Report on the World Summit on the Information Society,
10-12 December 2003, Geneva

The World Summit on the Information Society is held in two phases. The first
phase of WSIS took place in Geneva hosted by the Government of Switzerland
from 10 to 12 December 2003. It addressed the broad range of themes
concerning the Information Society and adopted a Declaration of Principles
and Plan of Action. The second phase will take place in Tunis hosted by the
Government of Tunisia, from 16 to 18 November 2005.

The World Summit on the Information Society provided a unique opportunity
for all key stakeholders to assemble at a high-level gathering and to
develop a better understanding of the revolution of the technology and its
impact on the international community. Its aims were to bring together Heads
of State, Executive Heads of United Nations agencies, industry leaders,
non-governmental organizations, media representatives and civil society in a
single high-level event. The roles of the various partners (Member States,
UN specialized agencies, private sector and civil society) in ensuring
smooth coordination of the practical establishment of the information
society around the globe, were at the heart of the Summit and its
preparation.

Nevertheless, a lot of question marks need to bet cleared:
¨ Who controls the international media, the private companies or an
independent UN-related body?

¨ The developing countries asked for a fund for assistance. The
compromise seems to be that a fund is going to be established, but payment
into it will only be voluntary. This question will be on the table again in
Tunis.

¨ Another big conflict issue was the guaranty of freedom of expression
in the times of internet. Here also, the governments could not solve the
question completely and went for compromise. On the other hand, one
paragraph in the declaration emphasises freedom of expression. On the other
hand it allows limitations and restriction of freedom of expression.
During the Prepcom III, I followed some of the preparatory meetings in the
discussions on the Non-Paper of the President of the WSIS Prepcom on
Declaration of the Principles of the subcommittee I. The most of the times
the discussions sorted the conflicts that exist between the North countries
and the South ones. The main idea is that the North is not very much
interested to invest on certain areas of telecommunication, and according to
CRIS (Communication Rights in the Information Society), this because there
is no space left for the profit (European Social Forum).

Very interesting in the context of the discussions on the plan of action,
remains the presentation of women in the information society. According to
China, the paragraph 10 (9) which is about the women's empowerment and the
paragraph 11 (9bis) which is about the marginalized and vulnerable groups of
society should be put altogether, insinuating that women are a marginalized
group of the society. This paragraph took a long time of the discussions and
at the end the conclusion was that it should remain at it was, without any
change.

To come back to the WSIS, even though the atmosphere of this summit left
some place for hope, the gap is present in every field of the information
and communication. As the Secretary- General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi
Annan underlined in his speech, there is a gender divide, a commercial
divide, a technological divide and so on. Talking about gender, I had the
chance to participate in several panels organised by the Gender Caucus, and
as in everywhere the gap exists within the gender question itself. You could
have the chance to meet a woman entrepreneur that is very optimistic about
the women's future in the society of the information (but she is one in a
million unfortunately). On the other hand, it is the reality of the
developing countries where a woman should be more than lucky to have access
on the internet cafe or even to have a telephone mobile. A huge amount of
the world's population, especially women and girls are still illiterate!
ICT should be more than involved in the gender divide within the digital
divide. But it is up to women to fight for their empowerment, in order to
reach decision-making, conflict resolution, and especially human rights in
order to increase opportunities for women in the information society. The
main ideas of these panels were that women should get more involved to get
gender rights into ICT policy at international and national level and for
this they need to proceed at least on two fronts: sensitising policy makers
to gender issues and sensitising gender advocates.


Suela SEFA
WILPF Office Geneva
2003-12-16