[governance] Valentina Pellizzer's speech

[Valeria Betancourt]

Dear all,

I am passing on Valentina Pellizzer 's speech in the IGF 2012 closing  
ceremony. She was not able to share it with you before as she was not  
able to connect to the internet.

Best,

Valeria
-------------
Trust!
Government does not have the answer.
Business does not have the answer.
Civil society has to propose its answer which is dialogue on the  
unavoidable human rights framework which is the only one that allows  
respect for the smallest in the community: the single individual/person.
Those individuals can be looked as user, consumers but primarily they  
are citizens. And in them reside the legitimacy we all need to derive  
from.
And this legitimacy asks for open protocols and not for closed ones.
Trust should be our default on privacy but also on security, trust  
that can generate and host dissent and relegate censorship to the  
place of bad memories and instead enforce trust as an actual practice  
in a world of dis-balanced powers.

Leaving our own / stepping out from our comfort zone
Being here in the IGF has not been easy. As a new-comer I had the  
privilege but also the burden of the invisible.
It is easy to get along with the old same well known plot: where  
governments are the stronger ones and “good” or “bad” according to  
geography; where business are the strongest because of their  
overwhelming wealth; where technical community own the key of the  
mechanism and the code of the answers; where academia analyze and  
evaluate from the distance; and where, last but not least, civil  
society is expected to act, scream, contest, protest and most of the  
time unlistened to.
But in a way or another if we want to inhabit the space, this space,  
roles need to be challenged and each of us has to step out from his/ 
her own comfort zone. Dialogue ask for critical thinking first of all  
of ourselves and then of the “antagonist or simply diverse other”.  
Dialogue asks for the ability to host, acknowledge and recognize  
others not from an empty politically correctness but from a truthful  
problem solving attitude. And the IGF should be and must be such a  
space.

Terms of Service
In the layers of the internet that connect people one to each other we  
need to acknowledge the immense power that Terms of Service have and  
acknowledging this, say that they cannot become the “accidental  
constitution” and the pre-condition of all our relationship and  
transactions. The constitution and pre-condition of our “content and  
others internet transactions” must be based on a human rights  
framework because it is only this framework than can guarantee  
legitimacy and accountability in the interaction between users/ 
citizens and internet intermediaries and the government. Last but not  
least practices that offer premium services of a “better” internet to  
those who can afford it will only serve to exacerbate discrimination  
and inequality between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the  
marginalized. This we must reject fully.

Autocracy 2.0
Here in Azerbaijan I learned, we all learned from Emin Milli, a  
writer, about Autocracy 2.0 and we cannot leave this space, this  
country without expressing our strong disagreement with the practice  
of intimidating and violating human rights in particular freedom of  
expression of journalists and activists. What is Autocracy 2.0?

Autocracy 2.0 hides behind formal online freedom to identify and  
monitor critical voices which are then silenced in the offline world

So Autocracy 2.0 is not only the efficient and effective framework of  
Azerbaijan but it is becoming more and more the preferred framework of  
all the imperfect democracy we live in, in our “least” but also “most”  
developed countries. Autocracy 2.0 signs conventions, declarations and  
do not formally restrict the internet but use others laws to shrink  
the space. One example for all countries: copyrights claims against  
bloggers!

Guarantee human rights online as much as offline
IGF as a multi-stakeholder space should not only work towards creating  
frameworks for an open, diverse and accessible future but has to be  
understood and practiced as a safe harbor for online human rights  
activists. Also it is a physical space that must acknowledge and  
accept dissent and host it in a transparent and accountable manner.
We can never stop or limit freedom of expression, even less we can  
deny solidarity to local voices that ask to be heard. A no-censorship  
policy should be embedded in the code of IGF as space where each and  
every one accepts challenges to their own comfort zone and its power  
of denial.
People's security has to be understood not in terms of excluding and  
preventing incidents but in the ability to accept, include and host  
diversity.
In short, human rights must be encoded into the fabric of our  
dialogues, the space we create for these negotiations and the future  
of the internet we are walking towards.


-------------
Valeria Betancourt
Directora / Manager
Programa de Políticas de Information y Comunicación / Communication  
and Information Policy Programme
Asociación para el Progreso de las Comunicaciones / Association for
Progressive Communications, APC
http://www.apc.org





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