IGF Stocktaking session

13 February 2007

Selected EXCERPTS

from the transcript of the meeting

F.Muguet V0.1 12 March 2007

Corrected for typos and minor errors.

Important statements in bold.

Explanatory notes in italic.

CHAIRMAN DESAI: The Advisory Group, which was charged with the responsibility of helping to organize the Athens meeting of the Internet Governance Forum met yesterday.

And today we are meeting in open consultation.

The purpose of both meetings, yesterday's meeting of the advisory group and this open consultation, is to take stock of the Athens forum, to see what are the lessons that we could learn from that forum, to make an assessment of the extent to which it met expectations that people had so that we can then forward this to the Secretary-General.

As you know, the Secretary-General set up this process essentially for focusing on the Athens meeting.

And the intention was always that after the Athens meeting, we would

evaluate how this process functioned so that we could learn lessons for

the remaining meetings of the forum

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>>FRANCIS MUGUET: Yes. I would like first to point out that we made our response on the discussion space of the forum, and all the three responses, not only in my response, were not taken into account on the Web site of the Internet Governance Forum, and even less on the synthesis paper.

I would like the people to refer to this Internet discussion space.

A few things about the Internet, the meetings in Athens.

Concerning the Web, in fact, the Web site (IGF Athens), it was not possible to most of the organizer to be able to include the schedule of their discussion because of a (computer) bug that lasted for two days. So I think there was a serious shortcoming which prevented some forums to be better known to the

participants.

The other thing is, there was an invitation to all stakeholder to put input on the Wiki -- for example, for a dynamic coalition – and unfortunately, this Wiki has disappeared, at least to my knowledge, without information. And the proposition of the dynamic coalition which has been written into this Wiki has disappeared also.

So this is one of the few things.

Now, concerning more things of content and procedure :

We think that the IGF should closely follow the mandate as determined by the WSIS, and in particular, there is the recommendation 72g ) “,Identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where appropriate, make recommendations. “

We believe this recommendation 72g) is very important, and this brings the questions of how the IGF can make these recommendations, and what should be the procedure to make a recommendation, and this brings us to paragraph 78 b ) “78. ../..The UN Secretary-General should also:establish b) an effective and cost-efficient bureau to support the IGF, ensuring multi-stakeholder participation.” ( text quoted since this paragraph is not quoted on the http://www.intgovforum.org site ) where the bureau and not a Secretariat office has been specifically provided by the text. And we all know that a bureau has a specific meaning in diplomatic terms, and a bureau deals with procedural issues.

So we believe that in order that a recommendation ( on emerging issues ) could be made, then a bureau should be set up in order to determine this procedure, in order to make this recommendation.

We propose that as a first step, as a nuclei of this bureau, for formation of this bureau, that the host country of the next IGF should be first the official ( ie de officio ) member of this bureau and should make consultation with other members of the IGF to form this bureau in order to determine in Rio the procedures to make these recommendations on emerging issues.

Coming back to the problem of emerging issues, we believe that it shall be not a duplication of efforts, and this is in the texts also of the WSIS. That's, in fact, not themes which are related to the Geneva texts : for example, access to knowledge which is interesting by itself, but the IGF should be concerned strictly with governance issues.

Otherwise, if the IGF is also found discussing with other issues, then the ECOSOC and UNESCO and the other, ITU and other relevant international organization which are involved in the action line meetings should be involved in the organization of these workshops.

Now considering the general output for all recommendations so done far in a more informal way, it has been proposed to formalize them in terms of the scheme of request for comments (RFCs), and this has also been the recommendation of the delegate from Indonesia, if I remember well, in Athens; and this, it will be a new conduct, a new conduit, I will say -- a new way to formalize, without -- without binding, in fact -- without binding anything, without binding effect, the output of the IGF.

Otherwise, the IGF shall be just very expensive chat rooms.

The IGF mandate, I believe, is not just being a place of discussion, but a place of action in order to implement the WSIS recommendations.

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>>RALF BENDRATH: I am speaking on behalf of the dynamic coalition on privacy and I want to give you a brief report on what we have done since Athens.

The privacy coalition was established as the outcome of two privacy workshops in Athens at the first IGF meeting, and in coherence with the IGF mandate, its purpose is to foster and facilitate a public-policy debate about privacy issues in the digital age.

We started as a uniquely diverse network of more than 30 actors from government, civil society, business, and international organizations, and we have generated considerable interest and now the coalition gathers participants from more than 50 entities.

Participation is open to any individual interested in supporting the purpose of the coalition, and in order to facilitate broad participation and open discussion,especially on emerging issues, we agreed that unless explicitly stated, the views expressed by participants are not considered as official statements by their respective entities.

We also have an ongoing outreach effort to attract new participants and ensure that appropriate diversity of stakeholders and regional diversity in order to cover the different aspects and perspectives on each issue.

For the moment, we have decided to concentrate on three major themes which is privacy and identity, because at the moment, the Internet is moving from Web 1.0, which is basically linking documents, to Web 2.0, which is basically linking persons. And in this context, there's an emerging layer, so to speak, Internet layer, protocol layer, of identity management.

And we will look into the privacy aspect of this.

We will also, in conformity with the overall theme of the Internet Governance Forum, Internet governance for development, look into the link between privacy and development, which is pretty new and has not really been discussed yet. And we will also look at the links between privacy and freedom of expression, and as Christian Moeller just said, we have close contact with other coalitions that work on these issues. We will develop short, synthetic issue papers in the coming weeks to help structure the debate.

And we will hopefully prepare more debated background reports in the

perspective to Rio.

We had a first face-to-face working session this Sunday here in Geneva.

And have been collaborating online through a mailing list and a WIKI. The WIKI, by the way, this was just raised, the WIKI is still online. It's just not on the intergov forum.org domain anymore. It's still there at IGF2006.info, and that's where you also find the link to the dynamic coalitions.

We have produced a detailed FAQ page describing our activities and working methodologies, and this whole report including the FAQ page and the list of current members is available in the back of the room.

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>>BRAZIL:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I hope I will not have the final word at this moment, as we still have some time for discussing.

But I would like to say that we feel very much encouraged and inspired by your words in summing up our discussions. I believe that you are paying attention to a lot of important issues that are key to the preparation of a meaningful and useful discussion in Rio and beyond.

And we thank you very much for that.

We are also glad to note that there is this continued interest by all stakeholders in taking part of this process, and that is also encouraging because it also proves that it was a good decision that we made in accepting to host the second IGF.

We feel now that this issue is gaining momentum. It has been very well discussed and presented initially in Athens. And now we are taking it with a view to deepening the discussion and to streamlining it so as to have a meaningful contribution to the international community as a whole regarding all aspects related to Internet governance.

We believe that what is most important for us in the preparatory process is the need to streamline the agenda and the format of the meeting, and we are very much interested in following up with you and all interested parties on how we are going to do that.

I was also glad to hear a suggestion that came from a representative of the civil society present here earlier today that was calling our attention to the Tunis Agenda, paragraphs 78 -- in particular, 78b which says about the establishment of a bureau to support the IGF ensuring multistakeholder participation.

I wonder whether we could take the opportunity of this discussion, this open discussion, to sense this idea. And why am I saying that? I believe that the organization of work, as you said, includes a lot of political sensitive issues., and perhaps it would be too much responsibility for the Secretariat alone, even for the secretary-general of the United Nations, to take decisions of policy, of political nature, alone.

I know that the Advisory Group has played -- has done a very good job in preparing for the first IGF, and it should continue working as an Advisory Group to the secretary-general. But, in fact, the decision is that of the secretary-general. It's not that of the Advisory Group.

And it means that it would be perhaps -- even for the Secretariat, it would be more convenient to have the support of a bureau that is constituted, taking into account a balanced geographical representation which is also called for in paragraph 78, and taking into account a balanced multistakeholder participation as well.

As we are touching new grounds of organizing our work, we are not sure how to organize this bureau. But we should try.

And having the responsibility of chairing the second IGF, the Brazilian government would be very much open to discuss that with you and all other interested participants.

For instance, issues that could have -- could be taken up by this bureau could be the selection of themes, the idea if we do need or we don't need a multi-year program, what we do with dynamic coalitions and how do we bring them up to the process, how do we select workshops that are meaningful in terms of the general scope and the agenda of the meeting.

The question of whether the transcripts are enough or the secretariat's

summary is enough as a result or not.

How could we go beyond.

I think that it will be extremely helpful if we could have this sort of bureau, which is a group that would be politically responsible for helping not only the chair, but also the -- you as chairman, and the Secretary-General as well, in presenting some political considerations for this.

I know that a bureau does not touch on -- take political decisions on substance, but on -- we are talking -- all these issues are related to the organization of work, and it's normal that at any U.N. conference there is a bureau to help precisely on the organization of work, which includes agenda and so on.

So that's the -- there's one last comment that I would like to make regarding your reference to the -- how to attract interest from developing countries.

Well, this is, indeed, an important issue, and what I think we have to bear in mind here is that the access to the Internet is unevenly distributed around the world, Aand if we take the developing world, we will see that this figure may be roughly around 10 or perhaps less than 10% of the population with access to the ( internet ) -- of course, it varies from country to country.

In the Brazilian case, it's around 15%, but it shows that there is a huge percentage of the population in the developing world who still do not have access to the Internet, and that is a cause of the digital divide.

That is the most clear example of how the digital divide manifests and how these people are deprived from -- even from citizenship and from access to information.

And for governments, it is important that when we talk about Internet governance, we are not focusing only on the users or only on those who are educated to access the Internet and to use it and even to collaborate with it. But we should also think and perhaps primarily think on those huge mass of people who do not yet have access, considering also that the trend is that there is a growing trend in terms of access, and we should devise ways and means to accelerate it and to include as much as possible as -- again, as a way of creating a people-centered, all-inclusive, and development-oriented information society.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: If I may just clarify on the question of the paragraph that you talked about of the bureau, this was discussed last February.

And it was clarified by -- then by the people who were involved in the negotiations that they had -- the bureau was basically -- what we called Advisory Group was supposed to be the same. The reason for this is, this is not a membership body, there's nobody who can elect a bureau, because there's no membership.

So who's going to elect a bureau? So I would say that that was discussed last February.

And the -- it was clarified that what they had in mind when this paragraph was negotiated by the people who were involved in the negotiations was that this would be the -- the Advisory Group would be that.

Now, what I think is important is the procedure for the constitution of the Advisory Group.

Many questions have been raised about this, about its composition, its membership, the nature of the process, annd those certainly are things which I will convey to the Secretary-General.

But it was discussed a year ago.

Because, basically, the question is that this is not a membership forum.

So there is no electorate there to -- to decide that -- A, B, C.

We are used to a system in the U.N. where we have only governments. So we can use regional groups and say, "This is the way it will be." But when you have a multistakeholder forum with everybody on an equal basis, the very process of constituting a bureau itself is problematic, but even more so when there's no membership.

It's an open door.

So that was -- Then we clarified.

We asked this question to the people that sponsored.

And they said, "This is what we had in mind."

Because I said, "How do I constitute a bureau in an open forum?" and then they explained that this is how it was supposed -- we thought. But I just thought -- But these are surely issues which can be looked at.

And this is partly the reason why we need to also connect the forum with the high-level processes which oversee WSIS. But I don't think it's possible for us to resolve this issue. But when we clarified it, this is the way we had done it. And I will certainly convey to the Secretary-General this --

particularly on how the Advisory Group is to be constituted.

That, I think, is part of the -- because it's a multistakeholder group.It represents countries as well as others.

And this is -- I just thought I would clarify that this was discussed.

If you look up in the transcripts of the last February meeting, you will see extensive discussion on this, including the clarifications which came from the people involved in the negotiating process.

But nothing is cast in stone. Anything can be revisited, redone, and there's no reason why we have to stick to any -- I'm just saying, right now, we are -- my advice would be to the Secretary-General yes to a multistakeholder forum, yes to have -- constitute an Advisory Group to plan the -- this forum.

And that these are the questions which have been raised about the constitution of the Advisory Group, which he may wish to take into account. and, of course, all of the other questions that I have talked about.

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>>RALF BEUDRATH: Thank you. I would like to address two issues.

One is on which themes we should address at the next meeting, and one is how far can the IGF go in terms of output.

On the first issue, I think just the fact that we all can discuss in a very open and transparent and inclusive, multistakeholder setting now does not mean we don't have different opinions anymore on many of the issues.

And I think we shouldn't really shy away from addressing critical issues that are really politically contested. That is part of the job and the mandate of the IGF.

And I would like to relate to what was said earlier this morning by the representative from the Third World Network, but also by others, that the IGF also should address issues like critical Internet resources, as one example.

I could also say as a privacy advocate that we should address privacy violations, the rise of the surveillance state under the guise of the war on terror.

That is rising on the national level, we have a fight with our own government on this. But a lot of these things are decided on the global or international level. This is something where IGF clearly has a role.

And we shouldn't shy away from discussing these.

And I think the idea that the IGF is a non-negotiating body is a great chance to have really open discussions about these things without getting into the square bracket, you know, trenches.

The second point is, how far should the IGF go in terms of output. Paragraph 72g of the Tunis Agenda clearly says, at least for emerging issues, that the IGF can issue recommendations, and this is definitely something we will address in the dynamic coalition on privacy.

I am not yet sure how we will handle this -- how we will come up with

outcomes.

But I wouldn't say just because we don't have a defined membership it's not possible to agree on anything. If I look back on the -- to the WSIS process, where I participated in civil society, there was no clear membership on who was a member of civil society, who can decide and vote and whatever on our joint documents. But we still managed to come up with a lot of joint documents, a lot of joint statements, and even with two large, about 20 pages each, civil society declarations for the two summits. That was possible. And we just used maybe more innovative, more open, more tolerant mechanisms instead of the diplomatic negotiation mechanism.

There are mechanisms like the IETF is using rough consensus, things like that. As you said, we are entering uncharted waters here, so we have to be creative. But I think we should discuss and think about how to come up with recommendations and outputs like this.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: Yes.

I wish we could introduce the rough consensus method into diplomacy. But, unfortunately, we can't. It would be wonderful to have a procedure in diplomacy where you say, "Everybody but other than the nut case has agreed." But, unfortunately, that's not possible.

>>BRAZIL: Yes, Mr. Chairman.

I am a member -- Carlos Afonso is my name.I am a member representing civil society in the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee. And I would like to read a statement by the dynamic coalition on the Internet bill of rights, if I may. I am participating in that dynamic coalition as well.

The dynamic coalition on the Internet bill of rights would like to report to the IGF community about its activities and progress. We have recently established a Web site at the URL internet-bill-of-rights.org in a mailing list which can be accessed and subscribed by the Web site.

We plan to use these online tools as the main venue for our work.We encourage all stakeholders who are interested in this matter to join the mailing list, and we plan to devote the next few months in doing outreach and increase participation. We are fully aware of the need to build on existing statements of human rights and duties and to interact with other related efforts.

Our project has been started to provide a meeting point inside a framework of a process of the United Nations, without any predefined outcome, both in terms of form and of substance.

Collective thinking is necessary to understand, for example, the appropriate degree of formalization and whether the objective could be one document or a series of documents, and how to ensure that any result is kept up to date with the speedy evolution of technologies.

We do not pretend to know everything or have ready solutions, but we believe in the need to gather an international environment to devote the utmost attention to this matter in advanced declaration, formalization of consensus about it. Consequently, we would like to devote the months leading to Rio to finding agreed answers to the following two questions:

One, which are the appropriate forms and instruments to implement and better define human rights and duties in the Internet environment ?

Two, what areas and types of rights and duties should be part of this work and of its results?

We welcome the generous offer by the government of Italy to host an international meeting on this matter and suggest that it be focused on the two questions above.

At the same time, we stress the importance of this matter and of human rights in general and would like that they are given better evidence and attention in Rio than it was in Athens, where they were collated with other important matters such as intellectual property rights and access to knowledge.

Thus, we propose the human rights and the bill of rights become one issue grouping itself, starting from the Rio meeting.Moreover, we propose that the bill of rights becomes one of the main working items of the IGF in the overall, with the objective to reach consensus and release documents and other results pertaining to this issue by the last IGF meeting in 2010.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: Louis Pouzin, of EuroLinc

>>LOUIS POUZIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would just like to come back a little bit on questions which have been

partially discussed, but I think not completely resolved. I think I appreciate very much the argument you gave about -- at least against the bureau, because we are not a membership body here in IGF. And I think it's a very valid argument. However, there are still functions in the IGF mandate which cannot be fulfilled unless we have procedures in place for just to do the work; and that's a number of functions which are labeled under the paragraph 72 in the Tunis Agenda.

So I would suggest that even if you're not talking about bureau, we still have a group of people who would identify or try to define procedures in Rio for helping the work of the participants, in particular, for example, for the subject which was just mentioned by a colleague, Bendrath, from Germany, emerging issues and how do we report on that, how to make recommendations, if needed, hard to distribute documents, and so on.

We have suggested RFCs, for example. So there are a number of partially technical, partially administrative questions which needs some kind of guidelines to be executed. So I would suggest that since Brazil is the next in line for organizing the next IGF meeting, that this subject be part of the program of the Rio meeting. In other words, setting up or proposing procedures for helping the work of the participants. Actually, if we need a structure for that, we might call that a dynamic coalition. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, my name is Wolfgang Kleinwaechter from the University of Aarhus, and I'm also a special advisor member of the Advisory Group.

Again and again both yesterday and today, we have heard that people want to have a more concrete outcome from the forum in the form of recommendations or something else.

My conclusion from the success of the Athens meeting is, the success became possible because there were no negotiations -- there was no negotiation process. This played an extremely important role to allow people to speak much more freely in an environment where they had in the end of the day not to vote in favor or against a certain text So I would really warn the group to go down this road and to say, okay, probably in the second and third forum, you know, we start something like a semi or quasi negotiation process to come out with some recommendations. It's not only the fact that by its statute, the IGF is not a negotiation body. Because the IGF has -- is not a decision-making body. So it's really in the spirit of discussion, that there is no need to have any consensus at the end of the day, even not a rough consensus. On the other hand, it's very understandable that people, you know, want to take something home, black and white, and while the whole forum is an innovation and we have entered uncharted territory, probably we can find also an innovation, you know, with regard to the final results. At the moment, the final result is the full text, you know, hundreds of pages, transcripts, where you can say, okay, this is what the forum has produced. The other alternative would be to have a document of two or three pages. But probably we can be innovative to have something in between.

The forum was established to send messages to the organizations involved in the process in Athens. So it means organizations like the ITU, like UNESCO, like ICANN, like IETF, and others, and to say this is what we discussed, and, here, this is an input for you. Please take this into consideration. And probably we can create a new, you know, form of this which we could call message, messages from the IGF.It is not a recommendation, it is not a resolution, it is not any declaration or something like that. This is just a message. And we can also send mixed messages, so that -- say, okay, one message is this, but we have to the same issue also another message, but it's now up to you, to the decision-making body to consider these mixed messages and then to start the negotiation process where you have an appropriate organization which has a mandate to negotiate a special issue.

So that means what I want to call you for is to be all the more innovative with regard to results and to go beyond our established system where we have recommendations, resolutions, declarations, and things like that.

And having the floor, you know, let me inform you also about the efforts which has been done in the last couple of months for the -- in the academic community. As you'll remember, we have launched a global Internet governance academic network, GIGAnet, with the first symposium in Athens, and we are planning now to have a second academic symposium in Rio. And there will be a call for papers published immediately after this meeting here, and we hope that people in your environment, which are linked to the academic community will be encouraged by you to make contributions to the academic analysis, and furthermore, we have also finished the preparation for the launch of the first summer school on Internet governance. This will take place in July and August in Germany, and the call for applications for the summer school has been distributed here already in this room on the table, and there's a special Web site where you can find all the information for the European summer school on Internet governance.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: The Third World Network.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, as Third World Network, we welcome the Chair's comments regarding our earlier statement, and we can supply supporting information on request.

On the composition of the Advisory Group or your recommendations thereto, we would like to transpose our concerns regarding the safeguarding of transparency and the avoidance of conflict of interest in relation to the fact that delegates, panelists, and Advisory Group or bureau members, who may have an interest or position in the current Internet governance arrangements, be asked to disclose their relationship with current governance structures of critical Internet resources, whether national or international. But as you can appreciate, there is some confusion on what exactly is national or international. So we would like it at both these levels. In the hope that no one would oppose transparency or avoidance of conflict of interest, I'm sure that we can get some sort of rough consensus on this issue.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: I don't see any problem on that. In fact, if there's any lack of knowledge, let us know. We'll let you know.

There's no problem whatever in everybody knowing what individual affiliations are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

There is absolutely nothing. Let me tell you one thing. My only affiliation is that I happen to subscribe to a whole series of semi-reliable Internet services in India. No other role. No board, nothing.

>>JEAN-FRANCOIS MORFIN: I am from INTLnet. We are a very old organization. We were created in 1978. I have two small questions.

The first one is, I understand what the president said about the Advisory Group and the bureau. But I am not sure that I understood why the legitimacy of the Advisory Group representing something which has no membership would be different from a bureau representing something which has started having some face-to-face relationship. As long as I have understood the ( bureau, the bureau was created -- ) the Advisory Group (it) was created in February of last year to support the Athens meeting, and I find extremely welcome the idea of a new kind of bureau following the Tunis recommendation, and taking advantage from the experience of Athens which was very positive.

The second point I would like to make is that usually we have associated the governance of the Internet to the numbering and the naming. This is done through the IANA.

There is two important new additions to the IANA.

The first one has been the addition of the codes for languages, which is by far and away the most important database of registry in the IANA, and the second point is a question of its evolution, architectural revolution from decentralized to either centralized or distributed.

On these four points, today the IETF is discussing decisional options which will engage forever the new form of the Internet. This is on naming, addressing, all languages and wiring and who is going to allocate the IP addresses. Will it be a worldwide system or will that be a ccTLD/LAC system.

We can approve this, we can disapprove this, but I think we cannot be unconcerned by this. And this is typically something that the IGF is meant for.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI: It's okay. I still have lots of commitments in India and there's a time difference. It's already 9:00 at night in India so I still have to go back and work on a newspaper column. But that's a different matter. I would say that I think the further discussions that we have had have been very valuable.

I think the -- Let me explain this question about bureau, et cetera, which people keep coming up with. It was discussed a year ago, but the term "bureau" was not used either for Secretariat or for the Advisory Group because the word "bureau" has a very precise meaning in the U.N. System, and it's for that reason it was felt that we should avoid using the word "bureau." You can call anything a bureau if you want. I think the important thing is transparency, and most important of all, to preserve this openness of the decision-making processes that people know why something is being done and what is being done so there's a full sense of engagement.

Again, I think several people have been mentioning the idea about the making sure about the issues. As I said, I don't think there's anything in the mandate which precludes any issue from being discussed in the IGF , But I would urge one thing. If the IGF is to discuss controversial issues, it should discuss them within a framework of a debate of good faith, and the sense of a debate of good faith is you must be prepared to be convinced by the other person. It's not a debate of good faith if you are just going to come there and knowing that you intend to disagree with the other person and, therefore, are not even willing to listen to what the other person is going to say. The essence of a debate of good faith is the willingness to go into debate ready to be persuaded that you are wrong. Not going into debate in order to persuade the other person that they are wrong.

If we can preserve this, if we can preserve this sense of a forum where people can talk openly, freely, and in good faith in the philosophical sense good faith, the way I was talking, then I think there's absolutely nothing which cannot be discussed fruitfully in the IGF. Now, if we don't have that, it still does not preclude that we discuss controversial issues. All that will happen is it will not be very fruitful discussion. If we all state known positions and walk away feeling happy that we have stated our known positions. And well, fine, if that helps you, that helps, but it's very unlikely to help.

The IGF can help when there is an attempt at trying to find common ground, an attempt at understanding which can then be taken up somewhere else. It's useful also in identifying issues which are not being addressed elsewhere and which need to be picked up, and where, if you like, early work can be done in the IGF.

There are open questions which have come up about outcomes, et cetera, and there is language in paragraph 72 which talks of recommendations as appropriate, and we still do not have a process for figuring out how to get to those recommendations. But these are things which will evolve.

A year ago when we started, everything was up in the air. Now at least we have gotten one point, which is this basic structure after multistakeholder process is something that has been agreed. We have some issues as to how we manage this multistakeholder process. We will learn as we go along, and perhaps it will keep evolving as we proceed from meeting to meeting.

So I just wanted to conclude by thanking all of you. You have been most helpful. I certainly have learned a lot listening to all of you in terms of what I would wish to convey to the -- well, the only thing, final thing I wanted to mention was I do not know what decisions will be taken by the secretary-general on the future arrangements for the organization of these meetings. And it would be presumptuous of me to assume anything. But I will make that presumption, and on the presumption that he continues with the present modalities, there is a thought that there would be a meeting around the same time as the meeting mentioned by Charles Geiger which is in May on the 23rd of May. I just want to mention that now in the case of those of you who have to juggle schedules, you can start juggling your schedules now. But as I said, there are no presumptions here because we still have to wait and see what are the particular decisions that will be taken by the secretary-general to discharge the responsibilities which have been given to him under the Tunis decisions. And I cannot, at this point, make any firm commitment on what those -- those positions would be. But assuming that they are the present firm, then 23rd May is the date that is being considered here.

So thank you very much. You all have been very helpful and very good, so you have one hour off from the time that we had assigned to us.

Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]