Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors (CCBI)
World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS
Tunis, 16 – 18 November 2005
CCBI intervention on political chapeau and implementation
Ayesha Hassan
Geneva, 15 November 2004
Thank you Mr Chair,
On behalf of the Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors, we are pleased to provide the following comments at this time.
We regret that we were not part of the meetings of the group this morning and will not be part of the meetings in December. Without the benefit of hearing the views expressed and reading the proposals not made public, we limit our comments to the draft document that you circulated.
I would like to call attention to the Input provided by CCBI ahead of your due date of 2 November on the political chapeau and implementation sections. This input was provided as a public proposal.
CCBI would like to reiterate that the commitments and language of the Declaration and Plan of Action signed at WSIS Geneva, 2003, should be acknowledged and remain in the text.
On the political chapeau :
·
Paragraph 6: We urge the addition of a reference to stimulating economic growth as a precondition to enable the other factors, and a reference to the important role of business in stimulating economic growth;·
Paragraph 7: We suggest reversing the sequence of ‘economic growth’ and ‘enterprise’ in this section to reflect the chronology appropriately;·
Paragraph 9: add the words youth and children. We suggest that the sentence should read ‘particularly attentive to …..the needs of youth and children, older persons….’;·
Paragraph 11: we suggest deleting the words’ for action’ and the sentence would read ‘….making proposals on internation internet governance’.On the operational section:
·
The ‘idea’ section on regional and international integration mentions the word ‘international’ in the ‘idea’ box, and we recommend that to ensure clarity and consistency, the text should include both regional and global or international integration;·
Lastly, the last paragraph calls for the institutionalization of WSIS through the UN. CCBI recommends that there should be some forum for dialogue and a mechanism to track progress, but that a formal institutionalization within the UN structure could divert desperately needed resources from action to continued dialogue.Thank you.
What is the Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors (CCBI)?
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held during the week of 8 December 2003 in Geneva, culminating in the Summit segment on 10-12 December 2003. The second part of this Summit will take place in 2005 in Tunisia.
Principals of the Summit host countries and executive secretariat invited the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to create the Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors (CCBI) as a vehicle through which to mobilize and coordinate the involvement of the worldwide business community in the processes leading to and culminating in the Summit. ICC and the CCBI group led the private-sector effort to provide substantive input into the first phase of the Summit, and mobilized the private sector to participate in the preparatory phases and at the Summit itself. The CCBI, is constituted of the following organizations and their members: Among the organizations actively involved in the work of the CCBI, in addition to ICC, are: Associacion Hispanoamericana de Centros de Investigacion y Empresas de Telecomunicaciones, Brazilian Chamber of Electronic Commerce, the Business Council of the United Nations, Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD; Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce; Global Information Infrastructure Commission; Money Matters Institute; United States Council on International Business; World Economic Forum; World Information Technology and Services Alliance; French Publishers Association; International Publishers Association; and Gobierno Digital.
For further information regarding CCBI, please consult the WSIS website at:
https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/index.html
About ICC
ICC is the world business organization, the only representative body that speaks with authority on behalf of enterprises from all sectors in every part of the world. ICC promotes an open international trade and investment system and the market economy. Business leaders and experts drawn from the ICC membership establish the business stance on broad issues of trade and investment, e-business, IT and telecoms policy as well as on vital technical and sectoral subjects. ICC was founded in 1919 and today it groups thousands of member companies and associations from over 130 countries.