New directions for WSIS
By Steven Lang, Highway Africa News Agency (HANA)
YASMINE HAMMAMET, TUNISIA. June 24, 2004 As the second phase of the World
Summit on Information Society (WSIS) formally opens in Tunisia today, it
will be business as usual in some respects, but there will be some
significant differences from the meetings held ahead of last year’s Prepcoms
in Geneva.

It is business as usual in that many of the same faces greet each other
enthusiastically in the halls and galleries of the brand new Medina
conference centre of Yasmine Hammamet. They are well known to each other,
as only professional conference participants can be. At the Civil Society
meetings, there are perhaps only a few dozen participants who are here to
speak up for the poor and downtrodden of the whole world.

It is business as usual in that many of the same issues debated in Geneva
will again be raised in Tunisia. Who is supposed to administer the Internet,
who should contribute to the Digital Solidarity Fund and how the Summit can
bridge the digital divide are questions that are still in centre of heated
exchanges.

There will be no changes to the Declaration of Principles adopted at the
first phase of the WSIS in Geneva. Government delegations have decided that
the process of achieving the Declaration was so laborious that they do not
want to open that “can-of-worms” again. However, some activists argue that
the rel reason for the reluctance to revisit the Declaration is that
governments do not want to accept as a principle the right to communicate.

The Geneva Declaration will stand unaltered, but it is quite possible that
the second phase of the WSIS in Tunis will produce some sort of political
statement. This statement could probably take the form of a “Tunis
Commitment” or a “Tunis Consensus”.

The Geneva Plan of Action could well be modified, or even completely
scrapped as commentators believe it is far too vague to be a real plan of
action. It is widely believed that a new Tunis Plan of Action is needed to
come up with more details.

The WSIS is unique in the context of UN summits in that it is taking place
in two phases. It is also unique in that there are no plans for follow-up
summits in the mold of “Rio plus ten” or “Beijing plus five”. As the
situation stands, there are no plans for a WSIS plus five or ten, yet many
of the goals set in the Plan of Action coincide with the UN’s Millennium
Development Goals.

Regional and thematic meetings
Phase one of WSIS was based on the outcomes of five regional prepcoms held
on five continents. Each of these regional prepcoms produced documents to
serve as the basis for the Geneva Declaration and Plan of Action.

For phase two, there will be only three regional prepcoms – in Africa, Latin
America and in one of the Arab states. At the moment, it is not certain what
type of documents these meetings are likely to produce, but sources within
the conference secretariat say that it is unlikely that they will be used to
draft Summit documents.

The regional documents will be submitted to the Summit meeting, and they
will certainly be “noted”, but they will probably not go any further than
that.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and other UN agencies will
also hold a number of “thematic” meetings aimed at filling specific
requirements and also providing input to the WSIS process. The thematic
meetings cover specific issues such as spam, financing and Internet
governance.

Highway Africa reports from Tunis come courtesy of the Swiss Agency for
Development and Cooperation. Editorial decisions are solely the
responsibility of Highway Africa.