Maurice Ali
Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 285 Location: Toronto, Canada
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Posted: Fri Mar 08, 2013 7:19 am Post subject: Final Statement of the WSIS+10 Review Meeting! |
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Final Statement of the WSIS+10 Review Meeting!
By Maurice Ali
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The first page of the "Final Statement" of the WSIS+10 Review Meeting held in Paris,
France at UNESCO Headquarters (February 25-27, 2013)!
So what was the WSIS+10 Review Meeting all about.....
Well when all is said and done it comes down to the final statement from the event:
http://www.iaij.org/wsis10_final_statement_en.pdf
Our reason for being there was to provide recommendations that would make it into the final statement which would then be carried forward into the process for ultimate review by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015 and possibly beyond.
If you check the last paragraph on page 2 and the first two paragraphs on page 3 you will see the points we also raised in our recommendations. Other people also had an interest in the Internet remaining free and open and included in the spirit of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Rights and Freedoms, but we went out of our way to mention it at our session. The big one that made me happy was the inclusion of this statement (the second paragraph of page three):
"Promote and ensure the safety of online journalists, bloggers and human rights activists."
That one points right to the citizen journalism session and participants and to us at IAIJ. We were the ones that provided the empirical evidence (from our report) of safety issues of citizen journalists in both the survey and submitted articles. We also were very obvious in mentioning all recommendations at the end of my speech which included safety issues for journalists. In addition to submitting the report to UNESCO in December of 2012, a member of UNESCO picked up another copy of the report from me at the end the session (along with an old copy of the newspaper).
Realize that when making policy it is not enough to just say we need these policies and then it all happens - though that is how it may start. You have to show the need for the policies or policy change and we do that by independent data confirming the situation that needs to be reformed by new policies or policy change. That is the "why" of the past nine months or so of IAIJ producing the report and then our active attendance and participation at the WSIS+10 Review Meeting! That one line means so much to us. It makes all the effort that lead to this worth it.
So yes, our participation was part of the machinations that lead to the inclusion of that statement in the final statement. The process works.
IAIJ: JOURNALISTS IN ACTION AROUND THE WORLD! |
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