7/29/03

These articles originally appeared on we!, our weekly newsletter.

Civil society organisations (CSO) had been busy the past few weeks preparing what needs to be finished in time for the WSIS Intersessional Meeting. The event recently took place in Paris, France from 15-18 July 2003.

There were many activities held and points discussed. There were also a few criticisms voiced by several caucuses. In the last issue, we featured the disappointment of women activists who found that certain paragraphs relating to gender were omitted from the WSIS Draft Declaration of Principles. Read that story here: http://www.isiswomen.org/pub/we/archive/msg00134.html.

During the Paris meeting, the Asia- Pacific Civil Society Caucus (APCSC) prepared a statement which was read on the first day of the meeting by Mavic Cabrera-Balleza, the Media and InfoCom Services Programme Manager of Isis International-Manila. Following is the full statement:

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Asia-Pacific Civil Society Caucus Statement to the Intersessional Meeting of the World Summit on Information Society
15-18 July 2003, UNESCO, Paris, France

The Asia-Pacific Caucus endorses the Civil Societies Priority Document that underscores key issues around sustainable democratic development, human rights, global knowledge commons, literacy, education and research, cultural and linguistic diversity, information security issues, access and infrastructure issues, disability and particularly gender equality and women's empowerment.

Particular to our region we would like to emphasise the principles of inclusivity, the right to information, gender equality and women's empowerment.

Emerging concerns such as information security on the Internet should not in any way infringe on people's privacy and right to communicate freely using ICT. We recognise individual agency in accessing information and knowledge for their own development. We therefore oppose actions that regulate content and communication and in anyway and undermine the free flow of information.

We also recognise that there are many different political environments within the region that are not conducive to civil society's participation in policy making and programme development in the area of ICT. The principle of national sovereignty should be extended to include not just governments but reflect the true sovereignty of the people (comment from the Czech Republic, footnote 25, p. 7).

We are concerned over the fact that national ICT policies, programmes and plans in the Asia-Pacific region do not address gender and ICT concerns. We support the Canadian government's submission that a gender dimension should be integrated in ICT policies and programmes to ensure that women and men equally benefit from ICT (para 11-a p. 8). We urge our governments to integrate a gender dimension in all discussion spaces on gender and ICT issues.

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The Civil Society Priorities Document that reiterates the themes that CSOs have been trying to inculcate within the official WSIS processes and documents from the beginning was also presented during the Intersessional Meeting. Topics like sustainable democratic development, human rights, cultural and linguistic diversity, global knowledge commons and literacy, education, and research are again discussed in this draft. CSOs active in the WSIS process hope that these topics will be further deliberated upon in the third and last Preparatory Committee meeting (PrepCom-3 to be held in September 2003) before the first phase of the WSIS in Geneva this December 2003.

In behalf of the Civil Society Working Group on Content and Themes, Steve Buckley spoke and presented the summary of the Civil Society Priorities Document, also on the first day of the Intersessional Meeting. We are posting that statement below followed by the full copy of the Priorities Document. A full copy is also available online at the following link: summary presentation to plenary http://www.isiswomen.org/onsite/wsis/cspriorities1.html, full statement http://www.isiswomen.org/onsite/wsis/cspriorities2.html.