[WSIS CS-Plenary] Fw: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - aloveless forced marriage

[jlfullsack]

Dear Mr Geiger

 

I thank you for your long mail answering my message, sent to the governance list on November 30th and to the CS plenary list on December 1st .

 

First of all, I do regret that we cannot use our own language (both French and German) so as for me it costs a lot of time . and it reflects only a part of what I've in mind ("language filter"!). But unfortunately we have to conform to the "international usage".

 

I understand your long comments rather as a "plaidoyer pro domo" than as a relevant response to some concrete issues I raised. I know the history and the rules of ITU, the memberships and respective fees, and the subtleties of its Convention. I also know the WGs and SGs' activities since I was involved in some of them years ago. Perhaps due to the fact that I was more spending my ITU activities in the field (mostly Africa) than in the tower, I may have a different sight on the issues we are dealing with currently. I nevertheless respect your point of view.

 

What I was asking for in my message is the urgent need of the ITU to open itself to the CS not for political purposes as you mentioned in your answer (see below), but because of its expertise, its readiness, its commitment and its voluntary contribution ! This is the vision I have of CS commitment in the ITU, whatever the form of its "membership" may be. But presence of the CS in the ITU isn't enough : CS asks for making good cases on subjects they know (mostly far better than ITU insiders could imagine) and for being listened to ! 

 

When I recall my misadventure outside the door (in fact I wasn't in the room since I was waiting for Mr Touré) of the "UN Group on WSIS follow-up" meeting room (September 19th) , I only try to underline the opposed attitudes of both the co-chairs of the meeting : OK for a CS member to sit silently in the room from the Unesco, a polite NO from the ITU. The case is self-illustrating. 

 

As far as the Working group of the Council (on CS inclusion in ITU) is concerned, it was established in 2006 (Plénipo Antalya), and its outcome two years later is a study on how CS is treated in other UN bodies ! This seems rather "short" as we use to say in French. We should have at least a proposal from the Council of the form they agree on for including the CS in the structure and in the working process of the ITU. Instead of that, we'll have to wait 2010 for a decision being agreed on during the Plenipo and probably another couple of years for implementing the (hard to take) decision . This leaves just a couple of years up to the time limit 2015 for the Action plan goals to be achieved. 

 

Permit me, Mr Geiger, to respectfully disagree with your opinion you give in the following sentence : "They (the NGOs) do not want to participate in working groups, they want to speak out in Plenary meetings. They consider their participation as political, not technical". Maybe that there are NGOs who comply with your statement. But you may not generalize. As for me, I recall that during the whole course of WSIS I never proclaimed myself as a speaker at any plenaries. When that occurred it was following a designation (some by votes) by CS groups (Content & Themes, caucuses, WGs) or its plenary.  

 

There is also a contradiction in your comments about the status of the ITU. You write : "As a technical organization, ITU never felt .". But -just for gving an example- since Kyoto (1994) ITU organizes its regular World Telecommunications Policy Forum, the next to be held in 2009. I often expressed my disagreement with this deviation (i.a. the neoliberal discourse of the ITU since the early nineties and its catastrophic consequences in DCs) the from its fundamental functions but it is now a matter of fact (please, visit the CSDPTT website www.csdptt.org and read the story -or my vision on it- of the ITU).   

 

What I'd stress once again is the urgency for taking some major decisions I already mentioned during the WSIS. I'd just recall my statement during its second phase you'll find attached to this mail. The three proposals for ITU to change or to improve are still valid. You'll verify that I always attached a high value to the ITU although I expressed some criticisms. But these were, and still will be, documented. 

 

As far as Internet governance is concerned I'm probably one of the few (if there are others) CS members to support ITU in this domain. But not with a "cheque en blanc".  At the recent EuroDIG meeting at Strasbourg, William Drake was also somehow critical on the ITU and expressed some ideas for changing that. I proposed to join him and if possible other CS members to propose some ways and concrete answers we could debate with members of the European Parliament and/or the council of Europe, as to allow them to present some proposals for reforming the ITU. For your information you'll find attached my report on this meeting which was very interesting and was a kind of pre-European IGF we (the CS in particular) want to put in place. These are some constructive suggestions which proove that the CS isn't only fond of speaking in plenaries .  

 

BTW : the attached documents are in French. I'll add another one in English to compensate .

 

All the best

Jean-Louis Fullsack

Président de CSDPTT

Strasbourg, December 4th, 2008  



PS : You'll also find the report of the ITU-CS meeting in may 2007. You'll see that I have some CS colleagues who are at least as critical as I Am on the ITU ! 

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Charles Geiger 
  To: Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group Space 
  Cc: plenary at wsis-cs.org ; plenary-bounces at wsis-cs.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 2:39 PM
  Subject: Re: [WSIS CS-Plenary] Fw: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - aloveless forced marriage


  [Please note that by using 'REPLY', your response goes to the entire list. Kindly use individual addresses for responses intended for specific people]

  Click http://wsis.funredes.org/plenary/ to access automatic translation of this message!
  _______________________________________




------------------------------------------------------------------------------



  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> 
        Sent by: plenary-bounces at wsis-cs.org 
        01.12.2008 10:40 Please respond to
              Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group Space <plenary at wsis-cs.org> 


       To <plenary at wsis-cs.org>  
              cc  
              Subject [WSIS CS-Plenary] Fw: [governance] RE: ITU and ICANN - a loveless        forced marriage 

              

       



  [Please note that by using 'REPLY', your response goes to the entire list. Kindly use individual addresses for responses intended for specific people]

  Click http://wsis.funredes.org/plenary/ to access automatic translation of this message!
  _______________________________________


  ----- 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 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  ____________________________________________________________
  You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
      governance at lists.cpsr.org
  To be removed from the list, send any message to:
      governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

  For all list information and functions, see:
      http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance_______________________________________________
  Plenary mailing list
  Plenary at wsis-cs.org
  http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plenary





------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Plenary mailing list
  Plenary at wsis-cs.org
  http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plenary
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20081205/54b98e1d/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: R?union UIT-Soci?t? civile_mai07.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 62464 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20081205/54b98e1d/attachment-0004.doc 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: EURODIG_compte rendu_nov08-Rev1.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 141824 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20081205/54b98e1d/attachment-0005.doc 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: R-forme de l-UIT_Proposition de CSDPTT.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 38912 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20081205/54b98e1d/attachment-0006.doc 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Proposal to ITU Reform concerning ISES.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 31744 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20081205/54b98e1d/attachment-0007.doc