IGF 2025 - Day 0 - Workshop Room 1 - Event #123 Making the WSIS+20 moment deliver digital rights and justice - A civil society brainstorming session

>> MODERATOR: Hi, everybody. Welcome. So this is a silent conference, so you need to put your headphones on. I'll be giving the tech demonstration, and so you just need to put your headphones on, and then you need to change to channel 1, which is just on the side. So if you change to Channel 1, turn it on, and then the volume is on the other side.

Can those with their headphones on, hear me now? Yeah. Excellent. All right. And just give everyone else a moment. Apologies that we're a bit late getting started, our colleague is running a bit late, but we're going to get started now.

So welcome, everybody, to our session, may being the WSIS + 20 moment deliver digital rights and justice a Civil Society brainstorming session, and we are really delighted to be able to host this today and the session is brought to you by the Global Digital Justice Forum represented by, I think, a number of you in the audience, and by my panelist Nandini at the global digital rights coalition for WSIS represented by a number of us as well. The Dynamic Coalition on Platform Responsibility, the digital constitution network and Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles so we're really pleased to have a diverse set of Civil Society organizing this.

I'm just ‑‑ yeah. Okay.

>> >> MODERATOR: Okay. The sorry, folks. I think we need to start over for the live transcript. Just bear with us to one more moment.

  >> ZACH LAMPELL: Can everybody hear me now? Yeah. All right. Hi, everybody. Welcome to IGF 2025. My name is Zach Lampell, I'm Senior Legal Advisor and Coordinator for Digital Rights.

I believe my friend and colleague has introduced all the speakers today. Again, I just wanted to welcome you all to this session where we will be strategizing on how Civil Society can make WSIS + 20 work for us and work to improve, protect, and promote digital rights for everyone around the world.

So, the idea is really to spend just a few minutes at the beginning, taking stock of where we are, and looking at what is coming up over the next six months as the WSIS + 20 gets renegotiated or negotiated, and then we'll split into breakout groups where we can have really deep‑dive and in‑depth discussions on the messages that we all want to put out and send out and advocate for with our partners, our communities, and our governments.

So with that, I will turn it over to Anya for her presentation. Thank you so much.

>> Thank you so much, Zach. I hope you can hear me. It's a funny thing, this is very high. My name is Ana and I work for Article 19 a local to global free speech organization working across the globe trying to promote freedom of expression and related rights. I'm going to start off by sort of situating us in the process right now of the WSIS + 20 Review Process which has been ongoing for a little bit, but where are we today?

On the 20th of June which was last Friday, the co‑facilitators of the process, of the WSIS + 20 review process, the Permanent Representatives in New York of Albanian Kenya issued what they call an Elements Paper, if you're like me you read this on the plane ride over coming here trying to understand what is in this paper.

Now, it's an Elements Paper, what does that really mean? It means it's a list of issues that they've heard when they were going through their consultations with Member States, of course, but as with stakeholders, and perhaps you're one of the few people being able to speak during the consultations with multistakeholders on the 9th and 10th of June which was online., and you've raised your issues n now, what is now in this Elements Paper. The idea is that it's a list of issues, it is not yet a zero draft or not yet the first draft of the outcome document that will conclude this WSIS + 20 review process. It's important to be aware of that because a lot can still change, which can be a positive, maybe also a negative.

In terms of the actual review paper ‑‑ sorry, issues paper and what's in there. I'm not going to give you a detailed analysis of this. There is a lot of issues in there. I think it's important that everyone from their own perspective looks at it and considers it. I just want to raise a few things for you to consider as we're going later into breakout groups to kind of walk through this and discuss amongst each other.

There is an introduction section, which sort of sets out the overall picture, and then there are a number of sections. There is a section on ICT 4 development, there is one on digital economy, social and cultural development, environment impacts, bridging digital divides, and the enabling environment, which ‑‑ and financial mechanisms, which are the first few sections. They're quite ‑‑ they talk about the issues, the progress made, the issues, and they invite for input.

Then there is a section on human rights and ethics, which I really ask for you to look at because that's a bit of a lighter section. Then it goes into building confidence and security, which is refers to amongst other things to the UN Cybercrime convention, and there it talks about Internet governance. I invite you to take a look. There is some old language and the multistakeholder is missing there. Then the new issues, the facts you will have heard, data governance, artificial intelligence, and something really important for a lot of people, capacity building, and then ends with monitoring and measurements.

So in terms of thinking about what to do is have a look at the issues that are important to you, bearing in mind that we're trying to progress the WSIS + 20, we're trying to progress the WSIS agenda, right, which was originated 20 years ago, so try to think about progressive language where we can make achievements and move forward.

The co‑facilitators have asked for inputs into the Elements paper. There is an online form you can fill out that asks about the achievements that you see, challenges you see remaining, priorities for actions, do you see anything missing here, and do you have any specific comments.

This is by the 15th of July. I invite you all to fill out this online form, and also to let you know that on Wednesday morning, the co‑facilitators will organize an open consultation for anyone here at the IGF, so that's another place where you can go and raise your questions and thoughts.

This is just to kind of give you a bit of food for thought. If you haven't read it, skim it now, and I will pass it on to my colleagues. Thank you.

  >> ELLIE McDONALD: Hi, everyone. My name is Ellie McDonald I work for digital partners, Civil Society and human rights organization and making sure human rights underpins the digital environment, but today I'm speaking on behalf of the Global Digital Rights Coalition for WSIS, so I'll just share briefly a little bit about the coalition and the priorities that we bring to the review process.

So, the GDRC WSIS involves slowly into being from October last year. We're a group of human rights and Civil Society organizations grown from the global north and south offering our shared expertise to ensure a WSIS review and human rights law and build on meaningful stakeholder engagement. We have three core priorities as a coalition. These are the basis for our work; however, we really welcome this session as an opportunity to discuss and elaborate on them. So these priorities are, first, to promote a human rights‑based and as well as a people‑centric sustainable and oriented approach to the WSIS review. It means ensuring that policy responses are grounded in international human rights law, especially in areas including surveillance, censorship, Internet governance show and discrimination online, areas where we've seen the government responses can be not consistent with international human rights law.

Like Anna I don't want to prejudge too much the Elements Paper, but I will say the language is not always consistent with international human rights law with respect to those areas. Because of our first, we want to promote regulation aligned with international human rights law and avoiding the normative gaps we see in other legislation, so for instance excluding military applications or private sector applications from scope. We also wish to formally recognize the role of OHCHR and other UN human rights bodies and wealth of interpretive guidance they bring to the regulation of digital technologies.

The second priority is advance the multistakeholder approach in digital governance and extend to digital policy processes. Critically, this means really applying in practice the Sal Paolo, multistakeholder guidance and we think it's useful guidance for how multistakeholder approach can be applied in multilateral as well as multistakeholder. And strengthen institutions like the IGF, and this includes ensuring that WSIS isn't subsumed by other more centralizing processes, and it means implementing new policy frameworks like the Global Digital Compact through the WSIS institutions and ensuring the continued existence of the IGF as a multistakeholder Forum in the context of shrinking civic space, something that is the importance of the IGF, it is currently recognized in the Elements Paper, and but it doesn't yet make any policy proposals related to it.

As mentioned, we're an evolving coalition, so we really welcome that we have the space today to talk through these ideas in a bit more depth. With that, I think I'm handing it over to Nandini. Hi. I work for ID for Change, that works as Secretariat for ‑‑ coalition of across the global digital south and aligns in the global north and forum is trying to work on multipronged action that will realize the vision of a equitable, just, and international order. In the context of the WSIS + 20 review, the GDGF members, IDF IT for Change, coordinated a campaign on digital justice now a call to action for WSIS + 20 and beyond and the attempt was to speak with Civil Society organizations and people movements, not just working on digital rights, but as traditional development domains and issues pertaining to disability, universal right to health, ecological sustainable, workers rights, gender justice and so on with an attempt to see what is it that we seek out of this era of the + 20 review and other emerging institutional mechanisms on data and AI governance and what would it take to bring in a human rights instructional justice vision back at the center.

So, the details of this campaign are like in a brochure that I have put out there on the table behind, and you could check that out, and we also have voices and testimonies from across different groups in the world which you can check out on our website, global digital justice forum dot net but whatever we just now quickly do is talk about some of the agenda of the campaign which becomes very critical in the context of Civil Society thinking around the Elements Paper and the things that are emerging in the WSIS + 20 review as policy priorities.

The campaign basically talks about four agenda. The first agenda is about you know ensuring that we have an integrated and indivisible human rights framework adequate to the digital paradigm. The elements paper does mention that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, but in the current context it's important to move beyond this by looking at the rights of those who are affected by the data extractism but may not be on the Internet or maybe not being online, so an expanded idea of what human rights means for all people in the data and AI value chains, and what would it mean to see corporate accountability in context for these rights.

The second agenda is about ensuring we preserve the Internet as a global communication comments and this would include universal and meaningful connectivity for all and ensuring that we no longer end up with wall gardens.

The third agenda would be a very critical priority in the context of climate change, talking about sustainable digital transition that safeguards the rights of future generation, and finally a international economic order that addresses digital inequality. The elements paper in its new sections of data and AI capabilities talks about a data flow regime, but we believe we must move beyond this demand to a data flows with rights regime which ensures that people of the Global South are not integrated on adverse terms into an extractivist data economy but people have control over their data resources and its use.

We're also concerned that reforms to IP and trade regimes that creates enabling environment for AI capabilities development in the Global South must become a critical WSIS implementation issue, and finally, there is a lot of reference to AI capabilities and return to an urge for blended and private finances, but in the current context when debt of the countries in Global South are all‑time high, I think that it's critical to talk about having international public financing for connectivity, DPIs, data, AI capabilities in the Global South and greater integration between financing for development processes and WSIS processes which is currently not the case. I think we all look forward to a collective discussion on what it would mean to reclaim the WSIS vision grounded in the UN charter, sustainable development, and human rights in the complex and challenging context happening right now. Thank you.

  >> ZACH LAMPELL: Thank you, everyone. Now it's time to self‑select, sort of, and break out into our breakout groups. We're hoping for a round of 10 to 15 people in each breakout group. Before we move into breakout groups, just want to quickly go over some guiding sort of ‑‑ sort of three guiding questions for each group to consider.

The first is if you've had a chance to read the Elements Paper, what do you agree with, what's missing, and what else needs to be included in the Elements Paper. If you haven't had a chance to read it, that's okay too. The second question is given digital rights and related justice and demand we heard earlier, what resonates most with you, what are your top three priorities for the WSIS + 20 review outcomes?

And then the final question is, what's missing? What are some of the rights and justice‑related agendas that are important to you and your communities that have so far been left out, either in the Elements Paper or in the different coalitions and ideas that have been presented thus far. And are you willing to share two or three priorities that you want to see on the agenda? The idea is that from these breakout groups, we will be able to put together a consolidated list of Civil Society's visions for the WSIS + 20 review, and that will enable and empower all of us to, as Anna said, give our input in a very clear, articulate, and coordinated way so that the Member States who are negotiating WSIS + 20 know what we want to see and we're better able to advocate for these positions.

So with that we just have 15 or 20 minutes or so for breakout groups. If I could ask sort of one group to come up here in the front corner, a second group ‑‑ everyone's going to have to move a bit but that's okay, a second group in the front corner to my left, your right, one group in the far back corners, one to the right and one to the left. If we need to have a group right in the center around, I think that's ‑‑ I don't have my glasses on in the center, maybe a fifth group right in the center. So if I could ask everyone to do a bit of moving around, enter your breakout groups and we'll be around to help facilitate the discussions. Thank you.

  >> ZACH LAMPELL: Thank you everyone so much for such a great discussion or discussions I should say. We just have a minute left so apologies for this session being a little bit shorter and more rushed than we anticipated, but again everything that we heard from the discussions have been really great. Just a couple of high‑level points that have come out from some of the breakout groups to share with you. First, there is a lack of acknowledgment of the structuring issues in the digital environment. What we mean by this is there is really nothing, no language that discussions the digital monopolies at the digital infrastructure layer, and how the people or persons who control the Internet infrastructure really have full control over how we exercise our human rights online.

So just in the last 30 seconds that I have before we get cut off, I want to thank you all, again. I want to thank the other panelists and moderators. I thank everyone at the Global Digital Justice Forum and GDRC WSIS Coalition. We will be issuing a paper on each of these two forum's websites that brings together our thoughts here today and we hope that we'll be able to work together and follow up so that we can push for a WSIS + 20 that takes into account all of our and our community's needs. Thank you all very, very much. I look forward to seeing you throughout the week. Thank you.

(Applause).