Revision of Redevelopment of Mission Statement from Wed, 05/13/2009 - 04:48

WHO WE ARE:

 

The Internet Rights and Principles is a Dynamic Coalition that has set out to make Rights and Principles on the Internet and their related duties, specified from the point of view of individual users, a central theme of the Internet Governance debate held in the IGF context.

 

OUR MISSION:

 

Responding to the IGF's mandate for multi-stakeholderism, the Coalition welcomes and indeed explicitly seeks participants from all stakeholder groups, including individuals, civil society groups, the academic sector, governments, intergovernmental organizations, the technical community, and the private sector.

 

Our mission is as follows:

 

  • Bring awareness and promote fundamental human and civil rights and liberties on the internet;

  • Discuss and anchor global public policy principles for the openess and evolution of the Internet framed by the public interest, through open and extensive stakeholder involvement

  • Promote the addressing of issues of human and civil rights in policy-making proposals by all stakeholders, contributing for a people-centric discourse and policy making in the IG space.

  • Identify ways in which these rights and liberties can be translated on the Internet, and evaluate the applicability of existing legislation;

  • Promote the specification of how the existing rights can be applied and what they practically imply in the context of new ICT technologies;

  • Identify ways in which new rights and principles deriving from the innovations caused by the Internet can be defined, agreed and promoted when necessary;

  • Seek to identify measures for the protection and enforcement of these rights, while pushing for people-centric issues and public interest based IG policy making.

  • Seek to engage the various stakeholders within the Coalition's mission and express the Coalition's interest to work with them, and, on doing this, bring issues of key public policy principles – and a stronger policy perspective – to the arena of human rights and Internet Governance.

 

We believe that a lot of work done for and around the IGF is thematically overlapping. Therefore the IBR coalition wants to be first and foremost a platform facilitating collaboration and dovetailing the work of the Dynamic Coalitions especially as they relate to Rights on the Internet. It wants to build a collection and showcase for the federated results of all the Dynamic Coalitions from the IGF.

 

It sets out especially to promote a process and instruments to frame and enforce Rights in the Internet. Also, our understanding is that Internet being a unique and unprecedented global phenomenon, it requires new policy approaches. In this sense, this DC aims to discuss and propose principles and models for appropriate public policy for the Internet – a key, in fact an indispensable, instrument of preserving and promoting global public interest.

 

We strongly believe that the UDHR is the basis for our work and we should build on all the existing work that has been done in this field. We therefore ask you to contribute to the collection of information and links to documents, projects and organizations we have started in our wiki, and contribute the results of this work to the platform.

 

Hence the Internet Rights abd Principles Platform will in fact be made of a set of several documents, some existing, some new - some substantial, some procedural or related to enforcement.