[governance] privacy coalition statement at IGF consultations

[Ralf Bendrath]

I just read a statement at the IGF consultations based on the meeting we
had yesterday. It is available at <http://igf2006.info/wiki/Privacy> and
copied below.

Best, Ralf

--------------------------

Dynamic Coalition on Privacy statement at IGF consultations, 23rd May 2007

(made by Ralf Bendrath, University of Bremen, coalition co-facilitator)

This is to provide you with a brief update on our work and with some
proposals on the IGF meeting in Rio. The Dynamic Coalition on Privacy has
met continuous interest and now gathers participants from more than sixty
entities, including governments, civil society, business and international
organizations. The coalition now has participants from all world regions.
The full list and more information about the coalition, including an
updated progress report, are available at http://igf2006.info/wiki/Privacy.

Participants in the Coalition have met in Geneva in February 2007, in
Montreal in May 2007, and again in Geneva yesterday. The major part of the
work is being conducted through a mailing list.

The Coalition work is currently structured around the following three main
themes:
• Privacy and Identity,
• Privacy and Development,
• Privacy and Freedom of Expression.

Short synthetic issue papers have been drafted to help structure the
debate and highlight the different dimensions on each of the issues
mentioned above. The drafts are available at the coalition wiki site I
just mentioned. They will be refined and adopted until the summer and
submitted to the IGF as contributions from the Privacy Coalition.

At our meeting yesterday, we also discussed the draft programme outline
for the Rio meeting. We have some concerns and some proposals.

On the themes

- We noticed that Privacy is not mentioned at all, and civil liberties and
human rights in general are pushed to the side. We therefore strongly
support the idea to add civil liberties and human rights as another
cross-cutting issue. This would mean including it in the criteria for the
workshops and addressing it in the main sessions.

- The “security” theme as it is described now and if it is to stay can
certainly be improved. First of all, it should address which is the object
to be secured – the citizen, the consumer, private property, national
security, human rights, or what else? Of course, there are many more
aspects to think about in this context, and we are more than willing to
help here with ideas and expertise.

On the format

- We think that to have a main session on “emerging issues in Internet
Governance” is a good idea, but we suggest having it at the beginning of
the meeting. This would be different from “issues that emerged at the IGF”
– which of course should be addressed at the end.

- Our members will propose several workshops on privacy-related aspects of
internet governance. These and other workshops then should feed into the
coalition meetings in Rio, which in turn should feed into the respective
main session. This is where timing will be relevant, and we ask the
secretariat to keep this in mind.

On the role and mandate of the IGF

- We agree that the IGF must move beyond a pure discussion event and see
if and how it can agree on recommendations or other output. We again refer
to paragraph 72g of the Tunis Agenda which mentions as part of the IGF
mandate to “make recommendations”.

- We therefore suggest to have the final IGF plenary consider any
recommendations that may arise from the ongoing work of the coalitions or
from the workshops and discussions in Rio.


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