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June 23, 2004
Opening of the Civil Society Event
This morning at the Hammamet Medina, Civil Societybegan a day-long meeting regarding the WSIS prepcom meeting, which will officially open tomorrow morning. After opening comments from Renate Bloem, she then welcomed Charles Geiger of the WSIS Executive Secretariate.Geiger explained the history of the UN's interest in hosting world summits. "Each summit creates their own rules," he said. "This summit is special because it has two phases. On the first summit the governments decided on the rules of procedure…. A world summit is basically an intergovernmental summit, while businesses, international organizations and civil society act as observers."
"The origins of this summit was that the Tunisian government proposed the summit at a meeting of the ITU in Minnesota in 1998…. It was then brought into the UN system, and there was a resolution that was the basis of this becoming a UN summit. They said the first phase would take place in Geneva in 2003, and the second phase would be in Tunisia in 2005."
"There were two breakthroughs at WSIS. You were able to create civil society bureaus so you could speak with one voice. Plus there were joint bureau meetings in which civil society and business were invited to meet with governments. Governments don't like to do new things, but once they do, they probably will continue." Geiger said he couldn't guarantee it would happen in this phase as well, but hoped it would, perhaps starting with a joint bureau meeting this Friday at 6pm.
"At the first summit we had two declarations, so the question now comes, what is left for phase two?" he said. "Here I can only make guesses, since I cannot speak for the governments. There is unfinished business on… Internet governance and financing mechanisms [for a digital divide fund]."
Geiger said there would probably be a second prepcom in Geneva next February, followed by a third prepcom in the late summer, either in Geneva or Tunis. There will also be regional meetings in Brazil, in Ghana in February and one hosted by the Arab League. He also noted that he expects the ITU to announce tomorrow the availability of UN funds to support the WSIS process, since WSIS to date has been an unfunded mandate and supported by various public and private sources.
Posted by acarvin at June 23, 2004 6:30 AM
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