Presented to the Intersessional Meeting

Paris 15-18 July 2003

WSIS - Civil Society Working Group on Content and Themes

The civil society organisations endorsing this document
consider that the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) 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 of information and communication
societies 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, are inadequately addressed or have
not achieved consensus. The following lines will draw
attention to these issues that constitute priorities for
civil society.

As a starting point, the WSIS documents should avoid
idealising the information society (IS). It is one
thing to describe the vision of the IS we rightly aspire
to, as orientation for policies, ("The information
society should be people centered...", Art 8, Draft
Declaration:), and quite another to state that "The
information society is a new and higher form of social
organization...." (Art. 9), which could misleadingly
gloss over the potential dangers.

Sustainable democratic development

An equitable Information Society must be based on
sustainable economic and social development and
democratic principles. Information and Communication
Technologies (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 peoples and nations. Democratic and sustainable
development of the information society can therefore not
be left solely to market forces; in order to balance
commercial objectives with legitimate social interests,
recognition should be given to the need for appropriate
regulation and development of public services, and the
principle of equitable access to services and affordable
cost should be reaffirmed.

Communities must also 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 around
economic, cultural, environmental, and other issues
regarding ICT-based projects.

The action plan should address proposals to support
community-based communications using both traditional
and new media and communication technologies and 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 should be used as an instrument for the creation of
genuine and sustainable sources of work, thus providing
new labor opportunities, above all for those who have
been excluded from the formal employment system, as well
as those affected by labor discrimination, such as the
disabled and vulnerable groups (including those infected
with HIV, the elderly, former drug addicts, former
prisoners, ex-servicemen).

ICTs can contribute to sustainability, but their use is
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,
ensure safe disposal of discarded ICT hardware and parts
and encourage the development of alternatives to toxic
ICT components.

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 not
only reaffirm Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (UDHR), but also commit to its active
enforcement. 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 only 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 particularly welcome the references to
communication as a right.

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

Global knowledge 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 must recognize the pivotal role of
people living in extreme poverty in the dialogue between
all parties, contributing their experience and
knowledge. It 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.

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 outputs
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) and should
stimulate the desire for learning. Publicly funded and
independent writing and research, in all parts of the
world, are essential for building a pluralistic and
diverse body of knowledge. Gender sensitive educational
programmes and appropriate learning environments
including e-learning must be developed to increase
women's access to education and employment.

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.

Governments should invest in nation-wide "backbones"
providing access to scientific, cultural and educational
information covering all categories of inhabitants, with
support through continuous programs for research and
development of educational resources and services.

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 and
developing 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 in either corporate or
government hands. It should reinforce rights of access
to the media and the means of information and expression
for all peoples, including indigenous peoples and other
discriminated groups as well as other 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.

Gender

Evidence of governments' commitment to gender equality
and women's empowerment 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 and
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.

"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 (such as OECD privacy guidelines and the
European Parliament Committee proposal for a Council
Framework Decision on attacks against information
systems) and impact assessments of potential policies.

The lack of civil liberties consideration in many
existing national and international frameworks and
conventions makes these solutions inappropriate
including current trends in increased surveillance,
monitoring, data-retention, mining and profiling. 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 oppose calls by some governments to support the
Council of Europe's Cybercrime Convention or models
based on the 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.

The WSIS should also recognize that one of the greatest
threats to "information security" lies in the
militarization of information space, including the
development and deployment of "infowar" technologies and
techniques; the deployment of military software or
hardware against civilian communications systems; the
domination of satellite orbits for military purposes;
and the purposeful destruction of civilian communication
systems during conflicts in violation of international
law. The WSIS should encourage the foundations for a
future Convention against Information Warfare to address
these concerns.

Access and infrastructure issues

Global universal access to communication and information
should be a target of the WSIS action plan. The
expansion of the information infrastructure should be
based on recognition of a universal right to communicate
and principles of equality and partnership and guided by
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.

National access and infrastructure plans must address
the divide between socio-economic groups and between
urban and rural areas. People with disabilities and
others who require special consideration in terms of
accessibility such as the elderly should have access to
appropriate equipment and services. Governments should
be encouraged to ensure democratic management of radio
frequencies, including access for community media.

Free/open source software that enables access and the
development of capacity should be an essential component
of all communications roll out plans. Governments should
be encouraged to adopt free/open source software as far
as possible, since their use of proprietary software is
both economically unsustainable and compromising in
terms of transparency and security.

WSIS should agree to draw up an International Convention
on a policy of subsidized tariffs and prices for digital
inclusion public policies and projects, and of the fair
renegotiation of bilateral network interconnections and
multilateral peering agreements, towards better balanced
and lower cost international route, Internet bandwidth
and hub repartition.

Global ICT Governance

In an information and communication society, good
governance must be based on the values of participation,
inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. This
particularly implies the democratic management of
international bodies dealing with ICTs. Given the
borderless characteristics of ICTs, decision-making
bodies should respect the principles of democracy and
openness as well as sovereignty.

In particular, the management of the core resources of
the Internet, that are the Internet protocols, standards
and identifiers such as domain names and IP addresses,
must serve the public interest at the global, national
and local levels. Furthermore, any decision made on
protocols and standards should be compatible with
international human rights standards articulated in the
International Bill of Rights (i.e. the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights; and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), and
specially the rights to freedom of expression, to
privacy, and the principle of non-discrimination. Such
decisions should also allow for a better-balanced flow
of information.

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 at
this Summit.

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 collection tariffs or taxes de
répartition), the WTO (e.g. its decisions taken within
the frame of the GATTS) all have huge potential
consequences 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;

– establishing 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