By IPS Correspondents
GENEVA, Aug 27 2003 (IPS)

Organisers of the World Summit on the Information Society are being asked to do more than bridge the digital divide; they face demands to look at information flow as a means of fighting corruption.

Too much coming out of preparatory meetings for the WSIS looks at the society of tomorrow in a technical way, says Guillaume Cheneviere, executive director of the World Economic Media Forum, which will bring media leaders together at a parallel meeting to the WSIS in Geneva December 10-12.

“It is without reference to human rights and democracy, to all these goals that the international community has been pursuing for over 50 years,” Cheneviere told IPS. “We must remember that the information society is about information, and people have a right to it.”

The Global Corruption Report for 2003 produced by the anti-corruption group Transparency International (TI) says information is at the heart of good governance. “Secrecy still strikes at the concerns of civil society everywhere, and most significantly it perpetuates an environment in which corruption can flourish unhindered,” says the report released last month.

Citing several examples of government measures to crack down on public access to supposedly sensitive information following Sep. 11, the report makes a case for better legislation to guarantee access to information both from governments and international organisations.

The TI report says information controls following Sep. 11 run against a small but significant trend to introduce freedom of information legislation. Such legislation has been enacted in the UK, Poland and South Africa over the past three years, and draft legislation is under consideration in India, Nigeria and Indonesia.

The TI report says that any summit that wants to address the issue of the information society must take up the question of free access to information. But it is not certain to what extent this question will be taken up at the December summit.

The preparatory meetings have emphasised strategies to close the “digital divide” through investment and education, with a belief that closing this divide will bring economic benefits.

Leaders of several civil society groups say the WSIS needs to give greater attention to freedom of information. “It is true the Internet plays an important role,” says Claude-Alain Danthe from the World Alliance of YMCAs. “But people (at the pre-summit meetings) were thinking too much about the Internet, email groups, cyberspace, that sort of thing.”

The TI report highlights issues that should be of great interest to government, business and civil society participants at the WSIS. The report argues that the increased power of information technology is making it more difficult for corrupt players to hide their dealings because demands for clear and accurate information are becoming easier to meet.

But the report says also that however professionally and accurately information is processed, corruption will continue to thrive without the vigilance of media and civil society, and the courage of investigative journalists and whistleblowers.

Toby Mendel, co-author of the report says public authorities must be obliged to publish information such as personal or surveillance records, but that the WSIS is failing to address these issues.

Exceptions and exclusions within laws to provide information can protect corrupt interests, he says. There is an increasing tendency among European countries to adopt secrecy laws, which override freedom of information legislation as a precondition to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) membership.

“Secrecy legislation should not be permitted to extend the regime of exceptions in a freedom of information law, which should be sufficiently comprehensive to protect all legitimate interests,” Mendel says in the report. “Wide-ranging secrecy laws can significantly undermine freedom of information legislation and should, therefore, be subordinate to it – unfortunately, this is rarely the case in practice.”

Information is, however, being recognised increasingly as a moral rather than just a money issue ahead of the summit. “The main reason for the digital divide is a lack of money,” says Guy-Olivier Segond, ambassador to the WSIS from host country Switzerland. But he acknowledges that “there is a certain resistance in certain regimes where they want to control the media of all types.”

Champions of information as a freedom issue say that freedom of information also needs the digital divide narrowed. But many are now asking for greater emphasis on the link between information and freedom.

Ann Florini, another co-author of the TI report says it is not the digital divide but access to information which is the big issue for ordinary people when looking at the challenges of the information society.

“From grassroots village associations to transnational campaigns, civil society groups are asserting the right of citizens to know what governments, international organisations and private corporations are doing and how public resources are allocated,” Florini says.

The WSIS has already faced criticism from Reporters Without Borders. Over two years of preparations for the WSIS, many countries cracking down on freedom of expression have been suggesting measures that would allow them to curb free flow of information on the Internet, the group says in a report.

*Brian Thomson is also correspondent for the InfoSud News Agency.

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