-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Frieda Werden
Verzonden: vrijdag 21 juni 2002 9:04
Aan: GSN
Onderwerp: Urgent simple action to preserve the Right To Communicate

The upcoming World Summits on the Information Society (Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005) have the potential to be a reaffirmation of people's right to communicate, or perhaps something like a WTO for Communication.
The door has opened for "civil society participation" though the convenor, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), is jointly run by the UN,
governments, and industry.
I strongly advise everyone to go to this web page and give your reaction to the very brief statement there of the WSIS themes, and especially to mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Here is what I wrote in my comment:
I disagree with limiting the "applications" specifically to promoting the goals of the UN Millennium Declaration. This declaration was a relatively hastily conceived document and to my mind left behind things that were good from its predecessor documents. I would re-word this section as follows:
"To harness the potential of knowledge and technology for promoting the goals of the United Nations as represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its successor declarations, including the Vienna Declaration, the Beijing Declaration, and the Millennium Declaration.

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FYI, the Vienna Declaration was from the World Conference on Human Rights in
1993, and was notable for specifying that women's rights are human rights; the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was from the 4th World Conference on Women in 1995 and explicitly mentions women's access to media. This is very important because the ITU has stated publicly that they don't want any mention of women's rights or any minority rights in this conference, that they think they can somehow be "broader" than that by ignoring these things. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
proclaimed by the UN General Assembly December 10, 1947, says in part:

Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

If you didn't know you had that right before, please start planning now all the ways you'd like to exercise it.

Frieda Werden, Producer
WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service
P.O. Box 33220
Austin TX 78764 USA
Phone (512)416-9000
WINGS