[WSIS CS-Plenary] Fw: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - a loveless forced marriage
Charles Geiger
Charles.Geiger at unctad.org
Wed Dec 3 13:39:20 GMT 2008
Having worked with ITU on the WSIS process for several years, please allow
me the following comments :
When Mr. Touré says that "ITU is the most inclusive organization of the
UN family", he is not completely wrong. ITU is much older than the UN (ITU
was founded in 1865) and has a long tradition of working with business
entities, which goes back to the first part of the last century. The way
business entities (and also some few not-for-profit entities) cooperate
with ITU is through "sector membership". Sector membership is very
different from the way NGOs participate in other UN Agencies and Programs
(and that is mostly where the misunderstanding comes from). Sector
membership is costly (the sector members pay a fee, which can be waived
under certain circumstances, e.g. for not-for-profit entities) and can
participate in Working Groups. Sector members have therefore the
possibility to influence decision-making at the beginning of the process.
Sector members are ready to pay the fee because it is in their own
business interest (e.g. in the standardisation field). No other UN Agency
or Programme has such a close cooperation with business (except perhaps in
ILO, where you have tripartite representation, from Government, from
employers associations and from employees associations/trade unions. ILO
also is not a typical UN Agency, it is also older than the UN).
In the UN, which is at its basis a strictly intergovernmental
organization, NGOs and civil society were accepted since its creation as
"observers". The consultative status of NGOs with ECOSOC goes back to the
forties of the last century*. Other UN Agencies, Programmes and funds have
introduced similar "observer status" for NGOs, take UNESCO and UNCTAD as
examples. The "observer" status is different from the "Sector member"
status in ITU, or from the tripartite partner status in ILO. The classical
observer status in the UN is usually limited to Plenary and subcommittee
meetings (WSIS made some exceptions to this). NGOs can make written inputs
and on some occasions take the floor during the Plenary, but they are not
"negotiating" and cannot participate in closed meetings and in working
groups etc. (The Council Working Group mentioned below had commissioned
a study on how other UN Agencies work with civil society, the study is at
http://www.itu.int/council/groups/stakeholders/Meeting-Documents/January/WG-Study-04-02-rev.2secretariat-UN-report-final.doc
)
Mr. Fullsack knows very well that at the last Plenipotentiary Meeting in
Antalya, ITU has created a "Council Working Group on the Study on the
Participation of all relevant stakeholders in ITU activities related to
WSIS". The main question is if ITU should, besides the possibilities of
sector membership, introduce something similar to an "observer" status for
civil society, especially in the field of WSIS implementation. There are
many questions related to such a status, especially compared to the ITU
"membership" status of today, which in some respect gives a stronger
position to the "sector member" than possibly to a mere "observer". But I
agree tha the "sector member" status does not exactly fit for civil
society entities that do defend general societal interest like Human
Rights, Access to Knowledge, ICTs for Development etc.. Such NGOs are
used to the "observer" status in other UN entities, which is free of cost,
and do not see any interest in paying a fee for becoming ITU sector
members. They do not want to participate in working groups, they want to
speak out in Plenary meetings. They consider their participation as
political, not technical. The Council Working group is under the
chairmanship of Argentian and Switzerland. We shall see what proposals are
brought forward by the Working group to the 2009 Council Meeting. (For
more information, see http://www.itu.int/council/groups/stakeholders/ and
the powerpoint presentation at
http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2007/civilsocietyconsultation/Documents/Civil_Society_and_ITU.ppt
)
Mr. Fullsack complains further that he was sent out of the room at the
beginning of a WSIS facilitators meeting last September in ITU. This
statement is misleading. I am not sure if Mr. Fullsack realized that he
wanted to participate as an observer at the yearly UNGIS meeting. He was
in fact kindly asked by Mr. Touré to leave the room. The UN Group on the
Information Society is a meeting where UN Agencies discuss and coordinate
the UN-systemwide implementation of WSIS. UNGIS does not (or should not)
deal with Action Line Facilitation. UNGIS was created by the Chief
Executive Board of the UN (where civil society is never present, not even
government observers would be allowed) and is an internal administrative
steering meeting. It is the kind of meeting where one Agency can tell
another Agency that it is unhappy with the performace etc. These kind of
internal steeering committee meetings (where you can also wash dirty
laundry) have never been open to observers, and it is wrong to take the
example of a traditionally closed meeting as proof of ITUs reluctance to
deal with civil society. In my view, ITU is not reluctant to deal with
civil society, the problem is different: As a techical organization, ITU
never felt the need to create an observer status for political
participation of civil society. But where Mr. Fullsack is correct:
Internet Governance is a highly political theme, and if ITU wants to play
a role in this field, it will have to open up to civil society and to
create a format for meaningful participation of civil society
representatives.
Finally, where I cannot agree with Mr. Fullsack is on the
"non-inclusiveness" of WSIS. I think that Mr. Touré's statement about the
inclusiveness of WSIS is correct. WSIS was the second UN Summit to
accredit civil society and business (the first Summit that accredited
business entities was the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development).
Besides the more than 3000 NGOs in consultative status with ECOSOC, which
had automatic accreditation to WSIS, Governments accredited more than
1'300 civil society entities, including University Institutes (a novelty,
no other UN Summit had ever accredited academic instititions) and local
authorities (e.g. the city of Geneva, or the city of Lyon, also a novelty
for UN Summits). At both Summits, in Geneva and in Tunis, there were about
as many participants from civil society as from Governments. For the first
time in the history of UN Summits, Summit working documents carried the
inputs from Governments and from observers in the same document, often on
the same page. My guess is that 30 to 50% of the final text of the Summit
outcome documents originate somewhere in civil society inputs, and were
taken over by Government representatives in one or the other way (it is
impossible to trace every idea to its roots in a negotiation process as
complicated as WSIS). I don't think that this kind of large inputs from
civil society took place at the Johannesburg or the Stockholm Summits.
Also, in no other UN Summit, observers (including civil society
representatives) spoke directly in the Summit segement, after heads of
State and Government (usually, observers speak in UN Summits in the
high-level or in the ministerial segment of a Summit). You find some more
explanations about participation of observers in WSIS on the WSIS website
at http://www.itu.int/wsis/basic/multistakeholder.html and in an interview
I gave to Reza Salim from Bangladesh in Summer 2008, published recently at
http://www.iconnect-online.org/News/wsis-and-beyond-a-reality-check. And
yes, ITU was indeed the lead agency for the preparations of WSIS, but the
way civil society was handled in WSIS was mostly decided by the WSIS
Intergovernmental Bureau, where the decisive influence did not come from
ITU, but from the two PrepCom Presidents, Adama Samassékou and Janis
Karklins.
Charles Geiger
former Executive Director, WSIS
* if you look at the list of entities in consultative status with ECOSOC,
at http://www.un.org/esa/coordination/ngo/pdf/INF_List.pdf , you will see
that some entities in general consultative status have this status since
1946 or 1947!
"jlfullsack" <jlfullsack at wanadoo.fr>
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01.12.2008 10:40
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[WSIS CS-Plenary] Fw: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - a loveless forced
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_______________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: jlfullsack
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org ; David Allen
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - a loveless forced marriage
This statement of the ITU Secretary general is by far less questionable
than a lot of other statements made in this long speach at the Cairo ICANN
meeting. But unfortunately it is'nt complete. He forgot to mention ITU's
responsibilities in that issue. At least in the time-wasting way of
leading the whole post-WSISI process, of which IGF is just one part.
As for me, I took my time for reading the whole stuff and found a lot of
other, even more questionable statements :
- Mr Touré was confusing the respective role of ITU and ICANN, and what's
more, their statutes !
- "It (the ITU) is the most inclusive organization of the UN family". May
I recall that I was waiting on the door before the beginning of the
ITU-Unesco chaired WSIS facilitators meeting last september in Genva. I
asked both chairs (Mr Khan and Mr Touré) for being allowed -as a WSIS
accredited membrer of CS- to only sit in the room for listening. Whereas
the Unesco chair agreed with a smile, the ITU refused firmly ! Unless to
say I was angry, having been for more than twenty years an ITU senior
expert (in both development and standardisation sectors). Moreover,
nowhere we find a clear explanation on this "CS inclusiveness" of the ITU
: who are the these "CS members" ? How much do they pay, and on which
criteria are they selected ?
- "But it (WSIS) was the most inclusive Summit ever". That's not true Mr
Touré : the Jo'burg Earth Summit (and the following Stockholm Summit) was
far more and really CS inclusicve, and the whole press, national, regional
and international papers, regularly reported on it. This wasn't the case
of the WSIS, despite desperate attempts of its "communicators" the fist of
which the ITU.
-" Our members need to be informed about those things" (Internet of
things, IPv6) "And we are doing that. The resolution from the WTSA last
week, taken by our 191 member states and 700 companies, private companies
, is to study and encourage the implementation of IPv6. I believe this is
a concern for all of us." OK but, Please, where is the CS in this process
? We need social and economic impacts to be studied in relation to new
technologies as soon as at the early stage of their design and their
actual impact is is to be assesed preferably before they are deployed.
This applies for both developed and developing countries (even more
stringently in the latter). We need a more serious and profound job to be
done in this field and this isn't the scope of ITU mandate ! Where are
we, the WSIS CS, in this field ? IGF is just one of these paramount issues
and is therefore relevant in the open and urgent debate.
Wolgang raised the question of CS inclusion in the ITU after this speach.
That was fine. But once Hamadoun Touré had delivered his biased (and
partly false) response, our CS fellow didn't question the ITU Head. It was
Ambassador Karklins who answered him : "It was very interesting to listen
to you. You are on the record, and I believe that many member states who
are listening to you will bring what you have said to the council in ITU".
Thank you, Janis Karklins ! This is the point the CS participating
member(s) had just missed !
All the best
Jean-Louis Fullsack
(----- Original Message -----
From: David Allen
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Cc: gov at wsis-gov.org
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2008 4:57 AM
Subject: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - a loveless forced marriage
At 4:32 PM +1100 11/9/08, Ian Peter wrote:
The telling statement from ITU being "I am personally of the opinion that
the IGF is continuously going round in circles and avoiding issues - it is
becoming more and more a waste of time."
Interested in analysis of how we can avoid this.
One suggestion:
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/Contributions-Sept_2008/IGF%20multi-stakeholderism%20-%20D%20Allen.pdf
<snip>
My fear here is that the outcomes if IGF doesn't succeed in addressing the
real issues are worse than those ...
<snip>
Ian Peter
Sorry for the delay in responding,
David
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