The Dynamic Coalition on the Internet Bill of Rights would like to report to the IGF community about its activities and progress.
We have recently established a website, at the URL http://internet-bill-of-rights.org/, and a mailing list, which can be accessed and subscribed by the website. We plan to use these online tools as the main venue for our work. We encourage all stakeholders who are interested in this matter to join the mailing list, and we plan to devote the next few months in doing outreach and increase participation.
We are fully aware of the need to build on existing statements of human rights and duties, and to interact with other related efforts. Our project has been started to provide a meeting point inside the framework of a process of the United Nations, without any predefined outcome both in terms of form and of substance. Collective thinking is necessary to understand, for example, the appropriate degree of formalization, and whether the objective could be one document or a series of documents, and how to ensure that any result is kept up to date with the speedy evolution of technologies. We do not pretend to know everything or have ready solutions, but we believe in the need to gather in an international environment to devote the utmost attention to this matter and advance the creation and formalization of consensus about it.
Consequently, we would like to devote the months leading to Rio to finding agreed answers to the following two questions:
Which are the appropriate forms and instruments to implement and better define human rights and duties in the Internet environment?
What areas and types of rights and duties should be part of this work and of its results?
We welcome the generous offer by the government of Italy to host an international meeting on this matter, and suggest that it be focused on the two questions above.
At the same time, we stress the importance of this matter and of human rights in general, and would like that they are given better evidence and attention in Rio than it was in Athens, where they were collated with other important matters such as intellectual property rights and access to knowledge.
Thus, we propose that human rights and the ?Bill of Rights? become one issue group in itself, starting from the Rio meeting. Moreover, we propose that the ?Bill of Rights? becomes one of the main working items of the IGF in the overall, with the objective to reach consensus and release documents and other results pertaining to this issue by the last IGF meeting in 2010.
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