WSIS SOS
By Raymond Louw Posted Jan 1 2004
The language is expansive and full of promise. The secretariat of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has adopted the slogan “Connecting the World,” and declares that “new ground” is being broken in discussions with a new “multi-stakeholder approach” that “provides for unprecedented stakeholder participation.”
This declared format, introduced in PrepCom-3 for the Geneva summit in December, is supposed to herald a breakaway from the aloof practices of the past where United Nations and UNESCO meetings were confined to government delegations with civil society and non-governmental organizations ineffectually trying to put an oar in from the sidelines.
It promises the world’s non-governmental institutions that — at long last — they are to be brought in from the cold to have a direct say in what the world should be doing in at least one area of development — the information society.
WSIS PrepCom-3 in Geneva in September started out this way. But on the third day the shutters came down.
Reality sets in
At the outset, media freedom groups were concerned that WSIS would provide an opportunity for authoritarian governments to make inroads on internationally recognized media freedom principles. Rephrasing them and reducing their effectiveness would give them leeway to further tighten the screws on media freedom in their own countries.
These fears came to the fore in Geneva, where two sections of the policy statements concerning the role of the media were strongly contested. The Media Caucus wanted Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” to be the standard, but countries such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran and Egypt protested. In addition to trying to force Article 29 — the clause that, among other things, allows countries to eliminate fundamental rights by proclaiming national emergencies — these countries sought to use national laws or “sovereignty” to override media freedom commitments under international agreements. Indeed, moves such as this would mean the end of media freedom in those countries.
A new rule was formulated as well. Civil society organizations, which participated freely in previous preparatory meetings for the summit, would be given five minutes at the beginning of working-group sessions to state their views. After being granted their chance to speak, they would leave while the government delegates debated the issues. Civil society would not be allowed observer status, which would have enabled them to lobby if they felt that the government delegations were straying from the principles they propounded.
A similar rule was adopted in the plenaries. Although non-governmental organizations could attend as observers, a five-minute limit was applied and rationed daily among three civil society speakers by a “Content and Themes Group.’’ This group was dominated by the radical militants of the Communication Rights in the Information Society Campaign (CRIS), an organization that uses language redolent of the detested New World Information Order model for global communications, which defines and is usually seen as limiting freedom of expression rather than advancing it.
The Media Caucus, set up at earlier PrepComs by a number of media organizations such as the World Press Freedom Committee, Article 19 and the Media Institute of Southern Africa to promote media freedom and free speech, managed to get two 100-second speaking slots, one each on the draft Declaration of Principles and the Action Plan — a fragment of speaking time in which to propound policies.
The Media Caucus
On the last day of Geneva meeting, the Media Caucus sent an open letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warning him of the danger and asking him to remind member states of their standing commitments to Article 19 and to the five regional statements on media freedom, such as the Windhoek Declaration, which have been unanimously endorsed by UNESCO general conferences.
This example of WSIS proceedings shows the shallowness of the promises made, and it is a lead-in to the vital concerns of media institutions about the likely outcome of these discussions.
Future of the WSIS summit
The role of the media in the information society was not resolved in Geneva. The next conference was postponed to another week in November, and labeled “PrepCom-3 bis” to deal with this and other points of disagreement. However, the media freedom and freedom of expression issues, which the Media Caucus rightly insists are crucial to the conduct of the information society, are now the core dispute at future discussions on the information society.
Many countries are equally determined to seek the entrenchment of accepted freedom values in the declarations, among them the European Union, the United States — though its influence is tempered by the current distrust of its policies — the developing country of Botswana and by a large number of Latin American countries.
It is difficult to speculate on the outcome of these developments on WSIS, especially if the standoff over the media issues continues beyond the November and December meetings and remains to confront delegates to the final WSIS meeting planned to take place in Tunis in 2005.
But the battle lines are drawn, and it is doubtful whether the media freedom and free speech disputes will be resolved with ease.
Raymond Louw is editor and publisher of a weekly current affairs newsletter, Southern Africa Report, and attended PrepCom-3 as a representative of the World Press Freedom Committee with WPFC’s European representative Ronald Koven.