Civil Society Statement
at the End of the Preparatory Process
for the World Summit on the Information Society
Geneva, November 14, 2003

I. Where do we stand now?

We have come to the last day of PrepCom 3a. This extra week of preparatory
work was neccesary after governments failed to reach agreement during the
supposed final preparatory conference in September 2003. In spite of the
extra expenditure of time and money, the deadlock continues ?and sets in
already on the very first article of the declaration, where governments are
not able to agree on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in
1948, as the common foundation of the summit declaration.

Through our observation of the process we have identified two main problem
areas that impede progress in the WSIS:

1.	How to correct imbalances in riches, imbalances of rights, imbalances of
power, or imbalances of access. In particular, governments do not agree on
even the principle of a financial effort to overcome the so-called Digital
Divide; this is all the mor difficult to accept given that the summit process
was started two years ago with precisely that objective.

2.	The struggle over human rights. Not even the basis of human life in
dignity and equality, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights finds support
as the basis for the Information Society. Governments are not able to agree
on a comittment to basic human right standards as the basis for the
Information Society, most prominent in this case being the freedom of
expression.

These are the essential conflicts among governments, as we see them now.
There is also ongoing fight over issues such as media, internet governance,
limited intellectual monopolies such as copyright, Free Software, security
and so on. This underlines our assessment that there is a lack of a common
vision.

II. Realpolitik or New Vision?

The underlying struggle we see here is the old world of governments and
traditional diplomacy confronting challenges and realities of the 21st
century.

We recognize the problems governments face in trying to address a range of
difficult, complex and politically divisive issues in the two summit
documents.

But this situation just reflects power struggles that we are seeing around
the world. A number of governments realize that much is at stake, and they
are responding defensively and nervously. They have noticed that they can not
control media content or transborder information flows anymore, nor can they
lock the knowledge of the world in the legal system of so-called