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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 153
The lack of emphasis and meaningful intervention on redistributive
claims should be seen as a problem of representation. In fact, as these
Northern-based CSOs have gained technical competence to challenge
dominant state and corporate interests, a variety of analysts at the WSIS
argued that delegates from civil society based in the South were underrepresented
and often did not have the requisite ‘expertise’ in technical
areas of intellectual property (IP) regulation or the intricacies of Internet
governance (Sreberny 2005; Kleinwächter 2004a). Overall, participation
by civil society was highly ‘Eurocentric’, with experts arguing that
European CSOs dominated discussions. Southern CSOs were seen to lack
‘human, financial and technical resources’ (Dany 2004), coupled with the
fact that CSOs from Africa were deemed relatively ‘young organizations’
(Cammaerts and Carpentier 2005). Although active in the preparatory
process, African groups were not ‘active participants’ in the summit in
Geneva. Active participation in this context is defined by ‘securing access
to all official documents, to the negotiation process and by participation
rights (e.g. the right to observe or to vote)’ (Dany 2004). Similarly, experts
cite the high cost of attendance and reliance on European languages
to account for the low turn-out of Southern CSOs more generally, and
point to the negative impact of authoritarian regimes to account for the
underrepresentation of Asian organizations. 10
The second phase of the summit followed another series of PrepCom
and regional meetings in 2004 and 2005, with civil society deliberations
‘characterized by difference, division, and questions of identity and representation’
(Banks 2005). Key figures from the groups centrally involved
in the WSIS process like Seán Ó Siochrú (2004) from the CRIS campaign
and Karen Banks (2005) from APC pointed out that questions about the
legitimacy of civil society were increasingly raised by US-backed conservative
groups challenging the social justice platform on issues like
intellectual property rights. Although this is no doubt a disturbing trend,
organizations and individuals from the South also raised the opposite set
of concerns, about the lack of focus on more expansive claims for both
recognition and redistribution.
The CRIS campaign and others most involved in the Civil Society
Bureau focused on the fact that Tunisia – an authoritarian state with an
inexcusable record on freedom of information – was to host the second
summit. The Tunisian state’s decision to ban the planned parallel Citizen’s
Summit heightened concerns raised about freedom of expression
and human rights. At the summit, some 150 people attended a demonstration
to support a hunger strike organized by the Tunisian Human Rights
League protesting against the censorship of the human rights issue within
Tunisia. The cruel irony of Tunisia hosting a summit on the Global