The second ministerial-level summit of the Partnership for Information and Democracy will be convened on 22 September 2022, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Ministers from the member states of the Partnership for Information and Democracy and civil society figures such as Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize 2021, will attend the meeting.
The Partnership for Information and Democracy, currently endorsed by 45 States, is the framework for a multilateral reflection on the implementation of democratic guarantees in the global space of communication and information. After a first edition in 2021 already in the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, the forthcoming second edition of the Summit will bring together, among others, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs from states of the Partnership and civil society representatives. The Summit will be opened by remarks from the French Foreign Minister, Catherine Colonna, and the Chair of the Forum on Information and Democracy, Christophe Deloire.
-
New States will publicly announce their endorsement of the Partnership on Information and Democracy at the Summit. Prior to the Summit, the number of signatory countries stands at 45 countries (30 countries at the time of the Partnership on Information and Democracy launch in September 2019)
-
The upcoming Observatory on Information and Democracy will be presented by Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, she co-chairs the Observatory prefiguration group with Angel Gurría, former Secretary General of the OECD.
-
The recommendations of the report How to end infodemics (2020) will be discussed by the ministers, after being presented by Maria Ressa, laureate of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, who co-chaired its working group. The report proposes 250 recommendations for regulation and self-regulation.
-
The proposal for A New Deal for journalism (2021) will be discussed by the ministers, after being presented by Nighat Dad, vice-chair of the Forum. The states will be called upon to support the development of the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), a self-regulatory mechanism promoting the reliability of information
-
The Forum will publish the recommendations of its working group on accountability regimes for social networks and their users. This report will be presented to the states by Damian Tambini, researcher at the London School of Economics and co-chair of the working group.
-
The Forum will announce the launch of its working group on pluralism in algorithms of indexation and curation
By gathering democracies together around concrete recommendations and solutions for implementing democratic safeguards in the digital space, the Summit will enable better coordination of efforts to build a democratic digital space.
About the International Initiative on Information and Democracy
Launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in 2018, the International Initiative on Information and Democracy aims to implement democratic guarantees in the information and communication space.
In less than four years, the initiative has resulted in:
- The publication in 2018 of the Declaration on Information and Democracy by a commission composed of several Nobel laureates, journalists and experts in new technologies;
- The presentation of its guidelines and proposals in major international forums, including the G7 Heads of State and Government in Biarritz (France) in 2019, and more recently the G7 Media in Bonn (Germany);
- On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in 2019, the signing of the International Partnership on Information and Democracy which now brings together 45 countries around the world around common principles;
- The creation of the Partnership’s implementing entity, the Forum on Information and Democracy, by 12 civil society organizations and research centers;
- The production of 350 recommendations to governments on How to end infodemics (2020) and A New Deal for Journalism (2021), which have been widely incorporated in draft European legislation;
- The gathering of an international coalition of 43 civil society and research organizations to promote democratic principles in the digital space.
- The organization of annual summits bringing together the States of the Partnership at ministerial level and representatives of civil society and the world of research, in an approach of multilateralism of democracies