[WSIS CS-Plenary] health section - explanation

[Ralf Bendrath]

Dear all,

I was facing a difficult decision here, as there was no agreement on the
exact wording of the health information section. I have tried to weigh
all arguments, but in the end I had to make a decision myself as the main
drafter and facilitator.

1. Elizabeth Carll wanted to include "physical and mental" health.

2. Sylvia Caras and others opposed it and proposed to add the sentence 
"Health includes biological, emotional, social, spiritual and vocational 
well-being".

This seems to be an internal conflict in the Health&ICT WG, which is none
of my business. But if there is open and public debate among caucus
members about this, it is a bit hard to accept this as a consensus caucus
decision.
Elizabeth on the other hand pointed out, and rightly so, that "physical
and mental" health was included in the Geneva CS Declaration. But: We
don't really have the rule of "agreed language" like the governments have
in the UN system, as CS is much more fluid, and many people have joined
the process only in the second phase. (The governments who had to agree on
something in Tunis had all been there already in Geneva.)

3. Hiroshi Kawamura as the Disability Caucus cordinator supported
Sylvia's suggestion.

This is something to seriously consider, and you could say it outweighs a
"less-than-consensual" proposal from the Health&ICT Caucus. What to me
added on this was the fact that the disability caucus does not have its
own chapter in the statement.

So, my job again was to make everybody equally unhappy. I therefore
decided to delete "physical and mental", while at the same time not
including "Health includes biological, emotional, social, spiritual and
vocational well-being". The statement now only speaks of "health". Nobody
objected to the word "health", right? ;-) This seems to be the lowest
common denominator and is also understanable by normal readers who don't
know anything about the conceptual struggles in tghe health care world
around this.

I had to make decisions like this in many parts of the document, when
different people and caucuses were fighting over the exact wording. I have
always tried to make a balanced and fair decision when they could not
agree on a consensus text. Much of this facilitating happened offlist, as
it is difficult to deal with these things on public email lists. You can
blame me for not doing it in public, but I have always sent out the next
version for everybody to give feedback, and I have alway tried to justify
the decisions I was forced to make. (We went through ten different
versions of the statement, by the way.)

I hope you understand these explanations, and I hope in the end everybody
is still able to sign on to the overall statement, which has evolved very
well over the last month.

Thanks a lot,

Ralf