Organization: Global Partners and Associates

Title :

Signatories to the WSIS Geneva Declaration and Tunis Agenda reaffirmed their commitment to upholding human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration in the information society. It is therefore necessary to ensure that human rights lie at the core of the shared norms and principles that govern the evolution of the internet and its use. One important way of achieving this would be to mainstream human rights in internet governance policy and activity, ensuring that governance processes never undermine the rights that are protected by international law and, where possible, advance and expand them.

The workshop will discuss practical strategies for ensuring that international rights standards are upheld within internet governance processes and policies from the bottom up, and for enhancing collaboration between people working on rights issues at the IGF. A major focus of the workshop will be whether the IGF dynamic coalitions can be an effective vehicle for this mainstreaming process. The workshop will also examine whether different stakeholders could find human rights useful as a positive framework for decision and policy making.

The workshop will begin by exploring how human rights standards are relevant to the work of each of the coalitions. For example, some coalitions, such as the Privacy coalition, are seeking to protect existing human rights. Others, such as the A2K and Accessibility coalitions, are seeking to enhance and expand the positive dimensions of existing rights. Others, such as the Stop Spam Alliance and Child Online Safety, are working on policy issues which affect rights and should therefore align their policy solutions with international human rights standards. The discussion will then move on to consider the challenges and opportunities for mainstreaming rights within the internet governance work of different stakeholders.

The aim of this workshop is to hold a productive and inclusive discussion amongst all workshop participants. Therefore, rather than having formal panelists in the traditional format, we are inviting a number of stakeholders to make short, concise contributions and comments as part of an interactive debate. Discussants include representatives from the dynamic coalitions, including the coalitions on:

• Accessibility and Disability (Gabriela Barrios)
• Access to Knowledge (Lea Shaver)
• Framework of Principles for the Internet (Gurumurthy Kasinathan)
• Internet Bill of Rights (Max Senges)
  Linguistic Diversity (Viola Krebs)
• Privacy (Ralf Bendrath)

The discussion will also include contributions from a range of other experts in the wider internet governance community including Peter Hellmonds (Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, Nokia-Siemens Group), Miriam Sapiro (Summit Strategies International), Shahzad Ahmad (Bytes For All) and the Council of Europe.

This workshop is being proposed by Global Partners and Associates, a UK-based company that works with partners around the world to build effective democratic institutions and promote human rights. Global Partners and Associates has been working in the internet governance field for a number of years, with a focus on fostering communications policy and practice rooted in human rights and public interest principles.

The workshop is seeking to advance and strengthen the multi-stakeholder principle within the IGF through engaging and supporting the work of the dynamic coalitions, the main vehicles for multi-stakeholder collaboration within the IGF. The workshop itself will involve discussants and participants from each of the main stakeholder groups, and will strive to ensure an equal balance between representatives of each group. An important aim of the workshop is to explore and incorporate perspectives held by people from countries around the world, including both the global north and south.