The United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) is calling on civil society and individuals to submit names of candidates from developed and developing countries as well as from economies in transition, all geographic areas, and policy orientations to serve as Civil Society representatives on the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.
This announcement can be found at http://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx?OriginalVersionID=1193.
This call was borne out of the outcome document of the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis [1, para 69] which contains a call for “enhanced cooperation in the future, to enable governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities, in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, but not in the day-to-day technical and operational matters, that do not impact on international public policy issues.” So far there has been little to no agreement on how this should be implemented.
In lieu of this, the UN General Assembly has asked the Chair of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) to “establish a working group to develop recommendations on how to further implement enhanced cooperation as envisioned in the Tunis Agenda.” This will continue work done by an earlier CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation, that was active from 2013-2014.
There will be five Civil Society representatives on this Working Group, one from each UN region. These civil society representatives will be selected by the Civil Society Coordination Group (CSCG).
Nominees are asked to consider a service period of 2016-2017 (and eventually the beginning of 2018).
Shortlists should be submitted to the CSCG’s nominations committee (nomcom) via the email address nomcom06@internetgov-cs.org.
The deadline is 15 March 2016.
Independent Civil Society experts (i.e. those who are not nominated by a civil society network or other community) can also send self-nominations directly to the CSCG nomcom by the same deadline.
More information about the WG proposal can be found at http://unctad.org/meetings/en/Presentation/CSTD_2015_s11_Major_en.pdf .
