[WSIS CS-Plenary] health section - explanation

[Hiroshi Kawamura]

Dear Ralf and all:

I highly value yours and your collaborators effort to pick up different
input to formulate the CS Statement. The Statement contains lots of valuable
substances.

However I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Majority of
Disability Caucus participants including myself had to stay more than 60 km
away from the venue due to accessible accommodations available only there.
That limited the caucus contact with other CS group who could stay
relatively close.
Secondly, the Internet access at hotel was terrible. It meant that except
for being on the venue the entire participants of Disability Caucus were cut
off from the e-mail connection and even within the venue there were no space
or no time to work on e-mailing with good concentration. Thirdly, the
Disability Caucus held two major events on 15th and 18th. On 18th, we
adopted our own declaration following Geneva. Entire effort of Disability
Caucus participants was focused on formulation of the Tunis Declaration as
attached. Lastly, traveling back home for persons with disabilities with
very poor airlines services caused a lot of problems to many participants
that resulted in piles of unread e-mails in the mail box.
Those are the factors why we could not actively take part in the drafting
process.

Having received final text that does not address digital divide of persons
with disabilities at all, I would like to propose to the drafting group or
the web master of the official CS Statement web page host to list the link
to other statements of Civil Society Caucuses so that missing issues be
addressed by supplementary documents.

Best regards,

Hiroshi Kawamura
WSIS CS Disability Focal Point

<Tunis Declaration on Information Society for Persons with Disabilities, 
November 18, 2005>

Recalling the historic success of the first Global Forum on Disability and
the over all first phase of WSIS; Being encouraged and moved by the spirit
of the Geneva Declaration on Inclusive Information Society, WSIS Declaration
of Principles and Plan of Action;

Noting, however, with great concern the difficulty of transforming words on
paper into real actions/implementation, given the fact that the concept of
"inclusiveness" in general often leaves disability aspects out, causing
persons with disabilities to be excluded, marginalized, forgotten and left
behind;

Having high hope and confidence in the ultimate power of the united force,
among persons with disabilities, our representative organizations our
friends and our empathetic allies of all sectors around the world, to work
for the true inclusive information society,

Therefore, we, participants of the Second Global Forum on Disability in the
Information Society, held during the second phase of WSIS, on the 18th day
of November 2005, in the City of Tunis, Republic of Tunisia:

1. Call upon all governments, private sectors, civil society and
international organizations to make the implementation, evaluation and
monitoring of all WSIS documents, both from the first and second phase,
inclusive to persons with disabilities;

2. Strongly urge that persons with disabilities and our needs be included in
all aspects of designing, developing, distributing and deploying of
appropriation strategies of information and communication technologies,
including information and communication services, so as to ensure
accessibility for persons with disabilities, taking into account the
universal design principle and the use of assistive technologies;

3. Strongly request that any international, regional and national
development program, funding or assistance, aimed to achieve the inclusive
information society be made disability-inclusive, both through mainstreaming
and disability-specific approaches;

4. Urge all governments to support the process of negotiation, adoption,
ratification and implementation of the International convention on the
rights of persons with disabilities, in particular through enactment of
national legislation, as it contains strong elements concerning information
and communication accessibility for persons with disabilities.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ralf Bendrath" <bendrath at zedat.fu-berlin.de>
To: "wsis-cs-plenary" <plenary at wsis-cs.org>
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 3:45 PM
Subject: [WSIS CS-Plenary] health section - explanation


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> _______________________________________
>
> 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
>
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