[WSIS CS-Plenary] GFC document on Chapter one and four not adopted as basis for Sub Committee B

[Bertrand de La Chapelle]

Dear all,
 President Karklins encoutered a strange roadblock during the Plenary this 
afternoon when trying to have his new GFC (Group of Friends of the Chair) 
formulation adopted as basis for discussion for Sub-Committee B.
 In several successive interventions, the Russian Federation representative 
strongly opposed the integration of the modifications negociated in the GFC 
(new paragraphs 10, 11 and 29), insisting on keeping the documents of 
PrepCom2 as the basis of negociation, the formulation in the GFC document 
being only considered as one proposition of modification among others. 
 The PrepCom President seemed genuinely surprised by this intervention and, 
expressing himself in russian, tried to point a contradiction : Russia was 
an active member of the Group of Friends of The Chair and as such had 
accepted - by consensus - that the present formulation be transmitted to the 
PrepCom to become the basis for negociation. But this was useless and the 
Russian delegate was obviously deliberate in his position. This single 
opposition, without any other comment by other delegations, was enough to 
prevent the necessary consensus for moving forward and adopting the present 
GFC text as a basis.
 Upon proposal of the Chair, the Plenary then adopted the following formula 
: the document prepared by the Group of Friends of the Chair will be 
transmitted - among others - to the Sub-Committee B, and it would be up to 
this Committee to decide whether it wants to integrate the proposed 
modification in the draft - or not. 
 So the proposals are neither accepted nor refused; they remain in a sort of 
limbo up to the first discussions of the Sub-Committee B. This introduces in 
the mix and the issue an uncertainty that will make discussions even more 
complex. 
  This brief exchange and decision, coming after the two hours lost this 
morning on the "gorilla chest thumping" match between China and the US about 
the accreditation of Human Rights in China, and the fact that the 
Sub-Committee A will start its work on Internet Governance without a single 
document to base its work upon, do not bode well for the coming two weeks. 
 The reason for the russian position are unclear. My tentative 
interpretation is that russia is the Chair of the ITU WSIS Group and had 
made detailed proposals about the role of the ITU in the follow-up and the 
necessary reform of ITU in that context. Russia probably felt that the 
formulationof the Group of Friends of the Chair does not allow enough 
possibility for the ITU to play a major coordinating role in the follow-up 
process and that would hamper the impetus to reform. Therefore, opposing the 
new formulation is probably a way to bring back into the picture the 
previous architecture with the coordinating body, the multi-stakeholder 
teams and so on... and potentially the joint proposal by ITU and Unesco. 
 This new situation will force civil society actors to ask themselves which 
of the two architectures they want to support. And the choice may prove 
difficult because each can be good or wrong depending on how it is 
implemented :
- the initial architecture (multi-stakeholder teams along Thematic domains, 
supported by international organizations, and with coordination mechanisms) 
would be very good if the thematic Domains are coherent and mobilizing (and 
not just the present hodge-podge of issues) and the multi-stakeholder teams 
are really nimble, transparent and effective. But it could become a 
bureacratic nightmare if international organizations seize control of the 
system, set up MS Teams with "fully balanced geographic participation" (ie 
thirty diplomats in each team because diplomats cannot agree among 
themselves in regional groups to have less),and only produce annual reports 
through a heavy secretariat mechanism.
- similarly, the new proposals by the Group of Friends of the Chair is today 
weak, seems to lack any susbstantive commitment and even evacuates the "full 
and effective" participation of all stakeholders and it seems much worse 
than the first one in that respect. But, provided some smart changes are 
brought into the formulations and some more constraining commitment are 
obtained by governments, this architecture might in the end provide a much 
lighter system, allowing more bottom-up emergence of initiative and their 
flexible coordination.
 The objective in all this might well be to find a set of rules that cannot 
go too wrong in implementation and provides the greatest flexibility and 
potential for greatness if it really works. 
 Good work in perspective for the Content and Themes Group this evening.
 Best
 Bertrand
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