World summit on the information society: the end of the beginning.(Community & Independent Media)

Mixed reactions marked the conclusion of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) last November 18, 2005 in Tunisia. Following the first Summit in Geneva in 2003, this second phase which had 175 participating countries, agreed on two main documents called the Tunis Commitment and the Tunis Agenda, to varying reviews.

Post-Tunis, women may have made some gains, but only on paper. Firm WSIS gender advocate Heike Jensen points out that women broke new ground in the Tunis Commitment. Paragraph 23 of the document specifically establishes the gender divide as part of the digital divide. Moreover, the same paragraph recognises the full participation of women as vital to ensuring human rights within the Information Society.

However, the Tunis Agenda fails to provide the political will and financial resources to back up the commitments to women's empowerment and gender equality. While promoting women's rights may have become the norm, walking this talk is still a dream, Jensen opines.

A post-WSIS civil society statement in the works also raises that lack of full, material and engaged commitment to gender equality hinders the transformation of the "masculinist culture embedded ... within the Information Society."

Much of civil society does stop short of celebrating the end of WSIS, not only when it comes to the provisions on women and gender, but also in other aspects. For instance, while pleased with the multi-stakeholder approach that enabled civil society's positive contributions to WSIS, NGOs feel that more could have been achieved, such as ensuring the full participation of civil society in the newly created Internet Governance Forum, and the funding for this web body.

Civil society also bemoans the WSIS failure to affirm the centrality of human rights in ICT for development. In fact, even human rights explicitly addressed in the Tunis documents were violated daily. Problems encountered in holding the parallel Citizens' Summit and the closure of the "We Seize" side event violated the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of information, and freedom of association and assembly.

NGOs also pointed out the irony of holding WSIS in a country known for its record of human rights violations.