The campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS: www.crisinfo.org) welcomes UNESCO's near-unanimous approval of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions. The Convention is a clear demonstration that governments recognize that culture cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. By endorsing the Convention, governments have shown that they are prepared to take positive steps to support cultural diversity in the age of global cultural industries.

However, while we support and encourage the ratification of the treaty, we have the following concerns:

* We would have liked to see stronger emphasis on the protection and promotion of cultural diversity within countries, especially indigenous cultures. We denounce the hypocrisy of those countries that suppress and destroy indigenous cultures internally while claiming to support cultural diversity beyond their borders. The CRIS Campaign will remain vigilant, and will condemn and mobilize against any attempt by any state to try and use this Convention to marginalise women, or to repress ethnic minorities, migrants, sexual minorities, or indigenous peoples;

* We applaud the elimination of language from earlier drafts of the Convention that would have supported and strengthened the current extremist copyright regime. However, the remaining unbalanced language on copyright in the Convention's preamble is a clear step backward from the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity;

* We are deeply concerned by the failure to stress the importance of the public domain, fair use and creative commons;

* We deplore the fact that there is no mention of the need to end the theft of indigenous culture and traditional knowledge by the transnational copyright and patent industries;

* We will remain vigilant with regards to the Convention's relationship to other treaties, which as it stands is extremely ambiguous and therefore may encourage some trade ministers to ignore the Convention altogether in their negotiations.

With these concerns in mind, we call on:

* Governments to ratify the Convention;

* Civil society to closely monitor their national trade ministers first as they head to Hong Kong for the WTO negotiations and in all future bilateral or multilateral trade negotiations;

* Civil society, to mobilize and use the UNESCO Convention a means to transform domestic cultural, media, and communications policy in order to bring about cultural justice.

Contacts: act@crisinfo.org
More information: www.mediatrademonitor.org ; www.crisinfo.org