Russia blasts internet governance bias

THE Russian Federation, having taken an active part in the Global Multi-stakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, which was held in São Paulo, Brazil, expressed concern on the biased and non-transparent approach to the organisation and conduct of the event. The Russian side has to admit that the global meeting has not disclosed the goals for which it was convened. The issues of the right of privacy protection against “wire-tapping” of telephone conversations and electronic espionage by intelligence agencies of individual countries were not included in the documents adopted by the global meeting: principles and a roadmap of Internet governance.

On the contrary, these documents actually confirm the right of intelligence services of the countries, in which the basic units of Internet traffic exchange are located, for uncontrolled collection of information about individuals from around the world.

It seems that such unbalanced results of the meeting will contribute to digital inequality between the developed and developing countries, as well as to the blurring of the principle of state sovereignty.

It is alarming that in the final documents of the global meeting, the role of the UN, ITU and other core inter-governmental organisations is either ignored or diminished.

The position towards the UN is contradicting the resolution of the UN General Assembly adopted in November 2013 at the initiative of Brazil and Germany as a co-ordinated reply of the global community to mass human rights violations in the form of national and extra-territorial screening and interception of messages, and collection of personal data.

The recommendations of the mentioned resolution to the member states to develop new principles and standards in this area are also not taken into account.

The Russian Federation proceeds from non-obligatory nature of principles and the roadmap of Internet governance, that were adopted in violation of procedure (without consensus) and are generally ignoring observations made by majority of states and NGOs.

We proceed from the assumption that the final papers of the global meeting cannot be further used as the internationally approved documents.
All reference to the mentioned documents by the core international organisations is believed to be inconsistent. — Embassy of Russian Federation, Harare, Zimbabwe.