grynspan (Costa Rica) 3 candidates nominated by other govts: Bachelet (Brazil, Mexico) Espinosa (Antigua & Barbuda) Sall (Burundi)

More than 1.2 million people have been forced to flee their homes amid Israel’s assault on southern Lebanon, as bombings, evacuation orders & demolitions pushed residents north and left many homes in ruins. @guardian draws on ACLED data to map the attacks: theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

🚨ATENCIÓN🚨 La excanciller ecuatoriana María Fernanda Espinosa será candidata a la Secretaría General de la ONU. La postulación será formalizada este martes por el Gobierno de Antigua y Barbuda, y ya fue transmitida a la Presidenta de la Asamblea General y al Presidente del Consejo de Seguridad, conforme al procedimiento acordado por los Estados Miembros para la designación del próximo Secretario General. La candidatura de Espinosa será la quinta. Se sumará a las de: 1⃣Michelle Bachelet, expresidenta de Chile, presentada conjuntamente por Brasil y México 2⃣Rebeca Grynspan, de Costa Rica, presentada por su país 3⃣Rafael Grossi, de Argentina, presentada por su país 4⃣Macky Sall, expresidente de Senegal, presentada por Burundi. En 2018, María Fernanda Espinosa fue Presidenta del 73.º período de sesiones de la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas, y se convirtió en la primera mujer de América Latina y el Caribe en presidir este órgano. @PrimeraPlanaECU

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