Dear Chun,
As usual your observations are precise and incisive. My impression of the
Asian Caucus was not merely to attempt to influence the decision making
process but rather to bring our quite clearly key areas of concern which
have either been sidelined, diluted or simply ignored. A means to lay
upfront, issues that a critical for asia, not with the belief that they may
be incorporated in the document. As you and many others have pointed out the
process of 'constructive' engagement with the WSIS has yielded little, and I
have ( or had) no illusions of the WSIS actually taking seriously anything
of substance that the civil society has to offer. My opinion would be quite
similar to yours, in that, we cannot provide legitimacy to document that is
clearly non-endorseable. How can civil society de-legitimise the WSIS
process is something that needs more clarity and direction.
Warmest,
Anoop
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chun Eung Hwi" <chun@peacenet.or.kr>
To: <communication@wsisasia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 9:04 AM
Subject: [communication 971] Re: Giving Asia Caucus support to key issues at
the WSIS
> Dear Anoop,
>
>
> I am glad to hear your voice.
>
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Anoop-focus wrote:
>
> > Dear Susanna and all,
>
> > I would agree with the fact that the Asia Caucus needs to have much
> > greater visibilty. I would like to list down the following issues
>
> I fully agree to this point. But my question is how we can do that?
>
>
> > 1. Communications rights, specifically with respect to the right of
> > community control over airwaves (community radio etc). I would think of
> > subsuming Internet governance as a subset of the right to communicate, a
> > key subset nevertheless.
>
> I have already mentioned in my previous comments. Briefly, the notion of
> communication rights had already gone away. Don't dream more of the
> return of the notion at least in the first phase of WSIS!
>
>
> > 2. Intellectual property rights, focusing on TRIPs and GATS within and
> > outside the WTO framework, including bilateral agreements and free trade
> > agreements(FTAs)
>
> Throughout last PrepCom III, I saw that those phrases or words concerned
> with international trade had been intentionally excluded from the current
> text. As a result, except for some parts of the heading of "enabling
> environment", we can hardly find out such words in current text. The
> reason is that trade related issues should be talked in approprite forum
> like WTO or something else and in WSIS, they would concentrate only on
> "informatio society" and in fact on "ICT" itself. This concern has been
> reiterated by many governments in the plenary of contents and themes and
> has become a consensus among governments.
>
> Additionally, as you can perceive it in paragraph 33, the balance between
> user's rights and IPR has been already broken. Rather it is a severe
> question whether to restore the balance is possible or not.
>
>
> > 3. Right to Development, particularly models of development that
> > challenge existing paradigms of development policy
>
> Now, paradigm of development policy has not been one of major concerns in
> WSIS process. Rather, the issue is whether to include the word of "right
> to development" in the current text or not.
>
>
> regards,
>
> Chun
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Chun Eung Hwi
> General Secretary, PeaceNet | phone: (+82) 2-2166-2205
> Seoul Yangchun P.O.Box 81 | pcs: (+82) 019-259-2667
> Seoul, 158-600, Korea | eMail: chun@peacenet.or.kr
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>