[WSIS CS-Plenary] GFC meeting today

[Ralf Bendrath]

Thanks for your report, Chantal.

> Here is a short summary of the GFC meeting of this morning. And also in
>  the annex a statment made on behalf of the informal coalition on 
> financing.
I would love to see the other CS speakers at that meeting sending their
statements to this list. I have only seen the ones from you (finance 
coalition) and Jean-Louis (CSDPTT) yet.

One remark, and this goes back to the heart of the political debate we 
already had in WSIS phase one:

> /c. About evaluation and policy debate/
> 
> According to ambassador Karklins, civil society and other organisations
>  should not fear that the topic of the information society disappears 
> from the international agenda after Tunis, because of the link between 
> the MDG’s Summit and the WSIS Summit. The mention of WSIS in the MDG’s
> documents means, for Karklin, that the topic of ICTs for development
> will remain on the agenda at least until 2015.

This is really not enough, and civil society should not buy into this. If
WSIS only stays on the agenda through the ICT4D discourse, then all the
other important things we have fought for will be lost. This especially
relates to the human rights dimension of the information society.

We can already clearly see it here in the EU: The governments have started 
again to see WSIS as purely a development summit. But they also have to 
look at themselves and how human rights can be supported and strengthened 
in the European information society. Currently, they forget about human 
rights in the WSIS context (or only think "Tunisia"), while at the same 
time the EU Council of Ministers will again discuss another proposal for 
mandatory retention of all communications traffic and location data in 
Europe for 6 to 12 month at its next meeting on Friday, which would imply 
a massive breach of human rights principles.

Therefore, we must insist that implementation is assured for WSIS, but 
that it definitely is not constrained to development issues.

Best, Ralf