[governance] Fw: Policy manoeuvres around a European IGF

[jlfullsack]

For your information 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: jlfullsack 
To: WSIS CS WG on Information Networks Governance ; Caucus Europe 
Cc: Catherine Trautmann 
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 5:42 PM
Subject: Policy manoeuvres around a European IGF


Dear all

The above event announcement that was sent yesterday raises some serious concerns in my opinion.

The European IGF is pending since January 2008 when it was announced and unanimously adopted by the European Parliament in Strasbourg (see my report on this session sent to the euc list). Since nothing happened in the meantime,  EuroDig -launched by some of our colleagues with the strong support of the Council of Europe in October 2008- questioned the two MEPs attending the meeting about the urgent necessity for -at last- setting up this European IGF as proposed by the final documents of the WSIS (i.e. multistakeholder based and open to CS). Both Catherine Trautmann and Malcolm Harbour gave their strong support to that.

The "hearing" in Brussels mentioned below is likely to be the response of the EU Commission to our concerns. 

However it is very far from the European CS expectations for a couple of reasons, and therefore unacceptable for us. Among these reasons :  

First : It is published just one week before the meeting, thus placing CS organisations concerned before a "fait accompli", and therefore unable to prepare the meeting and coordinate different organisations for a fruitful participation.
Second : There won't be any representative of the European CS in the discussion panels. In fact, these are organised "around" private sector speakers. Patrik Faltstrom who is alternatively a manager at Cisco, a representative of the Swedish government or a NGO member (as chair or something like of a Swedish ICT users organisation), depending on the nature of the meeting, definitely isn't a CS representative !
Third : Restricting the role of the European CS, who is engaged in the WSIS process since its very beginning, to just being a possible single answerer to the EC or EP selected questions during a couple of minutes, is an obvious sign of contempt for all of its organisations and members. Moreover, this attitude of the Commission (with or without the EP's support) strongly infringes the framework and the procedures based on multistakeholder principles edicted by the WSIS and agreed on by all European governments in Tunis. 

At last, I'd kindly ask our politicians in Brussels to draw their inspiration from the sub-regional African IGFs which are organized and are working as asked for by the WSIS. I suggest them to ask their African counterparts for some advice and help. In the framework of the EU-ACP Agreement for instance.  

For all these reasons, I strongly ask EU CS to boycott such a meeting. 
All the best

Jean-Louis Fullsack
CSDPTT
Focal person to the EP of the European CS accredited to the WSIS 
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