The World Summit on the Information Society must consider human rights, argues Rikke Frank Jørgensen

The so-called information society has been subject to global political negotiation for the last couple of years. Civil society groups have been fighting hard to get human rights on the agenda.

Groups such as European Digital Rights (EDRI) believe that information and communication technologies should be used not only to advance development, but to promote freedom of expression, access to information, the right to privacy, access to education and health services, gender quality, inclusiveness of marginalised regions and groups, and so on. Currently there are numerous violations of human rights in areas related to information and communications technology (ICT): imprisonment of cyber dissidents, state blocking and filtering of online content, illegitimate registration and surveillance of online users and activities, discrimination against groups and regions, restrictive intellectual property regimes, etc.

Human rights at the Summit

On 21 December 2001, the UN General Assembly asked the International Telecommunications Union to prepare a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).(1) The purpose of the WSIS is to explore how ICT can advance the UN goals for development: eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality and so on, as stated in the Millennium Declaration of 2000.

Governments, industry and civil society were encouraged to participate in the preparations for the Summit, which has two phases. The first was held in Geneva in December 2003, and a second is to be held in Tunis in November 2005.

During the preparations for the Geneva Summit, civil society groups involved in the process fought hard to get human rights on the agenda, and to broaden the focus from technical infrastructure to social justice and development. ‘It’s not about digital but about dignity’ was one of their slogans. In November 2003, civil society groups announced that they would stop contributing to the official documents and write their own declaration.

The civil society declaration, Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs, was presented at the Summit, together with the official WSIS declaration (The declaration of principles) and the accompanying Plan of Action. Some governments opposed a reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the text, but the official documents confirm that the development of the information society must be built on the existing human rights framework.

This is both good and bad news:  good because the reference to human rights is in there, but bad because so much time went into debating already-existing human rights commitments that hardly any energy was left for the interesting part. This is to use ICT to advance human rights at the local level. The WSIS promises are formulated in the most general language, and the negotiations carefully avoided touching violations of human rights such as the ones outlined above.

Furthermore, the documents stress a cyber security agenda, focusing on threats to national security and the need for stronger initiatives in this field, while ignoring the massive threats which technology poses to human rights standards for privacy, integrity, fair trials and so on.

Preparing for November

In the run-up to November, most energy has been spent on two issues which were unresolved after the first Summit. One is how to finance bridging the so-called digital divide. The other is negotiations on internet governance: the administration of the internet’s core resources (domain names and IP numbers), which is currently run by an American organisation (ICANN) on contract to the US government. In contrast, not much political energy has been devoted to actually enforcing the plan of action from the first Summit.

The fact that the second Summit will take place in Tunisia is itself a sore issue, since the country is known for its bad human rights record - not least with regard to freedom of expression. Two missions to assess the situation and the ‘WSIS readiness’ of the country have been conducted so far.

At the next global preparatory WSIS meeting in September, civil society groups will assess the situation with regard to Tunisia, and more generally discuss strategies for making the Tunis Summit more than hot air.

References
1.  See UN resolution 56/183

More information on the WSIS Human Rights Caucus.

Rikke Frank Jørgensen is senior adviser at the Danish Human Rights Institute, and co-chair of the WSIS Human Rights Caucus. She is board member of European Digital Rights (EDRI) founded in 2002 to defend civil liberties in the information society.