The final stage of the 10-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society, kicked off today June 9 in Geneva. Known as the ‘WSIS+10 High Level Event’, the ITU expects it to bring together about 2000 leaders from government, the UN, business and civil society to approve the final statement on the overall review of the implementation of the WSIS goals. The event is also being co-organised by UNESCO, UNCTAD and UNDP.
Today was supposed to be dedicated to Pre-event workshops, as no substantive debate on the content of the final submission to the UN General Assembly was expected. This had already been the subject of a long process of review by the Multistakeholder Preparatory Platform (MPP). However at the last minute, barely a week ago, a 6th MPP meeting was called for the afternoon today to debate some of the final text on the WSIS Action Lines.
The meeting was unable to reach agreement on the text – the main disagreement was about C9 on culture and media, which a few conservative governments felt gave too much room for dissent, and some governments really wanted cybercrime mentioned in C5 (Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs). In the end it was decided not to include text on the Action Lines at all in the final statement.
Meanwhile the pre-event workshops carried on in parallel to this, and APC participated in panel sessions on Partnerships for Development and Public Access Facilities.
All the sessions are open to the public by remote participation in real time (and the sessions are archived and made available almost immediately after the session) and can be accessed from ‘Webcast/Remote Participation’ link on the Agenda page.
Other links:
WSIS+10 Statement on the Implementation of the WSIS Outcomes (Chapters A, B & C):
http://www.itu.int/wsis/review/inc/docs/phase6/s/wsis10-statement.docx
WSIS+10 Vision for WSIS Beyond 2015 (Chapters A, B, C, D & E): http://www.itu.int/wsis/review/inc/docs/phase6/v/wsis10-vision.docx