Opportunities for members - UNCTAD civil society hearing 6-7 March, African IP Forum 3-5 April

One of the CI initiatives to be launched at our meeting "Consumers
in the Information Society" on 8-9 March is a new Web-based system
that offers:

• notification of upcoming meetings on information society
  issues that impact consumers;
• the ability to see whether any consumer representatives are
  already attending or not;
• if not, the ability to upload a request for support from CI
  for your organisation to attend; and
• a centralised repository for you to upload your reports of the
  meeting as well as output documents, web links, photos and
  videos.

This system will be demonstrated live at our meeting in March.

However, prior to then, I want to draw your attention to two
opportunities in particular, since it will be too late to arrange
for consumer representatives to attend these meetings once the
system is launched.

These opportunities are:

• A civil society hearing on 6-7 March 2012 to provide
  input into the upcoming UNCTAD XIII.  Most important
  will be to advocate for the amendments that CI suggested to the
  draft negotiating text of UNCTAD XIII, including the need for
  revision of the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection.  In a
  classic example of the lack of transparency of many UN bodies,
  we submitted a written input suggesting 7 key amendments to this
  draft negotiating text last year, of which none were reflected
  in the subsequent draft, and we do not know why.  This is why
  our attendance in person to talk to UNCTAD officials and
  government representatives is so important.  However, the
  meeting clashes with "Consumers in the Information Society", so
  we want to delegate a CI member who is not attending
  our own meeting to represent consumers' interests at the
  UNCTAD civil society hearing.
• The African Intellectual Property Forum, to be held on 3-5
  April in Cape Town.  Plans for this meeting have recently
  come to light, and have horrified public interest intellectual
  property activists and scholars worldwide for its relentlessly
  pro-IP bias.  The meeting is organised by the United States
  Department of Commerce, in league with the governments of France
  and Japan, with sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies Eli
  Lilly and Pfizer, the International Chamber of Commerce
  (ICC)-Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy
  (BASCAP), and Microsoft, amongst others.  African consumer
  representatives are urgently needed to register for the meeting
  and to speak out loudly at every session about the issues of
  access to knowledge and access to medicines that have been
  intentionally omitted from the agenda.

Please contact me off-list to express and explain your interest in
either of the above opportunities, for which your participation
would be supported through our Ford Foundation-funded programme
"Consumer Representation in the Information Society".  I will guide
you personally through the new web-based system which you will use
for reporting, and you can perhaps give feedback on it prior to our
meeting in March.

--
Dr
Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator
Consumers
International
Kuala Lumpur Office for
Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599
The global voice
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