The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> CHAIR: Shall we? It's time. Shall we start? Yeah. We will start.
Welcome, everybody, to the Dynamic Coalition on Gender and Internet Governance. And this is the annual meeting which takes place at the IGF. And at every dynamic coalition meeting we try to expand the range of issues that we are talking about with relation to gender. So this time we have three speakers. We have Laura from the Dominican Republic. We have valet from Bosnia and Herzegovina and we have India/yerm any. I ask that each of you introduce yourself and speak for seven to ten minutes. Then we can have enough time for a discussion after all three of you have spoken. Yeah?
So Laura, would you like to go first? I'm going to close this door.
>> LAURA BRIETON DESPRADEL: Okay. It's working. So good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. I am very happy actually because I was a little afraid for my English, but it is a small session. So if I make a mistake, please forgive me.
Well, I am Laura from the Dominican Republic the small island most of you probably know because of tourism and the music and probably because we share a border with Haiti. But the situation of the country is not well-known in the rest of the world. Basically today I am going to speak to you a little bit about sexual rights in the Dominican Republic, reproductive rights in the Dominican Republic and how we are using as femmists, I'm a feminist advocate in reproductive and sexual rights. I will speak to you a little bit about how we are using technology to support our fight with the government and with the Catholic Church mainly.
And, well, let me give you a little bit of background. I come from a country where three out of ten girls before 18 years old are already pregnant or have a son or daughter. Most of them are victims of rape. It is not victims of rape from family members or older men. The abortion is forbidden in all cases, including with the mother is in danger. And we have a lot of cases about girls dying even though they are sick and pregnant and we don't have sexual education in schools. All this because we have a lot of influence from the Catholic Church. And lately from other Protestant churches.
But the Dominican Republic is one of the few countries that are the last in the world that is a -- it is like a compendium with the Vatican where almost 60 percent of schools are given to the Catholic Church. And the rest, the other 30 percent is begin to the Protestant churches. So we only have like 10 percent of schools that are like us, how do you say like us in English? I don't know.
>> Secular.
>> LAURA BRIETON DESPRADEL: Thank you so much. It is only 10 percent of schools that are actually secular.
So what are we doing? First let me tell you a little bit. There is a NGO in the Dominican Republic pro Familia part of PPF. In 2014 pro familiar I will I can't had a campaign online, it was in social network. Very in my opinion, it was not even that new. It was only say sexual reproductive rights are rights. Know them and fight for them.
And they were sued by the Catholic Church because one of the videos had a 16-year-old girl with a condom. She was like 18 years old and she had a condom in her purse.
So the church said we were promoting sex, that we were promoting promiscuity and the case got turned down in court. For freedom of speech. We were very happy about that. But it is still in the constitutional court of our country. The constitutional court has not given any judgment yet, but it is very iting because people we know that work there say that it is coming and it is not going to be good. They are going to say that pro Familia was wrong promoting promiscuity among girls.
I'm working covertly for the UN population fund. And we are working in to give sexual education for adults and adolescents. This has been going on for the last two years or so. Our main issues have been that we have been trying to work with the Ministry of education. What do we want the Ministry of education? They have the people, right? That is why we want to go to them. And it has been, I cannot say that we have been censored, but they have been putting so difficult for us. Every time it is like no, you cannot say could be domes. Again the word condom seems to be the main issue in the country. And the presentation of family, they wanted us to put it was a man, a woman and kids and maybe a dog. And the only information that we can put in the app is what is a vagina, what is a peens, and this is how -- penis and this is how babies are made and that's it.
A year and a half we have been going to meetings and talking to them. They never say no, but they say that's so difficult. Let's see what we can do. So last year what we decided was that we were not working with them anymore. We got the support of the Ministry of youth and the Ministry of health. Now they are allowing us to put whatever content we decide. It has been very interesting because we have now like a group of youth, of adolescents, 13 to 19 years old, telling us what they want to put in the app. The information is so different from what we had before. I mean, from when I have a vagina, they want to know, you know, how to have sex in other ways. It is very different.
And interesting too is that we have a group of queer adolescents too now that are giving us more information of what they need in the app. The app has been now a lot of support from all the people we wanted to get to. And they are asking us questions.
We had a site on the app where they can ask questions and we are going to answer them immediately. In one week we received more than 200 questions from mostly from girls. 87 percent of users of the app are girls. So we are receiving a lot of questions. And the last meeting we have with the queer adolescents has been very interesting because now we are looking for information to include about sex by other people and other issues which we know is going to be a problem with the government. But after we have the support of the Ministry of youth and the health ministry, they say don't worry, go ahead. We'll take it. We'll take what is coming from the President and the Ministry of education probably.
So more or less that is what I wanted to tell you about. I don't know if I still have time.
>> CHAIR: You have a couple of minutes.
>> LAURA BRIETON DESPRADEL: I'm working right now in UN FPA.
>> CHAIR: What is that?
>> LAURA BRIETON DESPRADEL: PLANIAPP.
Let me see how ... that is and E -- it is not an I, it is E.
PLANEAPP. I think it's only available in the Dominican Republic still.
We wanted to close it, but we are working with Mexico and Bolivia, too, to send the app there. The Mexican group is already interested. The app has been working also with pro Familia and other similar organises, civil society organisations that wanted to be part of it.
Our main issue has been promoting it. And having the information, as I said before, having the information that the youth wanted to listen to.
And I don't know what else. Well, I was going to talk a little bit about the campaigns we have about abortion. Abortion rights. The civil society, they had taken -- the Dominican Republic government was the one that got the last two years, has been there is this report that said what is the government that is more online? Our government has Wop for the last two lines, the Dominican Republic that has, the President is on Twitter, the Ministers are on Twitter, everybody is talking there. We have taken our campaigns to talk to them in Twitter too.
For the last years in 2013 we had a girl, a 16-year-old girl that died because she had leukemia and they didn't provide her an abortion. She was two months pregnant. And she died.
This for the first time the country started speaking about abortion. Speaking publicly. Obviously the femmeness meeting was talking about it but we were not outside, talk about in the media and on the Internet. And lately we have a lot of campaigns. There is one called Voya Favor.
(Spanish phrase.) that is being done with the rest of Latin America, with the rest of the countries that are forbid Abortion in the three main choughs, Chile, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, we are working together in this campaign online.
And we do it actually, I don't know if you know the situation in he will satisfactorily do, a lot of women are in jail for having miscarriages. And every 17 we are doing a campaign on Abortion and the Dominican Republic and other countries are supporting them because they are taking the women out of jail right now. Hopefully, soon. Most of them are already.
I think that's it so far. If you have any questions, I'm open to speak to you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much, Laura. Thank you also apart from sharing the very courageous work you have done in this kind of situation. I think it is wonderful that you are bringing in the whole discourse around sexual and reproductive health and rights and sexuality into this IGF because I haven't seen that many sessions that are officially on the agenda that deal with sexuality. So thanks very much. We will do the discussion maybe after all three speakers. So if we could ask Vale, if you could introduce yourself as well?
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: Hi, my name is Valentina, it is a given name by myself with a H in front. I work with APC for the women's rights programme and working on sexuality and the Internet using the feminist principle of the Internet as the analytical framework. APC started ten years with a network that is called Erotics which means exploratory research on information and communication technology. It is the Spanish side, information and communication technology.
And we needed to use a word that somehow gets your attention because erotics has a sound and people project. It is also I think meaningful in a world that is just trying to forget the humans have sexuality, that have sexual rights and that part of our life and our body is composed by our desire, by our exploration and all the things that are called pleasure.
And it started from a curiosity. To give you a bit of background because I think it is important that we always remember there is always someone new in the room and that we also remind ourselves that it started from curiosity.
Because of the Internet, it is a visual medium. And the Internet was hosting and is hosting each and everyone. So the point was how diversity, how sexual rights activists, how the LGBT IQ community use the Internet, play on the Internet, but also are backlashed by the Internet. And we always use the singular about the Internet, but probably we should use a plural because there are also many Internet. We are all forced into this big commercial Internet, the one of the big -- the '80s, the one that is making money out of people's data. The beginning less, but in the last year I think that this is the new element.
So's rot particulars has done -- erotics has always done exploratory research working together with people in different countries, organisations, activists to understand how sexual rights are implemented, enjoyed or mistreated.
The last research that we have done is in three countries: India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It is baseline research. What I provide to you is the understanding. So the first layer is the access. Access is really a way to, the physical access. The device or the data you have to pay if you want to access or the cable TV that we provide you. But also access to information.
The first thing that is important, we have always to remember that access to information is still there and it is a primary reason why people go, go to produce their own content, to contribute to the knowledge that is there, but also to search.
It is a search that is perceived as a free search, a freedom search when you can look for words that are not spoken in school because this is per sexuality, the main is not spoken in school. It is moralised, constantly taken off the table and cripised.
And what we realised that with increasing of technology based on collecting data and with not any awareness about that and government jumping in, in the business of managing people's data, there are backlash. I don't want to talk about government surveillance, but what this data, the usage of data generates. Those data give the possibility to really go after each and every individual outside of the Internet. Because it is very simple to discover who is who.
Especially when there are no policies, no regulations, no legislation and when the actors are in a fluid connective. When I say actor, I mean the government, the company -- that can be the telecom company, the telecommunications company are the main broker of data and the main ones that access it, and the big corporation, sitting somewhere else in silicon veam primarily and peers.
When we talk about peers we are not talking only about the experts but also very important powerful actors, non-state actors like religious groups or conservative groups and groups that give them themselves the right to speak on behalf of each and every one, and alliances, religions, cultures, have control over people. So when this triangulation happened, data become a harm because this data is used against people. For example in Sri Lanka, we know in Sri Lanka very specific situation now, very delicate situation. With the Parliament that is disbanded, new Prime Minister that is imposed and on the brink of anything.
So if someone wanted to know anything about a person, they can go directly to the telecommunications agency and the local ISP provider and get a full vehicles, all the information, without any needs for the company to inform the person that there is an vehicles, a research about them.
And then without even having the needs of getting a court order.
So when we live in this kind of fluidity of powers that are connected, rag mat I cannily and realistically connected one to each other, we see how data is very important. And the are for example lags. The feminist principal, I am coming back, have a principle on privacy and the user needs to be in the centre. This year was the celebration of the new data protection regulation in Europe. That said that the user is the centre. I would say the level of principle is a big success. Something that at least is imposed among international organisations, issued a feminist and women's sexual rights activist have been pursuing many years. With he saw on the 25th of May a lot of websites and other stuff were not reachable in Europe because a company that was not based in Europe didn't take it seriously. They didn't take GDPR seriously so sites were not reachable because they didn't do the due diligence on how to protect -- this is the other part, the consent of the user to know at each given time what is happening with their own data.
And so data veil ensure, beyond surveillance. It is specific use of data and it generates hard. I will not enter into the domain of violence. I will say there is very interesting definition that has been done on a list of acts of violence. One of the form to combat if it is gender based violence. We need to talk about spectrum and it is not the binary, the man and the female, but all the colors of the rainbows. Within a fluidity that can also change in one person's lifetime. We are not fixed entity. And it is important. There is this list called omission by regulatory actors. When we have all that plenty of very generic regulations that promised us a redress, we have to be protected but then you go and there are no mechanisms in place. Yes, they say they are against violence or against this and they protect the users' data and you go and there is no system. There is no mechanism. There is no possibility. It is like there is this wonderful right that is sitting at the hand, of the floors of the cable but there is no capable, no windows and you have there to scream and maybe if you are lucky you have a megaphone but no power to enter this building and make this. I think it is an interesting framework.
So just to stay also on something pragmatic, its is also important that we started doing also benchmarking of all these companies because the Internet, I think it is important because sexual rights and sexuality is most of the time decided, protected or attacked at the national level. National legislation are the ones in charge most of the time. And then international convention, but most of the data very online communities sitting outside the country in big, research, it says the majority of people use social media. Social media are not sitting in the factory of the server, not sitting in the account. They are outside the jurisdiction, which is implied this continuous extension between the national and the global. And then a variety of companies that can be national, like telecoms, but also has not to be. All the many apps that we can have.
I think it is wore important that we start looking at benchmarking and we go looking at the privacy, the freedom of expression that in our case is freedom of expression through our body. Not the speech, not the obsessive North American right to speech, but only idea, because we have bodies and our bodies talk for us the way we want to talk to. This is also expression in full, in its full power.
I think we need to keep data at the centre of our discourse. Having this illuminated triangle where we have a corporation or company, the governance and peers. Expect powerful peers beyond the fight or the revenge that an ex- can pursue against one person and then how we benchmark.
So we need standards. From principles we need the standards to be able to implement so that we can monitor and to do this in an organised effort. So that we do not reinvent the wheel and each and everyone think of its own benchmarks. But we need that to have benchmarks and standards that we can draw from this big principle. The feminist principle, the human rights, these principles, but we need to do it all the way too so we can bring the rights back into the place that they are.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much, Vale for bringing in another sort of component into the conversation which is data Valence and reminding us that online our bodies are becoming data. And the way in which that is being used, right, is very much I think part of also the concept, the feminist concept of bodily integrity, autonomy, et cetera, and something that I think we need to think about in terms of our overall feminine activism.
Thank you very much. Our final speaker is Baldeep. Baldeep if you could again introduce yourself? And then you have a Power Point, right? Okay.
>> BALDEEP GREWAL: Hello. Can you hear me? From here is okay?
I'm slightly out of place here at the ifg because I'm academic. I teach English literature at a University in Germany, but I briefly worked with Point of View last year. One of the projects I was handling had to do with making the record from the gender report cards we received from IGF 2016 because I was so new to the entire concept of the IGF and everything, I did my research. I went back. I tried to figure out exactly what this space is, what are we doing here. Then I used that in my work.
At some point I realised, okay, maybe now it's time for us to take stock and really see if the gender report cards worked and beneficiary ka and I worked on this. She helped me write the report because I come from an academic background, very different way of writing. So I needed an initiation. So the report is ready. We are here now. So let's start with gendering of the IGF. I will be presenting a comprehensive study. I want to briefly talk about how gender has performed at the IGF thus far. Ever since its conception there has been a conscious effort by women's rights activists, all of those people like us, to advocate for the cause of gender and inclusion in the agenda of the IGF the highlights here are online violence against women, data privacy rights, sexuality rights, creating access to the Internet was also a major theme from 2006 to 2009. We see that the IGF did provide fertile lown for bringing gender rights into the formal conversation about Internet Governance. We have the DC in that direction.
By the time IGF 2009 took place there was growing discontent with women's visibility in the workshops and content of the workshops. There was urgent need of a tool that could be used for two things. Firstly, evaluate the engagement with gee and to encourage gendered perspectives in the workshops. It was in this context that the DRCs, I will refer to them as DRCs, the report cards.
What this gender report card looked like? Five questions, number of women people in the room, number of speakers on the panel, number of women as moderators, how inclusive are we in terms of gender issues in the discussion? This means this is split into two questions. Was gender part of the main theme? Secondly was gender relevant to the discussion in the room? These were the five minimal but crucial questions that the GRCs asked. The method of filling these out, APC members filled them out. Over the years we diversified from 2012 onwards it was mandated that every session organiser has to submit a report that answers these five questions about their sessions.
And if they don't do it, they can secure their slot for the next year's IGF and the reports are published on the IGF website and the IGF annual report. Reporting in languages English, report has to be in third person.
Let me come to what we expected when this initiative started in 2011. It was expected that the GRCs will allow us crucial insight into the figures that indicate gender sensitization at the IGF. They were considered a significant statistical resource that could be used to monitor the level of inclusiveness and diversity at the IGF r IGF. It was expected over the years we would not only obtain an archive of statistics but vital data about the challenges and themes revolving around gender at the IGF.
For the purpose of this pipe r paper I wept through all the summaries of report cards from 2011 to 2016. The initial situation in 2011 was that there was almost negligible inclusion of gender perspectives in the workshops regardless of how many women were present in the room and on the panels. Now that we have the GRCs, there was sudden awareness of the neat to privilege gender inclusion over gender identity, bringing gender perspectives into actual debate and discussion.
The 2011GRC gave us unprecedented cross-sectional analysis, statistically and thematically. Our sources were also Articles that different APC matters wrote about gender inclusivity at the IGF. This gave us a sense of discourse of gendering the IGF. We could see a dialogue developing between the GRC reports and the Articles.
Next slide, please. Next slide. So I basically took all that information and put it in this table so that it is easier for us to -- basically, one look at the table tells you everything you need to know about the four major categories. Organised yearly. So I'm just going to go through the categories and go into the analysis. The table shows us the number of workshops that submitted gender reports. The percentage of women amongst speakers. The percentage of women among moderators, and the extent to which gender mentions were part of the discussions in the workshops.
Starting with reporting, the second column that is how many workshops reported. We see that while clearly the GRCs fostered increased, the number of reporting workshops to increased over five times of the initial number obtained in 2011, '16 to 18. Now that gender had to be accounted for workshop organisers began to think about gender in the context of their workshops. Significant finding of our research, even as the number of reporting workshops increased even at best only 50 percent of the workshops have been submitting their reports each year. And we also now have the reports from IGF 2017 and the number of reporting workshops fell. That is unfortunate.
>> CHAIR: May I add one small thing here? Which is there's a little piece of the bottom of each workshop report. So I think what we are finding is that people are 50 percent of people of workshop organisers are filling in the top part which is the built short of workshop summary, what it achieved as well as the gender part at the bottom.
But around 50 percent are only filling the top part. But not filling that bottom gender part. They are submitting a report but omitting the gender aspect.
>> BALDEEP GREWAL: That was the next part, but that's okay because I also wanted to talk about a suggestion that Smita gave when I ran the study by her. Basically if it is mandated one has to submit the report, how is it that no one is filling these sections in? What mechanism will make sure that no one leaves the back. Smita at Point of View suggested why don't we fill in -- create a form that has a technical recommends in the language itself. The word complete needs to be added to the mandate. Following this we suggest in the official mandate that suggests that organisers ha of to fill in the report the word complete should cover all technicalities and loopholes. We are open to more suggestions so come talk to us.
Moving to the second category of women Panelists, so the report that I went through, they all had concrete numbers. They would say that there were four women on the panel or two women on the panel. Sometimes they give the total number of Panelists so that allows you to do a comparison. Four women sounds good, but if it's a panel of ten people, not so much.
I found it important to pull out percentages for each category. For speakers, the percentage of women speakers across the years remained in the range of 37 to 46, with no major fluctuations. As you can see, for 2016 I marked some entries as inconclusive. This is a second major conclusion or finding of this report. We were able to locate the problem area which highlights that there was not a reasonable number of reports with information on speakers that could be used to draw conclusions about the women who were speaking at IGF. For 2016 when I made the report there were only 17 reports that had viable information from which I could pull out meaningful data.
So that means that it is just useless information. I can't use it for any meaningful analysis. So among, not only does this preement us from making larger conclusions about a particular year. The sheer contrast in the number of reports obtained for each year makes it difficult to compare categorical results. I can't even make connections or comparisons between years then if one cell is flawed.
Moving on to moderation. So moderation exhibits sip lar gaps in reporting. Women have constituted rule one-third of the total number of moderators at each IGF. At the same time the fluctuation in the number of reports obtained for each year does not allow one to conduct further analysis let alone arrive at indisputable conclusions.
So I tried to rectify these things in the process of writing the study. What I did was, I tried to fill these gaps by experimenting with the online schedule for the year 2016. I went to the schedule. I used the information there to complete the gender report cards that I had. Once I did this, my conclusion was to discourage the use of online data. Firstly, this information precedes the events themselves. I can't confirm itself what the attendance at the actual even was like. Sometimes speakers change, are unable to make it. So in the interests of accurate analysis, live reporting is essential. There is no substitute.
I also found that the schedule in itself is incomplete and does not fill all the gaps. Secondly, sometimes the numbers according to the schedule are very different from what the report cards said about the same workshop. Again, that not a very firm connection between what the schedule says and what actually happens.
Finally due to the format of the online schedule, collecting and collating information from it proved to be extremely tedious and time-consuming. I literally had to go through the entire thing. But coming back to the table, the stats for the gender mentions show us that gender definitely has its foot in the door at IGF workshops, though in varying degrees. There is a clear progression in terms of making IGF workshop themes and discussions explicitly gender oriented. Where there has been arise in the number of workshops that consider gender as the main theme are of some importance, there is a corresponding fall in the number of workshops that do not include gender at all. That's good.
Mind sets are changing and the discussion reflects that. At the same time we definitely have a long way to go since we saw that in the Prime Minister's speech's opening ceremony, online abuse of youth was mentioned without any mention of how online violence against women is an entire problem in itself. We will get there. We are optimistic. Next slide, please.
I'll briefly outline the ways in which the GRCs have been useful. It can definitely be concluded that the GRCs have fulfilled the goal that was expected of them back in 2011. Apart from the insights and information that the reports provided us they allowed repertoires to allow comments as to how gender was handled in a particular workshop and make recommends on how the sessions can be made more gender sensitive.
The GRCs managed to both report and encourage understanding of women's participation that grew from women as spectators to seeing them as key players in Internet governance. It helped that the GRCs became institutionalized in the agenda very early on and we need to push for that. The obstacles were that some things did hold back the re-potential of this model. Not all workshops have been submitting report or or submitting incomplete reports which does national provide the full picture. The GRC format is successful, but actual reporting has to be strengthened. We see that in certain kinds of workshops there isn't a lot of gender engagement. We must send attendees to these particular sessions so gender oriented questions can be raised while we separately work towards getting women on these panels.
To conclude, coming back to the paper what we hope to achieve with the study -- here is the thing. We listened closely to what the GRCs tell us what r and what the discourse around Internet Governance has been. Signaled by these horses the study organise this archive, this is an attempt to take stock, review what was achieved and what remains to be done and as part of the recommends I plan to recommend a new model of reporting. That way the report that prepared for each year is easy to compare between years because all reports are following the same format. They have the same priorities in terms of specifically which figures are they focusing on. What is the mode of representation? Like I saw that a report from one year would use pie charts but the next worth would be bar graphs. It is difficult to compare across years with that kind of mismatch.
This also includes a suggestion that the GRC model should also include information on the same categories, but on both micro and Marco levels. We should have stats for the number of women present because moderators against the number of attendees in the workshops and the IGF itself. The total women participants at the workshops and the total number of women participants at the larger event as well as the foot fall at the event irrespective of gender.
This helps with pens. In addition to this it is important that each GRC report has information on the total of submitted workshop records for a year. This is included in a model of reporting along with standard format that each report should ideally adhere to. So it becomes easier. That's all. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you.
(Applause.)
>> CHAIR: And thank you very much for going sort of this background. Really working on this research paper. I think there is still a little piece of it left that is sort of in a draft stage. We would like to do some -- I think Baldeep intends to do some interviews as well as accepted it out for peer review, et cetera.
>> BALDEEP GREWAL: Yes.
>> CHAIR: Then we hope ton finalize it.
May I now ask if people have any questions? Comments? Thoughts? For any of the Panelist thes. If we can have a discussion. We have about 20 minutes left.
Yeah, it has been actually really rich, sort of getting three aspects of gender and Internet Governance into the room, right?
So the floor is open.
>> (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> AUDIENCE: I need to run to the airport actually.
>> CHAIR: I will give you the microphone back.
>> AUDIENCE: I came to this meeting exactly a year ago, all one IGF ago in Geneva to talk about, to propose a joint statement with dynamic coalition for publicness to speak about rightly forgotten, how we can be abused to allow men and sexual perpetrators to hide their doings in the past. In the meantime, a lot happened. One of which was the spread of MeToo Movement to South Korea as well and we had many flash points within the country where the women's group demanded abolition of truth definition. In Korea defamation can be punishable even if it is true. So many perpetrators use that as a threat to silence women. You know, for want to make the revelations.
There was a push to abolish truth defamation. I want to renew the proposal now with added mandate for abolition of truth definition which is completely in line with the international human rights standard. The UN Human Rights Council in 2011 issued the general comment 34 on freedom of expression which demanded that there should be a defense of truth to defamation, especially criminal defamation.
And this, of course, an lishes defamation or abolishing right to be forgotten leaves untouched many privacy regulations which concern sexually violent material and forced coming out and I don't know what the politically correct term is now but revenge Porno. We need those laws to be enforced faithfully to the spirit of the law. But what we are talking about is whether people should be forced to forget the information that is vital for ethical evaluation of a male-dominated society and stops of it.
So the statement is there already. I hope that your coalition will work together on this statement. Thank you.
Really, I have a 2:00 o'clock plane to catch. I really wanted to come here.
>> CHAIR: Can I very quickly in two minutes respond to this suggestion? Basically what happened is the dynamic coalition on publicness is a fairly new coalition, right? One of the things the dynamic coalition on gender and Internet Governance has been wanting to do is actually work with other dynamic coalitions so that we can mainstream gender for lack of a better word. Like really push it further and further into Internet Governance processes.
And while the draft statement was prepared last year, and while we did send it out for circulation, for comments, we actually received very few comments. So in that situation we didn't feel comfortable to just finalize the statement, but I think what you've said really resonates, Professor park. I want to say that in India there was a case recently with me too India where a number of journalists spoke out against really well-known journalist who is now, or who was India's Minister of state for foreign affairs. And he was forced to resign.
He did resign, but he resigned saying that he is resigning because he wants to pursue defamation case against the first person who, one particular journalist who spoke out. And so we have the situation where there is civil and criminal defamation laws but people in power typically use criminal defamation to go. Right again that whole truth question has come up where truth is not considered a defense against defamation. So I propose actually going forward this year, but now that we have the statement maybe we will look at it again with the defamation aspect as well in light of me too. And then maybe set up a small Working Group and have like a webinar where we can talk it through. Because I think what does happen is we all receive so many things to review that after a point -- so if we could set up like a small global Working Group we will put out an email to that. We will work on it and get consensus and then issue a joint statement.
How does that sound?
>> AUDIENCE: That sounds great! And I mean, if it is helpful I can even join this dynamic coalition.
>> CHAIR: Yes, I don't think there is a membership, but you should be part. Anybody who comes is part.
(Laughter.) we will have a new category of persons
The thing is, I think you should definitely be part of the Working Group so that we can really pull together members from both coalitions. And really progress it month-by-month. We will also think who at our end can anchor this.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes.
>> CHAIR: And really have global representation. I want to thank you, actually. I know we have been discussing this for awhile. It got to a stage and then sort of stopped.
And I myself was at a loss as to what to do going forward. Thank you for coming. And sort of ensuring it remains on the agenda. We will take it forward this year.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, thank you. And I thought I joined already m I'm so happy to be sharing the ... (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> CHAIR: Thank you so much. No, no, this is really useful. Thank you, because this is a working meeting. Yes.
Okay. So then any other sort of -- so this is one thing we want to report back on this year.
I want to report on one more thing which is very relevant in the me too context. The dynamic coalition drafted a policy on sexual harassment specifically for the IGF. Then again because of complexities of moving things through the system an perhaps our own ignorance about it, it took us some time to actually get it to the multi-stakeholder advisory group, but we were able to do that this year. And we then got a response from the multi-stakeholder advisory group saying that the MAG is willing to consider this online policy and feels it is a positive development. But we need to prepare a rationale for why, given that this is a consultative sort of body to the United Nations, why there is a need for a separate policy when several UN bodies already have their own sexual harassment policies.
So my colleague submit ta, Point of View, has done the background work and we've gone through several UN harassment policies and understand clearly why we need another policy as opposed to adopting those.
That is again something we would like to take forward with the multi-stakeholder advisory group this year. Smita? Yes?
>> SMITA VANNIYAR: I thought that the discussion regarding the defamation was interesting and maybe also take it a bit further because obviously a true defamation is an exceptionallized concept, but wholly the concept of defamation and deconstruct what evidence means, what then truth means. A lot of times we see in a lot of me too cases women are unable to establish the truth aspect of it. And which those sort of standards and then we can maybe open it up to a more larger feminist discussion. That is a very good point of entry of the defamation is seen even in the Pakistani context has been weaponised. Very little defamation cases get to the end but it is a silencing tools. It goes on for years, you have to go to a different city for hearings. That is the entire defamation maybe we can sort of deconstruct it and the whole concept of reputation and what that means and the sort of feminist critique of it might be a good place to explore it.
>> CHAIR: I think that's a great idea. What we might actually do is have two separate statements because the right to be forgotten may be over loaded with defamation otherwise. But we will take this on as well. You had a comment and Vale, you had an comment. Introduce yourself, please?
>> AUDIENCE: My name?
>> CHAIR: Increase, yes.
>> CHAIR: I'm poppy, I'm from South Africa, I'm an IGF Fellow. It's great to see a lot of women sitting at the table and having this discussion. And 90 percent of the people in this room are women. So I want to say yesterday we had a session with the man from Google -- I forgot his name. He was speaking about how we should not focus on making speeches and have conversations but actually get to the part where we take action.
So I have a question. As young people how do we go about going back to our countries and actually starting having these conversations?
So as young girls and women getting involved, getting them, empowering them to get involved in Internet Governance issues and how do we actually come to assess the impact of our conversations and action?
>> CHAIR: Okay, great. And there was one more? Yes?
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Kathy gill list, a lawyer in the United States. I just wanted to follow up the point that was made two people ago about the difficulty of proving the truth.
And say that in terms of what Professor park was saying about you need to add truth as a defense, that is step one. You also need to shift the burden on the accuser that they have the burden to prove falsity. So that that will help alleviate a lot of the tension.
Speaking as an American lawyer that's the way our defamation law generally works. Where the truth is important as a defense, but to make it a useful defense you shift the burden. Make sure that is part of the ask if you push for reform, ask for both.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Latika, I'm helping out with this and working as a consulttant tore BPF gender this year.
One of the things we were talking about, I don't know if this part is taken from the gender report cards but there are two questions at the end of each, one is estimating the total number of participants and the total who were women. Initially it said the total number of women present, but when reviewing this with the Secretariat just before IGF this year I suggested that we change it from women to women and gender variant or nonbinary persons present.
There's something I realised yesterday in the Secretariat room while filling out one of the reports. How do we really estimate this? If you are talking about women as the sex that is again different from talking about women as a gender. You know, in the rooms you can't go up to every single participant and say: What is your gender identity? I was listening to also what you were saying about why the gender report cards were not being submitted on time. That is like a gender problem we are facing with all the reporting. We are not getting any reports on time to be able to put out anything. So I was just wondering, you know, constructively to make this go forward, how do we really get -- how do we have, what kind of pointers can we give to session organisers to help them collect this data in the first place? Even right now sitting in this room, I don't know how many of us identify as women and I don't know how many of us identify as gender variant individuals. I don't know what to put in the record and this lead into the gender report card.
>> CHAIR: Do you want to go ahead?
>> Maybe to respond a little bit because ... yeah.
I have been working on the report card for a long time. I think that this is super, actually, really, really great to see and also great to see the value of it and see how it has changed through the years. And the fight to get the gender report card is something that is compulsory within reporting has not really been -- yeah, it has not always been so obvious, no? I think one thing in relation to the stuff that you are saying about the unevenness in the questions as well is to acknowledge that this is an evolving report card and the challenge that it has in terms of them doing this comparative stuff is becoming clear.
One of the evolutions that was very important is that it is moving away from counting numbers of people to counting, towards an analysis of content, right? I think maybe in that sense it is a little bit more -- that piece of the analysis that you did was more interesting for me because IGF Secretariat does an overall statistics of participants anyway. I actually don't really feel take it is all that necessary to actually measure whether how many people in the room, because it is also a fluid thing. People come and go. Then who is speaking and discussing? Maybe that is the thick that is useful to collect and measure as opposed to you trying to go, are you gender Sis or gender queer? It is a sur ray, are you Cis, are you queer?
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: But yes, so I think just to identify, maybe are there other indicators in which you might also want to start to examine in terms of the cross thematic or cross-sectional thing even at a higher level in terms of how themes are being defined for the IGF and subthemes. Where the gender gets, all of the so call coition issues gets clumped together all the identity issues are clumped together. There are three different themes. This sort of analysis is interesting to do and work much closer with the mag and the Secretariat and people like Latika who is working to see, and that's a instrument, working with people in the Secretariats to make sure that statistics are collected that we can access and analyze. That's a longer -- well, a much more really good work ahead.
It seems if we are doing work with other developing countries it is interesting to have a deeper dive into -- DCs, it is interesting to have a deeper dive into the work of the DCs, that is something we can do on a peer to peer level.
While I have the floor, the last thing is to also see how the gender DC can collaborate much more closer also with the BPF work. That is a little bit of a disconnect. I think the gender DC can play a niewfl interconnecting work with the DCs to make sure that the BPF has a broader view because it is South Africaned in that respect. Vale?
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: I want to reply a little bit. On the national because we have worked supported the national level and many national IGF, women, I really am counting, in gender, it is not possible. It's all male partners, they are not part of the community they discuss. So I think it is important to acknowledge the challenge and then when women's rights activists, sec wal rights activists try to enter this Internet Governance Forum nationally it is hard work. Very online communities it is the first time when there is a day zero, just a session to talk about women in tech. This is like the consolation prize and it is a long effort.
I would say that continuing the conversation, there is also a national and regional Internet Forum or DC. It is very important. When we talk about tools, tools are being given. If it cannot be compulsory, they are having the gender cards, regardless if it is a statistic, the number or more content analysis also at the national level. It is a way to surface the absence.
So if because they very often national, regional IGF go to research, to international, everything, the gender card is a tool on so at the national level so the process and everything is part of one system. Maybe it also brings a tool to the advocates at the national level. But also working through across the border with different groups to see gender in terms of issue, it is spoken, it is a slow base or two to make it first visible and then strategically address the issue.
>> CHAIR: Baldeep, did you want to say something?
>> BALDEEP GREWAL: Yes, I wanted to briefly respond to Latika and Jack's comments. Thank you for bringing that up. That is something I realised while working on the study. I saw that I have very clear stats for participation. That isn't a problem nirp. We have women in the room. We did this. We achieved this. We need to congratulate ourselves.
(Applause.)
>> BALDEEP GREWAL: And I mean, this is my first IGF. I was reporting at a session yesterday. I have been in and out of workshops. It has been quite a revelation.
In regarding to participation specifically and giving numbers for how many women in the room, I hit the same roadblock. It is a delicate issue. Of course, it is a category, so how do you say concretely how many participants. I might be a nonbinary person but I might not be okay with being open about it yet. So I feel like that is something that we can put on the back burner for now and give more focus on speakers and moderators and panels.
Specifically because we simply don't have the numbers for them. There's a reason for that. It is not just a coincidence or oversight. There is a reason why reporting people are not giving these things enough attention.
And there was something else I wanted to say but I can't.
>> CHAIR: We are almost out of time.
>> I wanted to ask also if you can include like if, yes, okay, there are moted raters, we are in the room, but what rooms? And the part, you know, we just.
(Laura.)
Are we only speaking in the children's rights? The coalitions and stuff like that? I mean, I want us to talk about something else. I don't want to see the women in the same places.
>> The study has a list of workshops where we don't yet hf a a presence. This is a good resource.
(Overlapping speakers.)
>> May I say -- my name is Carolina, with LACNIC, the LACNIC is essentially the institution that handles IP addresses for our region. So we are part of what is known as the technical community.
And we also hold, -- exactly. We ar community where gender participation is definitely an issue. So LACNIC essentially holds two events per year where we have a policy process that defines how IP addresses get distributed. This is also a process of Internet Governance, how basically Internet resources are handled.
We definitely are having also a sort of gender challenge in our region. I wanted to share that our organisation is also sort of actively trying to work on the gender balance. We are going to be conducting a sort of initial sort of research to understand why we are having low female participation at our very, very technical events. We have say some 20, you know, that were good years, we had 20 perspiration of women. Actually the IGF to us is like amazing! In terms of female participation. We are working hard to get women sort of participating more actively in sort of the development of digital infrastructure of the Internet.
>> CHAIR: Thank you for that comment. List, we are running out of time. Can you be super brief?
>> LISA GARCIA: Just a quick one. I was just thinking about having also the dynamic coalitions at the regional level of the IGF. Perhaps that is something that could work as well.
>> CHAIR: Sure. I just wanted to answer poppy's question quickly. What I would love to do, my personal dream is to do like a big social media campaign through the year on gender and Internet Governance. So that we are able to take the concept to young people, where young people are. And put it in a more popular format. We also know that not everybody will come to the IGF itself. And also that it has to relate to people's lives, right? Because when I first got into Internet Governance it seeped like a big word and a heavy word. I didn't know what it meant and what my relationship was to it. So that is actually something that we would love to do at some point. And really through the year like really demystify Internet Governance and really relate it to gender in a way where it relates to people's every day lives across the gender spectrum, right? But there is so many ideas, such little time.
On that note also we have been in conversation with Professor from American University who was very much part of the Accessibility and Disability sessions and who talked about how we could mine some of the data from the IGF documents to get a richer understanding of gender. So we are hoping that can become part of the sort of study of how gender is coming into the IGF and the impact that it is having, et cetera.
Thank you. I want to actually thank all our speakers as well as all the people who intervened and everyone in the room for a really rich an stimulating discussion.
Thank you, Vale, thank you, Baldeep, thank you, Laura, thank you Radika for rapporteuring and giving us the notes. I am hoping we are able to get sort of audio feed of the session as well or a video feed. There are so many ideas. You have it? Super! But I feel like we need to actually make a list and systematically start working on it.
So we'll find it from there.
But thank you, everybody. And a round of applause for us all.