Re: [hr-wsis] Draft Civil Society Priorities Document

Hi,

This is the draft CS consolidated document on CS priorities, elaborated
by the Content and Themes group and sent by Bill Mc Iver to the C&T
list and to the CS plenary list on July 10, 2003.
Comments should be sent by Friday (today !!!) to ct@wsis-cs.org
Meryem
========
World Summit on the Information Society

10 July 2003

Civil Society Priorities Document: (Draft of 10 July 2003)

WSIS - Civil Society Working Group on Content and Themes

The civil society organisations endorsing this document are well aware
of the potential importance of the WSIS, which is why we are investing
in this process. While we understand that the WSIS has no explicit
normative nor programmatic objective (no treaty is expected out of it,
nor does it have decision-making power to unleash new funding), we
consider th! at it offers a unique framework at the international level,
where not only different visions can be shared among a variety of
stakeholders and cultures, but also basic agreements on the shape of
future policies could emerge.

Given the breadth and complexity of the issues involved, an integral
vision is essential. A partial approach is likely to result in policies
that could further deepen both digital and social divides, or
exacerbate other negative impacts that are emerging.

We therefore welcome the broadened range of issues covered by the
present draft documents for the WSIS. We are concerned, nonetheless,
that certain key areas are still missing inadequately addressed or do
not make consensus. The following lines will draw attention to these
issues that constitute priorities for civil society.

As a starting point, the WSIS should avoid idealising the information
society (IS). It is one thing to describe the visio! n of the IS we
rightly aspire to, as orientation for policies, ("The information
society should be people centered...", Art 8:), and quite another to
state that "The information society is a new and higher form of social
organization...." (Art. 9), which could mislead us into ignoring
dangers and undesirable effects.
Sustainable democratic development

An equitable Information Society must be based on sustainable economic
and social development. This cannot be achieved solely through
market-led solutions, which will not automatically lead to equitable
service or lower cost, particularly in less profitable areas or for
low-income social groups, or where virtual monopolies exist. In order
to balance commercial objectives with legitimate social interests, a
principle of equitable access to services and affordable cost should be
reaffirmed, and recognition given to the need for appropriate
regulation and development of public services.

Development cooperation in the area of sustainable development should
reaffirm the principle of solidarity between richer and poorer areas of
the world.

ICTs have great potential for developing more democratic, transparent
and participative processes of governance, from the local to the
international level, which should be more explicitly supported in the
Action Plan. But technologies also have the potential of enabling the
perpetuation and expansion of existing, undemocratic power relations
and inequalities within and between nations. This would be incompatible
with the goals of sustainable development within the information
society. Communities must therefore be empowered to develop their own
productive forces within the information society, in particular to
participate in its development and sustenance through fully democratic
processes that allow them to share control of the decision making
arou! nd economic, cultural, environmental, and other issues regarding
ICT-based projects.

The action plan should address proposals to develop and nurture the
discipline of community informatics, which responds to the particular
characteristics and needs of communities, in relation to design,
development, deployment, and operation of ICTs, as well as local
content production.

ICTs can contribute to sustainability, but computers are also creating
new environmental hazards. In view of mainstreaming ICTs into
sustainable development, the action plan should include concrete
proposals and policies to: develop renewable energy resources,
particularly for remote communities; improve resource efficiency;
dematerialize and reduce waste; increase the useful life of hardware;
improve recycling conditions and ensure safe disposal of discarded ICT
hardware and parts.

Human rights:

An information and communication society! that has people and human
needs at its centre implies underlining the importance of human rights
standards as the core set of principles guiding its development.
Communication is a fundamental participative and interactive process
and is the foundation of all societal organization. In order to ensure
freedom of expression and the right to information, the WSIS
Declaration should therefore affirm that Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) must be not only adhered to but also
actively enforced.

In addition, the principles of a better-balanced flow of information,
free circulation of ideas, press freedom, participation in the
communication process, and knowledge sharing will become meaningful
inasmuch as they are supported by a consistent articulation of rights.
This would include the reference to the relevant articles from the
UDHR, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
relating, among other things, to: privacy, freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion, freedom of peaceful association, right to
education and to participation in cultural life of the community,
protection from discrimination or hate incitement, among others. We
also welcome the references to communication as a right.

Similarly, the WSIS should refer to improvement of HR standards, such
as human and social development, democracy and participation, as focus
points for setting goals and measures for progress.

Literacy, Education, and Research

Literacy, education and research are fundamental components of
information and knowledge societies. Knowledge creation and acquisition
should be nurtured as a participatory and collective process and not
considered a one-way flow. But only an informed and educated citizenry
with access to the means and ou! tputs of pluralistic research can fully
participate in and effectively contribute to knowledge societies.

Urgent attention should be paid to the potential positive and negative
impacts of ICTs on the issues of illiteracy in national and
international languages of the great majority of the world’s people.
Literacy, education, and research efforts in the Information Society
must include a focus on the needs of people who have physical
impairments and the elderly.

The action plan should devote attention to the tools, facilities and
resources that enable lifelong learning. Capacity building designed to
empower individuals and communities in the Information Society must
include, in addition to just basic literacy and ICT skills, information
literacy (i.e. the ability to find, appraise, use and create
information). Publicly funded and independent writing and research, in
all parts of the world, are essential for building a plur! alistic and
diverse body of knowledge in information societies. Gender sensitive
educational programmes and appropriate learning environments including
e-learning must be developed to increase women’s access to education
and employment.

Also, computer and information science professionals must be encouraged
to perform the continuous task of educating the public about both the
social risks and benefits of existing and emerging technologies within
the information society.

Global Governance

Global Governance in information societies should be based on a
multi-stakeholder bottom up policy development process (buPDP), which
should be as inclusive as possible and open to all groups, in
particular to stakeholders most closely concerned by a certain policy.
Global Governance should be based on the principles of openness and
transparency. Decision making bodies should be composed of
representatives of all stakeholders,! selected by their respective
constituencies; with a geographically, functionally and gender balanced
composition, and a consensus basis for operation.

Global Internet Governance (GIG) should include all public policy
aspects of the global management of cyberspace. This includes issues
such as content regulation on the Internet, free speech, access,
privacy, information security, data protection, e-commerce,
intellectual property rights, information infrastructure development
etc.

A special part of GIG is the governance of the core resources of the
Internet, that are the internet identifiers such as domain names and IP
addresses as well as the Internet Protocols (IP) and the root server.
The governance of Internet identifiers should be based on the buPDP
principle, including providers, users and relevant public policy
bodies, and must serve the interests of the global and local Internet
community.

Global knowled! ge commons

The Declaration should include, as a principle and theme, the
maintenance and growth of the commonwealth of human knowledge as a
means of reducing global inequality and of providing the conditions for
intellectual creativity, sustainable development and respect for human
rights. The privatisation of knowledge and information through
copyright, patents and trademarks is ceasing to be an effective means
of rewarding creative endeavour or encouraging innovation. Instead it
is contributing to the growth of inequality and the exploitation of the
poorest peoples and communities.

The Action Plan must defend and extend the global knowledge commons,
through public policy and investment in open source and open content,
including both applications and human capacity development, as well as
through access to public communication platforms for sharing of
knowledge and information. The Action Plan should commit to a
fundamental review of the impact on poverty and human rights of current
arrangements for recognition and governance of privately held knowledge
and information, including the work of WIPO and the functioning of the
TRIPS agreement.

The Action Plan should give particular attention to measures to
maintain knowledge diversity and to protect the knowledge pool of
indigenous peoples, especially botanical and agricultural knowledge,
against "information mining" and other unfair exploitation.

Cultural and linguistic diversity

The Declaration should adopt as a statement of principle the need to
respect cultural and linguistic diversity. Communications media and
information technologies have a particularly important role to play in
sustaining the world's cultures and languages. The implementation of
this principle requires support for a plurality of means of information
and communication including community-driven communications initiatives.

The Action Plan should promote legislative, regulatory, technological
and financial measures to support communications media and information
pluralism; and should allow for specific safeguards against the
concentration of media ownership. It should reinforce rights of access
to the media and the means of information and expression for all
peoples including rights of linguistic and cultural minorities. The
Action Plan should support the development of public service broadcast
media including community media.

The Action Plan should support new information and communication
technologies, which can reinforce cultural and linguistic diversity
through, for example, translation, voice recognition and other means of
transcending cultural and linguistic barriers.

"Information security" issues.

Existing policies on information security often impinge unnecessarily
upon the rights of individuals, and may be technologically and
economically problematic. The Declaration should contain, as a
statement of principle, that the informed involvement of all
stakeholders is an essential component to the development of any policy
at the local, national, and international levels.

The action plan must address efforts to create a culture of security
and confidence in technological, economic, and legal issues that help
to ensure a technologically reliable infrastructure. This includes
calling for education and open discourse, inventories of recommended
best practices, and impact assessments of potential policies.

The lack of civil liberties consideration in existing international
frameworks and conventions makes these solutions inappropriate. The
action plan should include a call for developing means through which
local and international stakeholders can ensure equitable and just
protection of rights as international legal solutions are devised.

We are opposed to the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Convention. Civil
society organisations have been working for a number of years to
educate and inform the convention's development to little avail and are
now opposing its ratification because of its overly broad mandate, its
insensitivity to local issues and its disregard for civil liberties.

Access and infrastructure issues

Global universal access to communication and information should be a
target of the WSIS action plan. The expansion of the global information
infrastructure should be based on principles of equality and
partnership and guided by rules of fair competition and regulation at
both national and international levels. The integration of access,
infrastructure and training of the citizenry and the generation of
local content, in a framework of social networks and clear public or
private policies, is! a key basis for the development of egalitarian and
inclusive information societies. The evolution of policy should be
coordinated internationally but enable a diversity of appropriate
solutions based on national and regional input and international
sharing of information and resources. This should be people-centered
and process-orientated, rather than technologically determined and
expert dominated.

International bandwidth costs and allocation of spectrum and
geo-stationary positions should be equitable and the current burdens of
cost unfairly weighted to under developed contexts must be eliminated
as an integral part of the process of equitable global communications
infrastructure. All regions should participate in relevant decision
making processes.

National access and infrastructure plans must address the divide
between socio-economic groups and between urban and rural areas.
Implementation should be measured by internationally agreed indicators
and time frames that address access, and affordable energy.

Open source software that enables access and the development of
capacity should be an essential component of all communications roll
out plans.

Information infrastructure must allow for future expansion and
development. Roll out plans should be inclusive of existing media
distribution and ensure that long term comprehensive solutions to
access and infrastructure are developed.

A digital solidarity fund should be established to ensure the
implementation of roll out plans on infrastructure development. WSIS
should agree to draw up an International Convention on a policy of
subsidised tariffs and prices for Digital Inclusion projects and
promote the creation of an International Fund for Internet Bandwidth
for such projects.

Gender

Evidence of governments' commitment to gender equality and women's
empowe! rment remain largely absent from the WSIS Agenda.

The Declaration must adopt as a statement of principle a fundamental
commitment to gender equality, non-discrimination and women's
empowerment, and recognize these as non-negotiable and essential
prerequisites to an equitable and people-centred development within the
Information Society.

To advance gender equality and women's empowerment in the Information
society, the Action Plan must demonstrate commitment to redress the
effects of the intersection of unequal power relations in the social,
economic and political spheres, which manifests in differential access,
choice, opportunity, participation, status and control over resources
between women and men as well as communities in terms of class,
ethnicity, religion, race, geographical location and development status.

The Action Plan should endorse the call of gender and ICT advocates for
the development of governance a! nd policy frameworks, the setting of
quantitative and qualitative targets, programmes, activities,
applications and tools, and a system of monitoring and evaluation which
would redress shortcomings of current gender mainstreaming approaches.

Attention to other regional and international processes

Finally, we wish to draw the attention of the different stakeholders
active in the WSIS process to a major risk. Essential decisions are
already being taken, in other regional and international political
arenas that may not be consistent with the vision and values elaborated
here.

Work in progress of supra-national organisations such as the Council of
Europe (e.g. its CyberCrime Treaty, the European Union (e.g. its
Directives on copyright and software patents, the WIPO, the ITU itself
(e.g. its new rules on taxe de répartition), the WTO (e.g. its
decisions taken within the frame of the AGCS) all have huge potential
conseque! nces for knowledge, education and culture.

We therefore recommend that the WSIS participants:

1. Establish a multi-stakeholders observatory committee that would be
responsible for:

• mapping decision-making in other political arenas that impacts or
intersects with the WSIS agenda;
• establish a monitoring system to ensure that decisions taken in other
political arenas that relate to the information society are consistent
with the general framework established by the WSIS process; and
• reporting to all stakeholders of the WSIS on a regular basis until
December 2005.

2. In the development of international legal frameworks, give
preference to those bodies which empower the effective participation of
developing countries in decision making process to redress the current
trend of exporting of frameworks developed by Western countries, to the
global level.

Endorsements

[To be completed]

--
Working List of the WSIS Human Rights Caucus
Web site : http://www.iris.sgdg.org/actions/smsi/hr-wsis
Public Archives: http://www.iris.sgdg.org/actions/smsi/hr-wsis/list
To post a message to the list, send an email to: hr-wsis@iris.sgdg.org
To subscribe/unsubscribe, send an email to: Meryem.Marzouki@iris.sgdg.org