Position of the Russian Federation on the outcome of the NETmundial Internet Governance Meeting
The Russian Federation expresses concern on biased and non-transparent approach to the organization and conduct of the NETmundial Internet Governance Meeting (San Paulo, April 2014), in which it has actively participated.
We have to state that the global meeting did not achieve the purpose for which it was convened. The human rights for the protection of privacy against surveillance of telephone conversations and electronic espionage carried out by the intelligence agencies of a number of countries have been ignored in the outcome documents of the meeting: Internet Governance Principles and the Roadmap for the future evolution of the Internet Governance Ecosystem. On the contrary, these documents practically affirm the right for unrestricted collection of personal data around the world by the intelligence services of countries that own the primary facilities for internet-traffic exchange. It appears that such unbalanced results of the meeting will worsen the digital inequality between developed and developing countries and contribute to the dilution of the principle of sovereignty of states.
We are extremely concerned by the disregard and underestimation of the global role of the UN, ITU and other relevant intergovernmental organizations in the outcome documents of the meeting. The position taken in the documents vis-à-vis the United Nations contradicts the UN General Assembly resolution adopted in November 2013 on the initiative of Brazil and Germany as a coordinated response of the international community to the massive human rights violations in the form of national and extraterritorial tracking of messages, their interception and collection of personal data. The recommendations of the said resolution on the elaboration of the new principles and standards in the area by the UN Member States have not been taken into account either.
The Russian Federation’s understanding is that the Principles the Roadmap are of a non-binding nature, which were adopted with violation of the procedural requirements (without consensus) and essentially ignored the comments of the majority of states and non-governmental organizations.
We believe that the outcome documents of the Global Meeting cannot be treated in the future as internationally agreed documents. Any references to these documents by the relevant international organizations would be inappropriate.
