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COMMUNICATIONS: Civil Society Wins a Place at WSIS Table

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 28 2003 (IPS) - The World Summit on the Information Society this year will be the first multilateral negotiations in which non-governmental organisations will participate on equal footing with governments and business.

The NGOs claimed an important victory Friday, at the conclusion of the two-week meeting of the WSIS preparatory committee (Prepcom) in Geneva.

Committee chairman Adama Samassékou, of Mali, went so far as to say that the creation of the Civil Society Bureau was the most important achievement of the sessions.

The delegates to the Prepcom decided that, alongside government and private sector representatives, civil society and international inter-governmental organisations will be the main actors involved in preparing for and participation in the December Summit, where the mandate is to establish policies to bridge the global digital divide.

The committee has begun drawing up plans to reduce the inequalities between rich and poor countries in terms of access to the Internet and other information and communication technologies.

The civil society groups accredited for the WSIS number 1,200, and prefer the "civil society" tag to the long-standing initials "NGOs".

Samassékou’s announcement of the inclusion of civil society in the WSIS process was "really a high point" of the Prepcom, commented Renate Bloem, chairwoman of the Conference of NGOs (CONGO) with United Nations consultative status.

The civil society groups were "desperate" after being excluded from the previous WSIS Prepcom, in July 2002, added Bloem.

The International Civil Society Bureau, which already began operations at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) under the coordination of Louise Lassonde, has divided its members into families, according to each organisation’s speciality.

The working documents include, as points of reference, proposals to connect all of the world’s villages to the Internet by 2010 and to set up community access to this technology by 2015.

Samassékou clarified, however, that the texts of a declaration and a plan of action discussed over the past two weeks in Geneva are merely working documents and do not hold the same weight as a Prepcom draft document would.

Other points of reference included in the texts cover the connectivity of universities, secondary schools and primary schools, as well as establishing Internet access for all hospitals and health centres worldwide.

These are just some of the preliminary aspirations for a plan of action and final declaration to be discussed at the WSIS, to take place in Geneva Dec 10-12.

The content of both documents will be up for debate prior to the Summit at the third Prepcom, slated for Sep 15-26, also in this Swiss city.

The second phase of the WSIS, to evaluate progress, is to take place in Tunisia, Nov 16-18, 2005.

The United Nations promoted the idea of the Summit as one of many means towards achieving goals related to the eradication of poverty, universalisation of primary education, full recognition of gender equality, and others.

The Summit delegates are to adopt policies aimed at correcting the inequalities in access to ICT (information and communication technologies). The ITU calculate that there are 500 million Internet users worldwide, but 80 percent are in wealthy countries.

In the developing world, meanwhile, only one person in 50 has Internet access. In the industrialised world, the ratio is two out of five.

In addition to governments, the private sector is weighing in on policies related to information technology, attempting to regain lost ground after the market contraction suffered by the ICT industry in 2001.

Sales of semiconductor materials fell 29 percent, and computer sales declined for the first time in 15 years, while mobile telephone sales stagnated, according to figures from the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Yoshio Utsumi, secretary-general of the ITU, which is organising the WSIS, says the Summit must also help industry, which has excess capacity in the countries of the North, to cover the technology markets of the developing countries.

Civil society groups challenged the initial orientation of the WSIS because of its "very heavy focus on commercial conditions to bring telecommunications infrastructure to all the corners of the globe," noted Sally Burch, of the Latin American Information Agency (ALAI).

The NGOs "shared their concerns about building full access to communications technology, in particular among developing countries and remote regions of developed countries," said Burch. "But technology should not be the starting point for this process," she added.

The draft plan presented by the civil society organisations demands priority for issues like sustainable development, democratic government, literacy, education and research, human rights, and the protection of global knowledge, and cultural and linguistic diversity.

The last point of the document mentions information security, which became one of the central issues at this Prepcom.

The civil society groups state that information security concerns must not in any way violate people’s privacy nor their right to free communication.

The terrain the NGOs have gained is important. The only inter-governmental agency that had recognised the participation of independent sectors prior to this is the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which has representatives of governments, businesses and trade unions sitting on its administrative council.