[WSIS CS-Plenary] reflections on the CS press statement from Friday

[Ralf Bendrath]

Hi all,

after a weekend with the needed sleep and now back at my desk at my
"real" job, I am very happy to read all the positive feedback for our
work in Geneva last week, especially on the Press Statement and the
Essential Benchmarks Document.

Here are some explanations on how we dealt with the suggestions and
comments made by you to our press statement on Friday. I do this to
provide some transparency for those who were not in Geneva and those not
involved in writing the final version.

1. Thanks a lot to all of you who provided concrete language proposals
to improve it. We could not take all of them into the document, for
variuous reasons. Some of them are explained later, some where just
simple overload of feedback, extreme time pressure, more than one
suggestion on the same paragraph, or simple lack of wireless
connectivity in Alain Clerc's office (that is where we did it, in order 
to be able to hand it over to the translation team immediately). 
We did not even have enough time to do the final proofreading. The
version now available at <http://www.worldsummit2003.org> has been
corrected 
in terms of layout and typos. I will also put online the french and
spanish versions as soon as possible.

2. North-South / Digital Divide: We drafted the final paragraph on this
during the plenary, which is an attempt to combine the general idea of
the two provided in the first draft for feedback. It was accepted by the
African Group there in the CS plenary as well as some people from the
development policy community and APC.

3. Internet governance. This issues was by a majority not seen as a
central conflict, and we also got a signal from the internet governance
people that they would accept this decision. So it was deleted, but the
issue was mentioned in the list of other conflicts we observe.

4. Naming and blaming individual governments: We felt that this was too
tricky at the moment for two main reasons: If you do this in a joint CS
statement, you have to make damn sure that the blaming is balanced. In
no way did we want to only accuse the dislikers of human rights. Some
governments are already trying to blame the whole failure of the summit
to them. By joining them in this, we would neglect the other crucial
conflict over north-south and finance issues and the other issues where
we are in substantial conflict with the human rights defenders, such as
intellectual monopolies or the overall broad consensus among governments
on the security language. And by the way, we were just not able to do a
complete assessment of the positions of all governments and of where to
point which finger and in which size. We used the solution proposed by
some of you to implicitly differentiate between the governments by
saying
"some" or "certain".
Secondly, the negotiations are still going on until the summit. By
naming the bad guys (who, as I've said, can be different ones on
different issues), we would make it more difficult for them to come to a
face-saving solution that could be in our favour. Some are still playing
tough, but you can imagine they will back down right before or at the
summit.
We assumed that the bad guys will know when they are meant anyway. 
This will of course be different if they finally reach an agreement.
Then we can and should openly say who is more responsible for which
kinds of problems we see. In the end, we preferred to make an
independent CS statement and not publicly join forces with some
governments in a statement which basically says that we work on our own
vision now.

5. Stating that we do not provide any more input to the official
documents: As was rightly noted, we can not speak for all CS groups. And
some groups will of course continue lobbying on their issues and in this
process also might provide concrete language proposals etc. We do not
want to encourage anybody to stop this. But the statement is a joint
statement of the CS groups involved in the WSIS, so it means that there
will be no more _joint_ efforts on this. I will put online the joint
papers we produced on the current draft declaration and action plan in
the next couple of days (some still have to be compiled), but that was
it. By this, we state public our criticism of how the already
disappointing "multistakeholder" process was taken less and less serious
in the last days of PrepCom3a. On Thursday and Friday, we did not even
get our speaking slots anymore, and the governments were completely back
to the old Realpolitik mode of horsetrading among themselves. 
So our public statement of partial withdrawal from the official WSIS
process can in the end serve and was clearly meant as a wakeup call for
them. If you have heard the final statements by some delegations on
Friday evening, you could hear that they had understood us. We reminded
them that their job here is coming up with a true vision, not just
another boring and bad compromise. This was the general idea developed
during this week in the strategy working group and accepted in plenary.


I hope this explains how we came up with the final statement on the WSIS
process. Again, please understand that we could not include all
suggestions. We were working under extreme time pressure and with only a
small number of people availabe who really did the work in the end. And
these already were suffering from lack of sleep, fresh air or sunlight
since Monday...

I finally want to thank all of you who who were there and helped, no
matter if they discussed with all of us, drafted language, provided
input and great ideas or just offered help on proofreading and
facilitating the consensus reached in the end. It was a pleasure and
honor wo work with all of you!

After this great experience, I feel pretty confident now that in this
spirit, we can further develop and formulate our vision in the coming
three weeks and by this have a serious impact on the global public
debate on the information society.

All the best, 

Ralf

Editor, http://www.worldsusmmit2003.org