[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


----- 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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