The Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS (GDRC-WSIS) published a joint submission to the zero draft of the WSIS twenty-year review process (WSIS+20) outcome document.
The submission, authored by the coalition’s twenty-four member organisations, welcomes the zero draft as a significant step forward compared with the earlier Elements Paper. We strongly support that the draft anchors the WSIS process in international human rights law, gender mainstreaming and explicitly reaffirms multistakeholder cooperation as a guiding principle. We also applaud that the draft decides to make the IGF a permanent body, and attempts to align WSIS with the GDC and the 2030 Agenda. These foundations are essential.
Together, we make practical recommendations to lock in the progress already achieved, prevent backsliding, and strengthen the draft’s commitments to human rights, gender, financing and capacity building, to name a few. Our recommendations include:
- Preserving the draft’s existing language on human rights, multistakeholder cooperation, gender mainstreaming, internet fragmentation, the permanence of the IGF, and alignment between the WSIS and other UN processes.
- Enhancing and clarifying the human rights language to ensure the full application of international human rights law across the technological lifecycle. Specifically, strengthening references on the need to apply human rights due diligence and human rights impact assessment, clarifying the duties of the private sector, and prohibiting the use of digital technologies fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
- Integrating safeguards for human rights and multistakeholder cooperation throughout the sections on digital public goods and digital public infrastructure, data governance and AI.
- Adding a commitment to establish a dedicated taskforce anchored in the WSIS architecture to explore and propose financing mechanisms.
- Broadening the internet governance language to recognise the IGF and its wider ecosystem and ensure community consultation on its future funding and working methods.
- Embedding multistakeholder principles throughout the WSIS framework, drawing from the São Paulo Multistakeholder Guidelines.
The submission is jointly authored by Access Now, Association for Progressive Communications (APC), ARTICLE 19, Center for Communication Governance (CCG), CyberPeace Institute, Data Privacy Brasil, Derechos Digitales, Digital Rights Foundation, DW Akademie, the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), Fact Check West Africa, Fundación Multitudes, Global Forum for Media and Development (GFMD), Global Partners Digital (GPD), Global Network Initiative (GNI), the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), ICT Watch, Media Foundation for West Africa, Paradigm Initiative, Research ICT Africa, STOPAIDS, Tech Global Institute, WACC and Weiba Foundation.
Together, our organisations formed the Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS (GDRC-WSIS) to promote a human rights-based, people-centric and multistakeholder approach to the WSIS+20 review process.
Read the full joint submission here.