IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
16 SEPTEMBER 10
0900
COMMONWEALTH PROPOSALS ON CHILD SAFETY ON THE INTERNET
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> JOSEPH TABONE: Right, welcome ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this session, just to make sure you are in the right room this is the session about the Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum. I would like to thank you for being here, I think we're going to have to shout in order to be heard. Can you all hear me and can you all understand me? It will get noisier as the next session starts.
What we're going to do this morning, we have two hours, you know, for this session, and the way that we are organizing our time is we are very dedicated to forty minutes for the first part of the session and providing you with a regional round up, what has been happening in very different parts of the Commonwealth, and then of the major or main apart of the time we will focus on the initiatives from the past year which has been a compilation on child protection.
I have I've had the opportunity to report at a plenary on the CIGF, and I will not spend very much time in going through that I'll just touch on that briefly.
(Audio issue.)
>> JOSEPH TABONE: and that has been very well received. I think I will stop there now and before starting with the regional round up I wanted to introduce my colleague, from the Commonwealth, Abhinav Bahi.
>> ABHINAV BAHI: Thanks, Joe, I want to thank you all for being here. My name is Abhinav. I work specifically on IT for development issues with the Commonwealth Secretariat. I thought I would spend a couple of minutes, very brief amount of time, I don't want to take too much time because we have a focused agenda and for those of you who don't know of our activities and organisation, the Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 54 member states. We have quite a diverse group, we cover all six continents, we have 36% of the world's population and 56% are youth and what we have today is going to grow more relevant as the youth gets on the internet. Our members cover all sizes, Canada, India, the largest population, and small island states which have populations of less than 1.5 million who have their own specific development needs. Again, we have a range of developed and developing countries, the UK and Canada and we have emerging markets such as India and some of the least developed countries as well. So we are a unique mix of nations and what this creates is unique opportunities for sharing knowledge, skill and capacity in the organisation. We are headquartered in London and led by the secretary general, Secretariat Chengetai Masango who is from India, and we have a good governance and economic track and I wanted to focus on the work we do with governance and economic and social development, specifically as it relates to the IT programs that we run.
So what the Commonwealth does, as Joe mentioned, we run a series of capacity building programs to help countries with their IT for development needs and this is done in a series of programs and workshops, and regional workshops that folks on specific aspects or country needs in a particular region and we have in country placement of experts based on country needs. To give you an example, recently we worked on creating the nationalized city strategy for Tonga and that was a programme that we specifically created at their request. There are a number of demand led initiatives that we have created and I will be happy to talk about them in detail at the end of the session for those of you who are interested.
Another programme that we are involved with is the Commonwealth Connects programme, which is a funded programme that Joe alluded to and the Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum has constituted this. We are happy to be here and we're happy that you're here and we realise that you do have different sessions that you could attend to really happy that you are interested in we have to say here. Don't want to delay the proceedings any further but I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have with that I'll turn it back to Joe, thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you, very much. I think we can proceed with the regional round up and if I could call on Rodney Taylor who is the business development manager of the Caribbean Union, so Rodney?
>> RODNEY TAYLOR: Thank you very much. I'm Rodney Taylor, from the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, and we were mandated by the Secretariat to deal with the issue of internet governance, and we had a forum, as my colleague from Saint Lucia pointed out on Monday, and we have had a longstanding history of discussing the issues, and this year we held our 6th governance forum in August. When we started the issues were not very clear, of course it consists of 15 states in the Caribbean and in 2007 we held a conference on internet governance to try to raise the level of awareness by ministers. These events served to identify and prioritize internet governance issues within the region, and it was advanced through the creation of online discussion forums, informal working groups, working liaisons with regional and international internet administrative agencies and other events. The CTU developed a framework published in 2009 and there were 5 years that needed attention, those areas were internet content, public awareness and capacity building and research and internet governance to name some. The recommendations outlined in this policy framework would be subject to this review and now we have to make the distinction between the CIGF and this would help to identify the public policy issues relative to internet governance in the region. One of the initiatives to promote public awareness which is strategic number four of the policy framework is the Caribbean ICT road show. A significant amount of time is devoted during this road show to a youth forum which seeks to engage young people by focusing on issues that are directly relevant to them and in conjunction with this there is a forum for parents representing the dangers of cyberspace and what parents don't know. One presentation, for example, that would protect children in cyberspace and parents knowing about the internet and keeping up with the technology, particularly in many places in the Caribbean and in other places I'm sure, many children are more advanced than their parents and the parents have yet to understand the dangers in cyberspace. Some of our recommendations include that parents familiarize themselves with the popular web sites that people often visit, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et cetera. And that they keep the lines of communication open with their children. They have an idea of what is happening online and they provide child friendly software for those who are more technologically knowledgeable. We also provide during this forum a number of reference sites that parents can go to, such as protectouryoung.com, et cetera. All of these are to raise the level of awareness and to protect children and help them understand that social networking web sites on the down side of course there are benefits but on the down side it can lead to withdrawal of personal, social interaction because the virtual world becomes more important and this represents a challenge as well. With respect to the legislation within the region, unfortunately, parties are not harmonized. Barbados, where I'm from has a computer misuse act and under Second 13, which is the prohibited conduct it addresses the issue of child pornography and outlines a person who knowingly publishes child pornography through a computer or produces it or possesses child pornography would be subject to a fine of $50,000 or five years or both.
In the case of a corporation it's $200,000 so they're pretty heavy penalties and the law goes on to define what child pornography is and there is now other legislation that seeks to protect children on line in any form. Jamaica does not address the issue of online protection, Trinidad and Tobago, are the same thing applies, in Bahamas there is none. We hosted the first children's festival to mark world telecommunication and cyberspace day. It was held to raise awareness about creating a secure online environment for children. The ICT festival had four workshops for children ages 9 to 14 and one for parents and teachers, the latter covered the topic "educating children about online risks" with respect to the forum, regionally we have raised awareness and I think there will be legislative support for raising awareness and the CTU is committed to supporting this endeavor. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much, Rod, and we now move to west Africa and we have Freda Ruth Murray Bruce, Nigerian Communications Commission. So Freda?
>> FREDA RUTH MURRAY BRUCE: Thank you very much, I hope I'm a bit audible, can everybody hear me? Thank you. Okay, I'm just going to give an overview of where we are in West Africa, what we've done so far online, child internet safety online and basically the challenges we have, the initiative and what recommendations we have both at an international level and also at the Commonwealth level. First of all, West Africa has a population of 300 million of which half of that actually you would say is Nigeria, they have 150 million population. You have English, and French speaking people and that has implications when you start developing regulations and also with these 16 countries you have some that are Muslim, Christian, and when you talk about protection and relevant legislation, then you know social and really just bias has a way when you talk about what you consider adequate levels of protection. In West Africa internet use is mostly done at public internet cafes, which I will explain implications later and also on telephones because most of the operators, are pay as you go service for internet use on the phones. Now, what are the laws that we have? As we all know we have general international laws that protect children, we have the 1959 convention on the right of the child which has been ratified by all UN member states. We also have the African chatter on the rights and the welfare of the child which has been ratified by nearly all African states as well and in 2001, the heads of state declared a decade to promote the rights of the child. Obviously problems we have with most of these things it is unfortunately more rhetoric at this time than actually laws that, you know, are applicable or enforceable. Nigeria, where I'm from, has a Child Right Act, which has been ratified by about 60 states in Nigeria. Several West African nations have developed national strategies on human rights and protection but unfortunately, there is no enforce ability in most of these things. When it comes to internet use it is largely regulated in West Africa, we have inadequate laws, regionally I don't think we have anything but every country tries to start little things but I don't think we can achieve very much if we work as individual nations. Now, one of the main issues we have that makes online safety a problem, I think we have social problems in West Africa that have actually played a part. It's like we all come on and say the same thing "access" but we don't have a lot of fixed band broad band, something we don't have, and we have lack of accessible computers where you have poor nations computers are seen as luxury items and we have unfortunately poor electricity. I raise my hands and say Nigeria is probably one of the worst and also you have the cost of band width, both local and international. As a result of all this, this is an even stronger demand for internet use to be at internet cafes, not at home. Once you have been at cafes, there is not a parental protection so a lot of internet use exists there. Another problem is you have the general issue of poverty, means that in terms of on the food chain, this is not the greatest priority for the government. When we started with telephone, mobile telephones, everybody wanted to have phones, nobody cared about quality of service or afford ability, it's the same thing now. With most of the country unable to have access at all, it's not really the priority of government, I'm not saying they don't care about it but it's not real their priority now to talk about policing because they're trying to grow access, grow more people using the internet not trying to find ways to hold it and it's somewhat perceived as a problem of the rich. Because you have a great percentage of people who are illiterate, when you have parents who are unable to monitor internet use of their children, I mean, having a child who can use the internet already says you have arrived so you don't go and start saying "what are you doing?" Because most don't understand. The other problem we have is the global attractiveness of social networking sites. My organisation actually spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year trying to provide subsidies for internet use across Nigeria and on a recent monitoring trip we went to the internet cafe to find out the use and how people are making use of it and 8 out of 10 computers, what you had were Facebook. You didn't have schoolwork or looking for jobs, I was personally demoralized. When you have these problems you are going to be fraud and crime, because that's what they are exposed to. And global access affects them as well. So what are West Africa and Nigeria doing? I have to be honest, Nigeria is 150 million, it's difficult to police what has been happening everywhere, when we have our IGFs set in discussion and things are brought out, income West Africa most of the problems have to do with the cost of access, broad band and all that but even our last meeting the issue of child protection came up. But there are different initiatives taking place across parts of West Africa and there was something organized with support from the Microsoft foundation about child safety and the internet age across a few countries in West Africa not in Nigeria. You have special initiatives for developing countries and they recently organised a forum in Nigeria and the telecommunications companies in Nigeria talked about protecting the child online, the African security association protecting children online forums, simply put there are quite a few initiatives and most of them have been basically the private sector, mostly the operators and also big companies like Microsoft and civil society because usually they are championed by civil society. We don't have too many initiatives by the government but we'll get there and there are also a lot of campaigns, targeting parents. Because at the end of the day, people say "it takes a village to raise a child" but at the end of the day somebody has to be fundamental to the training and that is usually the parents. So there are trainings currently in west Africa, targeting and informing parents of the problems online. We all know them but in Africa this is the worst, West Africa, why? Because we don't have adequate laws or legislation and people that pray on the young understand we don't have the structure to catch them. So parents are advised on pornography, pedophiles, online issues, et cetera. And they are educated about soft wears and how they are used and the civil society is trying to get the youth to protect themselves. Since most internet users in cafes are on the phones so the parents are not there so you talk to the kids and you teach them how to protect themselves so that is where civil society comes in. At the same time periodically when there was a problem the government got the ISPs to block sites but this was usually for political reasons especially when you have really just problems but I think there has to be an increased use of ISPs blocking certain sites and you have various targeting schools, for example, my office, every year we give computers, laptop to 800 schools across Nigeria, it's like 80 schools and part of the things we do is train, train them on the need to actually train children how to protect themselves online and I'm sure the initiatives like that are taking place and at the same time Telco in West Africa understanding the issue of corporate responsibility and good governance are working toward taking part in conferences and providing support to civil society and government to carry out these things. Now, I hope I've had time to breathe because I tend to talk fast! I don't think I've actually had time to breathe so far. So what I would recommend as initiatives and I said government initiatives or intervention, these are not necessarily all international government, the regional and Commonwealth, and also some international. One of the primary things I will talk about has to do with the development of international instrument on child online safety. I say this because this is critical for West Africa. I am not saying that this should be accepted as the law. Let's be honest, unfortunately in a few things in the world especially with online things, we tend to be followers, rather than leaders and at the same time issues of safety and security and openness and are more things that the developed world has you are a ahead of us, we are dealing with basic access and still trying to get access. Now we have the situation, we have countries who are different religious beliefs and they have a great bias when it comes to setting law so it's difficult to set laws within ourselves but with an international instrument it's easier and this has happened many times, the global laws, that will then develop regional and national instruments culled from the international. So in order for us to be able to develop properly subregional laws we need an international law that everybody can pull from and then we can develop other laws. The other thing is that we need more civil society calls on government. I will give a recent example. We had a form measure presidential candidate in Nigeria who came out trying to marry a 13 year old Egyptian girl and everybody kept quiet, the minister responsible for children, did not speak up and the civil society started making such a fuss this was three months ago it became such a big issue, he had to come out and speak the Egyptian father had to say, basically, that thing disappeared because and he has lost his reputation and it made me understand that wean in West Africa civil society is powerful! And I think we need to really empower the civil society because when they start speaking government listens. We need measures like hardware and software based tools for secure internet use and we need cross line and bilateral corporations fighting crime, the internet is the largest nation in the world, I can't even call it a country, it's a nation of 36 billion people, no one nation can do it on its own and on the national level we have interagency collaboration. You know these are more difficult in Africa because we don't have data basis and stuff but I think with additional help from the Commonwealth, things like this can happen. We need a database of practitioners on child safety. We need a database so we can basically we need synergy and as a government we need to ensure that there is regulation of internet use, everybody has been weary on regulating internet, we need that. I hope I have not spoken too much.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Freda, well done, thank you. Unfortunately Freda hasn't been feeling well. I think we can move on to Ang Peng Hwa, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and he will be talking to us about initiatives in that very part of Asia, thank you very much.
>> ANG PENG HWA: Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Joseph, am I speaking? I'm told not to eat the mic. You all know of this thing called a chat room? We are in an off line chat room! I'm trying to get my own slides up by myself! Okay, well, my the reason for me being here is that I was involved in something before, a field initiative to monitor the internet and organisations regarding freedom of expression, but let me say that on the Asia Pacific front we don't have too much by way of child protection. I'm probably in fact, we did discuss didn't discuss child protection at all and I think the reason is similar to what Freda said, it was our first meeting, so we were looking at other issues that seemed more pressing at this point in time. But let me say for Asia there are things that can be shared with the Commonwealth and with the rest of the world. First of all, there is a high penetration of broad band in Asia, my friend from South Korea, they lead the world in broad band penetration, high rate of penetration there, 97, 98%, right? So everybody has broad band there, just about. But there is what you might consider a disadvantage, sort of like opposite of the problem Freda has where they have no broad band, it does have some disadvantage and I will talk a bit about that. The main thing that can be learned from Asia is that there are some best practices that could be deployed in the rest of the world.
There is, for example, filtering, and my one sense is that filtering should be used, for example, in education, meaning that any school that wants to use internet should filter it for usually stuff, pornography or any distractions, and I teach in the University and use of the computer can be distracting, when you speak everybody's laptop is up and some of them are on Facebook, also, as what Freda said. I think the filtering issue is major, and you should filter content, for example. I want to talk about the issue of gaming, besides Facebook the other big use of internet in Asia is for gaming and apparently in Asia we are very, very big, so the big MMORG, massively multi player online role playing games, where you act as a warlord, a wizard, this is new and available because of internet, my daughter has a big exam coming up but she is a leader of one of these clans, they play at 2 and 3 a.m., some of her friends wake up at 4 a.m. to play the games so they go to school drowsy so this is a disadvantage. I think what can be learned, for example, with Korea, Korea has something called information ethics commission. When I first heard it Kim, don't get angry at me when I first heard it I laughed, Information Ethics Committee it was meant to be a bunch of sen censors, but they have moved on, they have lawyers and counselors, to advise you what to do, you get defamed by the media, what do you do? You call a media regulator, you call them up and ask them what do I do? And they will give you advice, forward looking. They have internet addiction counseling. I don't know whether it's an Asian phenomenon, in Japan we have, for example, people who are cocooning, guys, I don't know why it's just guys, they stay in the home, they don't come out, food is brought to them under the door, and they don't come out for a year, the only contact with the world is through the internet, gaming, social media and that's all they do. Eventually they do get out of it but apparently not everybody does so it's an alarming situation. In Korea they have that and in China they have addiction, in Singapore we haven't looked at a phenomenon but we think there is something similar. It looks like right now based on the world we have it looks like it's a phenomenon that arises because of the communal or community use, a group coming together so you are having this community of friends when you are online so you don't want to break up this group. Some people ask what's different about games when you play off line and in the MMORG, everybody has a role. So you could be a healer, a medic, somebody else, a strategic person, a leader, are if you are out, because some mothers unplug computer, you are not just quitting, you are let be down a whole team so this deserves further study and I would highly recommend further study by the Commonwealth so you can see the problem coming so why not get ready? I want to echo what Freda said about privacy. Somebody was telling me this morning that the most common screen seen at IGF is Facebook. Yesterday I was telling somebody that Richard Allen, a Facebook policy person was attracting all the questions in the forum and in fact one forum where I was speaking yesterday he had to step out after he presented and the very first question was, "whereas Richard Allen"?
So Facebook is a major issue, and if it were a country it would be the third largest country after China and India, 500 million and increasing by the day. It's interesting because there is a group of Hong Kong users who are here and they were funded by the Asia Pacific IGF and they had questions of Richard about how to handle privacy. So it's interesting, silly me I say how do I handle privacy and I say guys, you were born before the mobile phone or the internet you don't know how to handle menus on Facebook but it's use, guys that should be familiar with the internet, they should be techie and they are asking questions about privacy so I think this deserves attention. I guess my final point here is that the there is quite a bit of expertise not just in this room but outside, my friend, Sonja Livingston of London School Of Economics, has EU Kids on line, she said more than 30 countries are plugged in, UK is part of the Commonwealth so that's a source to be tapped. So I think there are resources that should be tapped, I think that looking in Asia you can see some dangers coming and I think the work that the Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum is doing is fantastic, you should look ahead and get the Commonwealth ready to face the challenges, thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much, professor Hwa, and we can now move to Alice, East Africa, I think most of us know her, she is
(No audio)
>> ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. The East African Governor answer forum took place for the third time this year in Campala and while issues of cybercrime have been on the high agenda, I don't think any of the East African countries have begun to deal with child online protection specifically. There are quite a number of efforts, stealing cyber security, creation of legislation to establishment of computers, phones, all of those efforts. I think none of the countries and we're all represented here, have a specific have a specific emphasis on online protection yet because I think as my colleague from West Africa says we are struggling with access issues. So while it is a high priority issue, yes, because of the number of young people that engage especially in social networking tools, it hasn't become a legal regulator or even social or technological, you know, issue to begin to I mean to deserve the kind of attention that access is getting at the moment. So really we have nothing to report, because there was no discussion on child online protection during the East African IGF unless I share with you some of the issues that came up.
Nothing much. Yeah.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. I think that, you know, we have those taking notes on sound initiatives, that are very interesting that are going in different parts of the world, and the purpose of this very Commonwealth initiative is precisely to really take note of this wealth of activity that is going on to enable us to share much of this. One of the things we will have to be discussing for next year is what the focus of this group should be, and we will be you will be looking out for the web site and we can try to engage each other on that and I will be summing up the discussions, are the input on the web site. Now for the second part of this meeting, which is going to be focused on child protection, I would like to turn it over to the Honorable Alun Michael, who will be chairing this session and introducing the participants in this. Alun? Thank you very much.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you very much. It's fascinating to hear how much is happening in different regions of the world and I think it's encouraging that the Commonwealth is engaging so strongly with these issues. I think those of us who have been involved with the Internet Governance Forum since it's inception feel strongly that the Commonwealth provides opportunity and information to be shared and personally it seems important to me that we move this into the mainstream of parliamentary associations, and it's good to see the Secretariat Chengetai Masango here as well this morning. On the child protection topic, I'm going to turn to Sandra Marchenko, who is at the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children which is based in Alexandria, Virginia, and she will be followed by John Carr, with he European NGO Alliance for Child Safety Online, who is well known to all of us, and we will be having contributions from Brenton Thomas from Australia, and Jeoung Hee Kim from the ITU, but can I pass first to Sandra.
>> SANDRA MARCHENKO: Good morning, can you hear me? Yeah? Okay. I think we'll switch gears just a little bit now, my name is Sandra Marchenko, and I'm with the Koons Family Law Centre, which is within the International Centre for Exploited and Missing Children. I want to thank you for letting me be here today, and we have information at the booth that you may want to check out and I would like to tell you about our organisation because you may not be familiar with the work that we do and I want to talk about programs that are part of a tool kit that Mr. John Carr has pulled together. This was founded in the late 1990s and it was founded by the U.S. based organisation. The Coons family institute of which I am the director is within the international centre and we are a research arm of the organisation and we are aimed at building coalitions, bringing together experts and promoting best practices in the area of missing children and child exploitation. The institute itself is named in honour of the world renowned artist, Jeff Coons who is himself a victim of as a parent, abduction. The protection of children requires a coordinated and global approach and along those lines the centre assists countries through public and private partnerships, establishing global resources to find and prevent exploitation of children, providing training to prosecutors, judges, and others, as well as changes in laws, treaties and systems to protect children worldwide. We offer a broad range of programs and for today's discussions the global campaign against child pornography is one of our programs and within that falls a financial coalition against child pornography, law enforcement training on computer crimes against children, global safety campaign and a number of model legislation projects. Just a quick note: Some of you may be familiar with the national centre for missing and exploited children, and I wanted to distinguish between the two organizations because there is a fair amount of misunderstanding about the two organizations. The national centre is our sister organisation and it's a clearing house of missing and exploited children in the United States they are mandated by US law to provide support and assistance within the boundaries of the United States. The international centre has a global mission to protect children worldwide on these issues threw advocacy and activism, policy development and multinational cooperation. So I would like to turn quickly then to the one particular project which you will find this is discussed more prominently in this joint report. It is our report, child pornography model legislation and global review and I'll talk about the financial coalition at the end. One of the greatest challenges we confront as champions of child safety and children's rights globally is that only few of the world's nearly 200 countries have strong enough legal frameworks in place to combat the sexual exploitation of children especially child pornography. The lack of legislation in many countries is a huge hindrance to investigations and overall child protection efforts. We live in a world in which the old rules no longer apply. Today victims of child pornography can be anywhere in any country, children and their images have become a tradable commodity. With this in mind the international centre began researching child pornography legislation in the then 184 Interpol member countries. In order to gain a better understanding of the existing legislation and to gain where the issue stood on national, political agendas, in particular we looked at five criteria. We are look to go see if national legislation exists with specific regard to child pornography, if child pornography is defined within existing legislation, if legislation criminalizes the computer facilitated offenses, if it criminalizes the simple and possession knowing of child pornography without regard of intent to distribute and whether or not ISPs are to report to law enforcement or another mandated agency. In April of 2006 we published the report on our findings as well as recommendations for model legislation. We were shocked by the results of our research. At that time we found that the majority of countries around the world, 95 out of the 184 that were researched, had no laws specifically outlawing child pornography and in many other countries the laws that did exist were inadequate. Following the release of the report and continuing to present day the International Centre has been working with individual countries and governments advocating for new legislation, commenting on proposed legislation and working with national governments and regional bodies to help broaden and encourage a broader view of the legislation. As a result a thorough update was conducted of our research and we have expanded our research to include 196 years. In August of this year we have completed the sixth edition of this report and I apologize I do not have copies with me, it is available on our web site. We are sad to say that though we have seen movement across the world there is much that needs to be done. Our research now indicates that 89 of the 196 countries we have reviewed still have no laws specific to child pornography. Only 45 countries have legislation we consider to be sufficient to combat child pornography offenses and just to give you an idea what we consider to be sufficient means that they have all five of the components that we look for in legislation, most typically the component they do not have would be the requirement for ISP reporting. As I mentioned, we have seen movement in numerous countries, just to give you a sense, 19 countries have enacted legislation which specifically criminalizes child pornography offenses, 23 countries have passed legislation defining the crime, 26 have enacted legislation criminalizing computer facilitated offenses, 26 have criminalized the simple possession of child pornography and two have enacted legislation of ISP reporting. Among the Commonwealth countries our research shows that 33 countries still have no legislation at all that specifically address child pornography, only 11 countries now have legislation that is considered sufficient to combat child pornography offenses. Within our report the country by country analysis is just one part of the report. It has amen use of concepts that can be adopted in a variety of political and socioeconomic situations, the law must extend beyond criminalization of actions of perpetrators, are and equally it's important to define the language used inspect penal codes, that we require the forfeiture of assets and strengthen sentencing provisions. Just to give you have a sense, the term "child" for the purpose of child pornography offenses be defined as anyone under the age of 18 regardless of the age of sexual consent, that the phrase child pornography be defined and that this definition include computer specific terminology, offenses specific to child pornography be created within the national penal code, that there are criminal penalties for parents or legal guardians who do nothing about the child pornography, that those known where it exists be penalized, the criminal liability of children involved in child pornography should be addressed, penalties for repeat offenders and organized crime participants should be enhanced and other aggravating factors such as the quantity and severity of images should be considered.
So beyond the model legislation the International Centre is also particularly concerned about the link between child pornography and the financial system. In this regard the International Centre leads a financial coalition in the battle. In 2006 the financial coalition against child pornography which is a ground breaking alliance between private industry and the public sector was created. At this time it represents nearly 90% of the US payments industry, currently there are 34 companies that have joined with the International Centre as well as the National Centre, and these include credit card companies, ISPs, banks and other financial institutions. The coalition works directly with law enforcement to follow the flow of funds and shutdown the payments accounts that are being used in this enterprise. As a result of the coalition's efforts we have seen a reduction of 53% in the number of reported unique commercial Webb sites of child pornography that are being reported at the National Centre. And manufacture these are shift to go nontraditional methods of payment and are imposing restrictions on the use of US based credit cards. The International Centre is work to go advance the coalition globally as a member of the steering group of the European Financial Coalition as well as with regional networks in Asia Pacific and Latin America. The lives of children who are exploited are forever altered not only by the molestation but by the permanent record of the exploitation which it is captured on film or video, when these images reach cyberspace they can continue to circulate forever and are viewed again and, again. It's akin to the virtual tracking of the sexual abuse of children. No country is immune of this and it will take concerted efforts by law enforcement and civil society to ensure that the world's children are protected. The laws are essential in order to effectively address this growing problem. This is recognized and validated by a variety of international legal instruments including the convention on the rights of the child, it's optional protocol as well as the Council of Europe conventions on cybercrime and it is important to remember that legislation though crucial is not the only tool which is needed. The training of key personnel encouraging industry, responsibility, and blustering cross sector collaboration are essential elements of a proactive approach to international child protection efforts.
I'll end there and I will pass it to Mr. Carr who will speak to the joint report of which these are elements. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Can we go straight o John? I'm conscious we do want to give time for people to ask questions but it's important that we hear what John has to say.
>> JOHN CARR: That's a polite way of saying don't speak too long, hey?
>> JOSEPH TABONE: I knew you would be able to interpret.
>> JOHN CARR: And I don't need to. Sandra has given an excellent account of the report we did together and the report wouldn't have been possible, really, without the research that the International Centre has done not just this year but has been doing every year since 2006 and they're the only people in the world who do it. Certainly they're the only people in the world who do it consistently. For me, my background by the way is in child protection in the UK. I work with the NSBCC, Bernardo's and all the big children's charities, although amy background is technical, it's rooted working with and for children. For that reason, it seems to me that it's absolutely fundamental to any country's approach to child protection on the internet that dealing with child pornography or child abuse images as we prefer to call them in the UK has to be in place and that's why the survey is so important because we can see straight away what progress, if any, we're making. The five headings, that the Centre uses for analyzing each country's approach to dealing with child pornography, you've already heard described. If you look in the booklet, we suggest there is, in fact, a sixth heading. That is dealing with what we call pseudo images. In the United States, following a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Reno versus ALCU, I think it was, the United States Supreme Court said that an image a child abuse image cannot be illegal as child pornography if there was no child involved in the acts depicted in the image, in other words, are the illegalness of the image was rooted in actual harm being done to an actual child. Now, in the UK we don't agree with that. If an image looks like child pornography, it is treated as such. That's a sixth factor you may want to consider. We've never come across, by the way, a single person who has ever been involved in the illegal downloading of child pornography who said "no, I won't download that particular image because it's a real child being depicted, I'll only download those images, because I'm confident it's not a real child being abused," and with the modern video editing software and photo stop shop Photo Shop and those things, it's easy to create these, and the harm that it does is just as important in our view.
Two quick final points. One of the things that's mentioned in the document which I think are important is the role of hot lines. One of the ways in which we got things moving in Europe and in Australia and New Zealand and various countries around the world was by creating a facility for members of the public or anybody, really, to report child pornography whenever they found it on the internet. Typically the way it will be found is through spam or something of that kind reaching your machine, you click on the spam and you find yourself at a web site where child pornography is being advertised.
It seems to me it's essential that a mechanism such as a hot line exists so that you can or citizens can report it, to somewhere where it will be properly investigated and dealt with and hot lines can be a great help to the police as well because it means that they themselves don't have to do the initial sifting and investigation and confirmation before the image is acted upon. There is a global body called INHOPE and we are fortunate to have with us in the room Adrian Dwyer who is the chairman of that organisation and the purpose is to promote hot lines across the world. The truth is it's not essential for every single country to have a hot line, the truth is we could work with one single hot line for the whole world but in practice it's never going to work like that but Adrian is here, INHOPE exists and they are a great source of information.
My final word on it is this. What the data shows going back several years now is that as broad band access increases in the country so child pornography distribution increases in the same country. We have never found a country yet where that isn't true. It may be a theoretical possibility but it's not actually like that. So as with money laundering and things of that kind, what is inevitably going to happen is as it becomes more difficult for the criminals who make and promote this material to house it in some countries they are nationally going to my great to countries without the right legal framework or trained law enforcement officers. So as broad band increases this problem will increase unless we act early to head it off and I hope in that sense the document that we've produced with the Commonwealth IGF you will find useful because it gives basics for tackling it.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: John, thank you for that excellent presentation, we have two short contributions now to add to the main contributions, the first Brenton Thomas, Assistant Secretary of the Spectrum and Wireless Services Branch of the Australian Government Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. I'm sure the title is nearly as long as the contribution, Brenton?
>> BRENTON THOMAS: It certainly is. The Communications Department is how we tend to talk about it. Like many we have a multi facetted approach, we involve teachers, the industries, parents, and most importantly the children and the youth themselves. As a number of speakers said and in particular Sandra and John and Freda as well have indicated this really needs a legislative underpin and go that's very, very important that you get your legislation right and work hard on that legislation and you are willing to evolve and update that legislation as you need it.
We've had in Australia a strong legislative base through the criminal code since 2004 which prohibits access and transmission and solicitation of child pornography over the internet. We are constantly updating that, we need to constantly update that for the changes that occur in the way in which this material is presented and transmitted.
Then in addition to that, we, for example, earlier this year increased the penalties for involvement from 10 years to 15 years in jail and these sorts of issues are constantly under review. As I mentioned, it's in addition to the legislation there is a number of outreach and supporting mechanisms that need to be put in place to make this an effective response. We've provided funding to our Australian Federal Police Child Protection Operations team, they go out and investigating any online child sex exploitation and to back that up we've given funding to our Commonwealth public prosecutors and others, and in this way we're able to identify and act quickly on any inappropriate behavior. We've also got into the education process through what we call Cyber Smart in Australia and we've asked our Australia Communications And Media Authority to go out and establish web sites, to talk to teachers, to take material out and provide up to date information to families and promote the issue of the importance of protection online for children. We've put in place an online help line service which I think John referred to which is a quick and easy way for children to report any incidents that occur or cause certain. We are as a number of you would also be aware looking at the issue through the government of an ISP filtering arrangement, and it has drawn considerable criticism but the government continues to look at this issue and the point that I would make is we are having the support of ISPs in providing this service, a number of ISPs appreciate the problem, want to react responsibly and they want to be involved in this process. It has a degree of political opposition because of issues to do with the potential impact on the quality of service of the internet but it's something which the government is keen to take forward.
We're also working in consulting counsels and working groups which include a youth advisory group, we've put together a youth advisory group recognizing that older people of my generation perhaps really don't understand the way in which the youth is using the internet in this way and I think that's true in terms of the use my daughters are making of it and I can concur with those of you who have children using Facebook! Finally we are working within our region through programs in our area and it is clear and obvious that these problems don't stop at national borders, to get a global response on this is vital and certainly we're taking our experience into our region and would be happy to share it with others including obviously this forum today. Finally my comment is picks up on something John said, Australia as you're probably aware is going through a massive upgrade in our communications system. We have plans for a $40 billion national broad band network and we recognize that in providing that and also the mobile coverage that will be associated with it in addition to the fixed line that the potential exists for significant growth in online abuse activities. So what we need to do within Australia is increase our efforts not be comfortable about where we are but increase the efforts to take this approach forward and that's certainly what the government intend to do. I think all the associations that are connected with us. Thank you.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you for that, Brenton, our last speaker is Jeoung Hee Kim, who is in the Strategy Division of the ITU.
>> I'm Jeoung Hee Kim from ITU. I was asked by the Commonwealth can you hear me now? Okay, it's better. ITU, as a leading UN specialized agency in IGF, ITU promotes cyber security in the range of activities related standardization, communication and technical assistance for our members, including developing countries. In 2005 at the summit on Information Society ITU was entrusted by our member state, the leader of the communities with action line C5, building confidence and security in the use of ICT. As a sole facilitator of Second 9C5, to fulfill our responsibilities, our Secretary General has launched an agenda in 2007. As a core competency, ITU has launched a new programme and we have two years under our belts, but we are young in this area, our partners, John and others who are expert in this area, we already made big progress and provided significant outcomes in this area. ITU has provided sets of guidelines, thanks, John, to your contribution and for guidelines for policy makers and for industries and for educators and parents and also guideline for children themselves.
This guideline is really, really useful and helpful, so please come to visit our web site and then this guideline is available in our web site with six languages. Also we had national survey in 2009 and we wanted to find out in individual countries what is their strength and their weakness on their policy and national legal systems on child internet protection. We found individual countries, what they are missing and where they are strong in this area and also we have been working on providing the statistical framework on child internet protection. Even though we have research on child protection, the framework is a little bit less information for the world. So we, ITU, is working on providing statistical framework which includes concepts, definitions, measures including examples and we are almost done with the statistical framework and now it's available as a draft but the official one will be released November. So once that framework is released, we expect that our member states will encourage Commonwealth countries to be enable to find out their individual policies on child internet protections, where their policies are located and what they need and then what they can share with other countries, things like that. Right now well, it was generous for Commonwealth to give me only 5 minutes to introduce every ITU activity, so rather than to ask more minutes to explain our ITU activities on this, I brought this, so please help me to make my luggage lighter, and this year's information has all the information about CCA and we are building our network with our co partners, John Carr and others, so please door is open so if you need our help then we are more than happy to help you. As part of that, our Secretary General put this cyber security issues as one of his top priorities and plus the last year he actually called for action for our member states and experts in this area. Again, I'm more than happy top share our information and share our resources with you, the Commonwealth member. That's it, thank you very much.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you very much indeed. All of us are going to have heavier bags as we go back if we take the copy of the leaflet as well as the information in electronic form, but we thank you for that! We have a short opportunity now in case people have questions on what they've heard before we go on to the wider discussion on the work plan for the Commonwealth's IGF for are which I will hand the chair back to Joe. Are there any questions? And perhaps if we take questions and then respond to all of them together, is that okay? So let's go in order around the room, first, please?
>> My first question is directed to
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Straight into the microphone.
>> My first question is directed to Asia Pacific, I suppose. Or perhaps around the table, how do you propose in terms of content filtering? How do you persuade the ISPs to do that? Was it easy? Did you meet resistance at first? Do they have software that makes it easy or is it a mental thing.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you.
>> My question is about the children. This debate always concerns me because before you get to the legislation you have a child who was hurt, so what I would like to hear is that there are plans to use the internet to educate the children in how to protect themselves.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you very much. If you could just say who you are? I'm sorry, I should have asked everybody to do that.
>> JAMES REGE: My name is Jim Rege, I'm a member of Parliament from Kenya. I would like to congratulate John and Sandra for a great job in research on child abuse in cyberspace. A 19 year old kid invented Facebook. We just don't know at what age T minus how many years he started doing this research. Have you thought or come up what we could do because these days we buy our kids computers and you can't go to their room, a 16, 17 year old kid you can't go to their rooms to check what they are doing or check in their cookies to see what they've been up to, what are we going to do? Thank you.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you. Next. Gentleman over there.
>> AUDIENCE: First of all, thank you for the presentations, Sandra, I learned a lot from your presentation. I hear from the Commonwealth, and as a Pakistanian, I'm excited to be in the room and we need to talk about harmony and in the situation I think it may be useful to talk about the Commonwealth law and it has a specific provision on child pornography, Section 10, it's largely based if I'm not mistaken on the Council of Europe cyber crime which I think a lot are members to and have ratified that so would it be a possible solution to move toward that? Any use in the Commonwealth IGF on any work done in Pakistan? Thank you.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you very much. Gentleman there?
>> TIM DAVIES: Tim Davies, Child Campaign. There has been good research presented but have any of the panelists done research in resiliency in campaigns to support young people being on line, because that's missing from the debate.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you, gentleman there?
>> AKRAM CHOWDHURY: Thank you, Mr. Chair, I'm Akram Chowdhury, I'm a Parliament member from Bangladesh. We have our own child pornography programme, but I'm afraid there is no link between them so the Commonwealth, I believe, should give a link and extend the technical cooperation. They also, you know, should organise regional IGF programme like in southeast like West Africa and things like that and coordinate those things and we could report our feedback to the international IGF forum.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you, very good.
>> RAJESH CHHARIA: President, Internet Service Provider Association of India. We are talking about the child pornography, and I appreciate Sandra has come out with a report, how many countries are able to make the legislation but few years back, few decades, same was with the drug pedaling also and we have accepted that the drugs are similarly the child pornography is also very harmful for our young generation, why not we take this issue as a drug pedaling and all the countries come together in making the law so strict that the same way to the drug pedaling we are giving the death sentence the same we can give to the system of child pornography?
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you. And the lady there?
>> GLORIA: Thank you very much. My name is Gloria. I work with the Minister of ICT Uganda. I wanted to clarify that the government of Uganda passed the computer misuse bill that tack cells child pornography. As much as the priority was access and afford ability and all that, this year the bill has been passed, thank you very much.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you very much, good news. I think I've taken everybody and I'm going to ask John to address some of these, but I would say, the real debate on child abuse and protection of children was outside the mainstream, it is now a mainstream preoccupation of the IGF and I think it's very gratifying that it's a mainstream preoccupation for the Commonwealth IGF. John, would you like to respond to the questions and then I'll come to Sandra.
>> JOHN CARR: Briefly, on the question about content filtering, in the UK we have no law that says ISPs are obliged to filter out child pornography, they choose to and BT to their eternal credit were the first to go, their C.E.O. said we don't want that anywhere near our networks or customers so let's device a technical method of keeping it off our networks, so it's now being done and this goes back to our friend from India's point.
We know how to keep child pornography off the web. Companies like BT and others in many other countries, it's certainly not just Britain, Australia does it, New Zealand does it, Canada does it, there are lots of countries that have shown from a technical point of view how it can be done so the question is, why isn't it being done? You don't need law to make this happen. We didn't have a law in Britain, I don't think we have a law in Canada, I don't think it was a legal obligation in Australia, may be now but I don't think it was originally. It needs the industry to accept their responsibility to deal with it and you know when we come to these meetings at the IGF and we have conversations about internet governance or the future of the internet and so so, forth, and we specifically do not make decisions but it would be good to think that the industry were listening to these conversations and acting on them. Because if they don't, eventually governments around the world will ledge late and that legislate and then they will have to act, so they can either act on it or it can be left for the governments to get involved. I agree our friend from Saint Lucia, the best possible defense for a child on the internet is what they've got between their left ear and their right ear, education and awareness of children is at the heart of it.
However good the technical solutions might be that we can come up with and there are some very good ones, are as I've just been mentioning to you regarding child pornography, in the end you're driven back to the child's self reliance. When I was a kid I was taught not to talk to strangers, not to accept candy from strangers, not to get into stranger's cars and I was taught if a bad guy comes along and tries to bully you and get ahold of you, scream fire, shout, in other words, you have to teach children resilience and how to deal with those situations to get out of it. What are the kids up to? Yep, we're always going to be at least a year behind, in my opinion, what the kids are actually doing, but as adults and policy makers, governments, we have a responsibility to try our best, thank you.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you indeed, John, Sandra?
>> SANDRA MARCHENKO: I don't have a whole lot to add to that, I think what John said is right on point, we absolutely agree. I'm covering each of the sectors so we feel that educating the children is a key component so internet safety campaigns, community outreach and awareness, and legislation needs to be created and we need to make sure we're in each of those areas to make sure we're fully assisting in the best possible way. Someone asked about whether or not we had done additional research as far as resiliency, that has not been done but we are constantly updating the research and we work on other similar model laws, something right now on child protection projects, looking across the world, not specific to online protection but generally so we are looking at different aspects of child protection laws.
I don't know that I have much more to add except to say that we absolutely agree that the harmony of the law is key as well and to see drawing on the Commonwealth model law and the other international legal conventions, only make it easier as we're talking about cross border issues.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: Thank you indeed, Sandra. I think what was encouraging about the questions was that they were focused and practical questions and I think what is encouraging is this exchange of view and experience throughout the Commonwealth. I just want to make one comment about the UK model which John summarized because of its relevance to the IGF process. As a John said, industry has to accept responsibility. That's not self regulation, it's not just leaving it to the industry because government including the police are engaged with the industry in the way that things are worked through and Parliament is not passing laws because we're satisfied and engaged and nothing is happening and the reason that works is because civil society mainly in the shape of John Carr is watching like a hawk to make sure that the industry lives up to its accepted responsibility. So the four elements which are essential for the IGF process, industry taking leadership, government crucially engaged, Parliament and civil society being involved is actually in that and that's what is important because it's not necessary just what's in legislation, it's what we do. Thank you very much for the opportunity to chair this session, Joe, I pass it back to you for the discussion on the work plan.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. I think before we move on to getting some input and feedback from you about, really, what we should be doing for you nor the coming doing now for the coming year, I think there was some intervention from Uganda. If I could call up on them now and following that I would like to call on my colleague, from the UK, Mark Carvell to talk about a couple of initiatives that he has been involved in really with me in getting the Commonwealth initiative going, but he's been involved in specific activities himself. So if I could start off with Uganda, please?
>> AUDIENCE: Good morning, everyone, I'm from Uganda, and just like my colleague from the ICT, we have the computer misuse bill, that was passed last month, and it addresses child pornography. I thought I could just I outlined a few sections on child pornography. The Bill provides sanctions it's addressed if a person procures, produces or possesses and distributes or is even suspected to transmit child pornography through a computer system, the person or the persons get a prison sentence not exceeding five years.
Also it provides for the magistrate to guarantee to grant permission to police to search their premises and since in computers if the suspect or if there is reasonable grounds to believe that the crime has been committed. I thought I would share those sections. Well, the bill was passed just last month, but we have yet to see how it's going to be implemented because currently in Uganda, we have issues with access and connectivity, and we have an emergence of cyber cafes in every corner, in every street of town and many children are accessing computers, the internet, using the mobile phone. So we actually we are waiting for how the police in conjunction with the ministry of ICT are going to implement this. So far that's the only challenge we are seeing right now. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. If I can call on Mark?
>> MARK CARVELL: Thank you, Joe, I'm Mark Carvell from the UK Ministry, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, and as you know, the Department has been supportive on the outreach, the Commonwealth can make on the agenda, the approach of the multi stakeholder approach of addressing issues, including this one, online child protection and we were very keen to identify specific areas of challenge for a number of Commonwealth countries in this area. The opportunity for Commonwealth countries that have developed approaches, policy responses, hot line and so on to share that experience, and I was appreciative of the contributions from Australia, as an example of that. I think this forum does provide a very valuable opportunity for identifying areas where we can do concrete action. I hope all of us will go away from this session today on, online child protection and think about how administrators, civil society, experts, and business in individual member countries might want to pick up the tool kit which John and Sandra have developed for the benefit of the Commonwealth drawing on the research that has been undertaken by ICMEC. As a next step, we should think about and I think this was touched on in one or two of the interventions, how actually we can take forward this work, how the nuts and bolts of developing a law, setting up a hot line, maybe a regional hot line for islands to work together in creating a single hot line, sharing commitment and resources, so that's something we should start to think about now in the intervening period between this session here and the next one at the IGF which I hope very much Kenya will have the opportunity to host next year following the UN vote. So that's my first reflection on what we've done here today, and I hope as I say, we'll all go away and talk to people and think about how we actually sort of create the next step, facilitate the next step, how individual Commonwealth members can look at this particular issue and work with the experts that we brought together in the Commonwealth community.
I just wanted to say a couple of words are about the linkages, which we've helped to develop through various Commonwealth entities with regard to internet governance.
Earlier this year my ministry was pleased to host a Commonwealth telecom organisations forum and I was able to talk about internet governance and able to flag up this issue at that and I'm pleased that the CTO partners with us on the internet governance agenda. We have other partners, too, ICANN, Steve Sherman here representing ICANN, working on this initiative, too. Just a few days ago in Columbo, preparing for a plenipotentiary, plans were made to talk in Columbo to talk about and deliver concrete actions, and I'm glad that the Commonwealth IGF group was able to agree in a proposal that the UK helped to formulate, and that will be heard in Guadalajara at the ITU, and I'm pleased about that.
I think that's what I wanted to say, I'm appreciative of all of you who have come here and I hope we can take forward this Commonwealth IGF initiative, add weight to it, build on what we've helped to establish with the help of John, Sandra and others and the ITU as well, as partners, and this time next year or whatever the Kenyan IGF is actually held we will have a report on what's been picked up from the tool kit on online child protection and what more can be done, resiliency, I think that was an interesting point, maybe they can report back to us on that further research at the next meeting. Okay, thanks, very much.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. We have about 10 minutes left. We have now tried to give an accounting of how we have been invested our efforts in the very last year. As you are aware, the purpose of the CIGF is primarily outreach and a sharing of experience and that is what we have presented today, is, really, the outcome of these activities. I think in the two areas that we have been focusing on, we have now initiated these repositories, which you could refer to on the CIGF web sites, resee the repositories as being something that are dynamic, but I think they show a good start in really providing you with pointers about initiatives, that can be taken in your various countries and I think we will be looking to you and to other sources to complement these compilations.
Now, if we can spend possibly the last, really, 10 minutes, I would like some input, some ideas from you bearing in mind our reason for being, as I said, which is sharing good practice and outreach on, you know, what our thrusts should be for the coming year in, really, 2011, and the next IGF, so anything that you have in mind and the limited resources, keeping those in mind, so we can start.
>> ANDREW MILLER: Andrew Miller, member of the British Parliament. Joe, I think Alun touched on the success stories in the UK and John Carr has been important in making that happen through the work he does with Child Net and that is involving young people themselves in the process. If you're a business, these people are your next generation of customers, if you're a parent or teacher, they are your responsibility here and now. So listen to them is my advise, and one of the things that I don't know if any of you have seen some of the young people that have come with us to this IGF. They've made series contributions to the process serious contributions to the process and I would strongly recommend because we have the benefit of having a common language within the Commonwealth that we find better ways of reaching out to young people, to youth organizations within our own nation states and help them join together. It has two huge benefits, one, the broader well being of the Commonwealth itself and secondly to engage collectively on solving some of the problems because the children themselves we found are interested in their own safety, their own privacy, and also of the issues that we would expect as adults are seriously on their agenda, my advice is trust them and engage with them.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. Gentleman there? Please?
>> ADRIAN DWYER: Can everybody hear me? First of all, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak. My name is Adrian Dwyer, and I'm the executive director of INHOPE, the International Association of Hot Lines. We currently have member hot lines in 31 countries around the world and this is a trusted network of hot lines which help provide reporting facilities for members of the public to report their concerns to about internet content. Primarily images of child sexual abuse or child pornography. The hot lines themselves do the initial triage and assessment of the images, trace where the content comes from and then report to centre hot lines all law enforcement, to enable quick removal of the content and subsequent investigation, criminal investigations of the content there.
I would like to take this opportunity to offer the assistance of INHOPE, it's a trusted network of accredited hot lines who are recognized as being national bodies to deal with such material. I would like to offer the training and the support of the INHOPE association to any country or person here that is interested in setting up a national hot line to help support their growing internet community. So that's what I would like to say. Thank you very much for your time. We do have a web site, it's inhope.org and you will be able to find more information on that and you can contact me. My name is Adrian Dwyer.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much. We have three interventions, one, two, and another one here, so these are clear, very, very important ideas for the future and I will try to capture these in the end so we can go around starting with the gentleman here, please?
>> RODNEY TAYLOR: Rodney Taylor, CTU, just an observation and a recommendation. First of all, I think that filtering is good but we have to be cognizant of the fact that it is not a total solution because we have technical ways of getting around filtering of simple filtering of web sites, we have peer to peer networks which use the internet as a mechanism for transmitting files between computers and I think that's a big issue. What also came up clearly today is that protecting children online is just not a simple problem of child pornography we have the issue of addiction and antisocial behavior as a result of children recluding themselves to online activities. With respect to the recommendations I think it's important to do research particularly in the developing countries where this is not perceived as a problem. We need to understand what is the nature and extent of the problem. I think we also need to, in terms of multi state participation, include a broader range, persons who may have, in fact, been responsible or who have been involved actually in the trafficking of child pornography. I think we need to understand the psychological profile and have a very broad, comprehensive understanding of the nature of this problem. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much, Rodney. Jeoung?
>> JEOUNG HEE KIM: I wanted to agree to the gentleman's opinion over there because the children are the stake holders, some of the children know more about than most of us, I think. When we think about child protection we think children are usually victims, but in these days, children make themselves children victim mice themselves or each other. So I think it's important to listen what they're talking about themselves and the internet, things like that. ITU invite Girl Scouts of America, and they propose themselves the safe guidelines of how to use the internet. This is initiative from the children themselves. We think it's good idea to listen or put ours in their position when you prepare legal framework or whatever strategy. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much.
>> PHILIP OKUNDI: Honorable Philip Okundi, Communications Commission of Kenya. I would like to say that I'm very encouraged, because this is one of the very first Commonwealth meetings of ourselves where the number is so large. I remember in the past we tried so many times and very, very, very few people came. I remember Mark there and the Honorable tried so much that we could meet the Commonwealth and set up an idea of a meaningful size and be able to agree things together. But this to me is the first site meeting where we are so many. I would like to encourage this to happen in the future so that more and more we can deal with these major issues. At this meeting we have been dealing with child protection issues. I think to me also probably for the first time it's come out in such a forum and I think more will happen. I would like to say that we need to encourage networking among ourselves as Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, if you work together we can produce a very formidable force in the idea of fraternity and then we can always be a very, big, single force which can influence decisions at higher levels, higher leaders within the Commonwealth. I like to also say that the original IGFs, they are taking shift, in Eastern Africa I think we have gone a long way forward now and I would like to say at this forum, the Commonwealth should come up with a kind of organisation in order that we do even better, thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you. We can have a final comment from our colleague in Pakistan?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I think the British Council is a useful foreign agency and networking tool in all Commonwealth countries and what I would suggest is that the model law on cyber crime which includes child pornography could possibly become part of an outreach effort which may not require too much of an additional resource, because you have them there already, in Pakistan a legislation is currently being drafted to be required, this information and feedback so maybe something like that toward parliamentarians and using that to disseminate this information, you have the network, the resource, the manpower, just put it through the network, it would be useful, thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Joe mentioned the resource base, and I would encourage everybody to use the web site because we would like to hear from everyone. So far in the last year we've been doing broadcasting. We want to hear back and we welcome input from the different countries as developments happen, even requests for information, we have a Facebook site so there are platforms available to send the message out.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you. Alun?
>> ALUN MICHAEL: I think the virtual Commonwealth has been referred to in the last few comments and we don't have to wait until we're in the same room to make those developments and I would ask you all to engage parliamentarians in supporting the work of the IGF, comments by Phillip, you can see that the support there can make a big difference and ironically it's made its way on to the agenda of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association which is what we have been wanting for a long time and of course it's the week we're here so you sometimes can't win, but I think it's important to get them engaged and get the work both in terms of child protection and tackling child abuse and the general work of the IGF into the mainstream of their thought, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the Union, we're going to push that forward and we're in the UK with the strong support of the speaker trying to develop a new way of dealing with the internet inside parliamentary institutions and I think that's something we will be happy to share with others as we go forward. We have seen some really good examples, Kenya is an excellent example along with the other East African countries and if that model can be expanded as was mentioned just now in terms of the regional IGFs in which all Commonwealth countries have a say, we can be a really significant actor in the way that the whole IGF process is taken forward. I would like to thank Joe and Mark for the effort that they've put in to breathing life into this. I endorse what Phillip said about the fact that this is the most exciting event that we've had for the Commonwealth over the period since the IGF process started, thank you.
>> JOSEPH TABONE: Thank you very much, Alun, but I would like to really thank all the presenters in this session this morning and most particularly I would like to thank John Carr and working with Sandra for the work on child protection and I would like to also thank very much Dr. Stephanie Cyler who has worked on the compilation of cyber security. Summing up the inputs from this fine part of the session, some very, very good ideas of which we're going to have to look at in order to see how we can in some fashion be tackling this. I think the suggestion of drawing in young people, I think this is something that is key and we need on the top of the agenda from now on, really, how to do that and I think it will be of enormous value in showing the experiences of what has taken place in different countries on this and perhaps, you know, for the coming year that could be the focus of our activities. We've done thinking relating to that and if you have more ideas I think that we would like to hear about that. The suggestion and the offer for the setting up of the hot lines in various jurisdiction, I think that is something we will take on board, incorporate some information really about that on our web site. I think this is really an enormous hands up for the countries who are interested particularly having the help in the developing the capacity for this, possibly technical and the human resources. The suggestion by the Caribbean is something we could think about and in developing countries to really try and look at the extent of the commonalities of these countries and perhaps these issues of cyber security and child protection, how they could be more effectively addressed in these countries, I think that's something we have and can take on board and making a suggestion for networking, this is something we are precisely doing here. The recommendation by Pakistan and I would like to talk to you some more about that.
I think the idea of some harmony across the Commonwealth, having a template on this engagement of the parliamentarians, thanks to Alun that is something that has resonated, I have made contact to Alun, I think they were gracious to give us space in the periodical for this month and Alun has penned a very informative article on governance and I think for most of the readers of that publication it's going to be the first of really such information and hopefully it will generate curiosity about this issue which is important to engage that group. Again, at the instigation of the Parliament. They have a session which is going to be held in Nairobi this week, and we have not been able to participate in that, either from Kenya or internationally, so can I reassure you that a Baroness who has a certain relationship to John Carr will be passing on messages which are well designed.
Okay. I think because we're now really past our time, I wanted to thank you all very much for coming here. By way of personal reflection, really, I have to make a confession that when I was first really approached about really chairing this group I have to admit that I was a bit guarded, perhaps Luke warm about this because the last thing that I wanted to do is to have another talk shop, there is so much of that, that is going on. But I have to say that really in the course of the past year, the experience has been very instructive for me personally. I have had several incarnations, and obviously the national regulator, the communications authority, I have confessed I have learned more about cyber security in the course of the past year than I did in all the time that I was at the Communications Authority so this is what has convinced me and is something I very much believe in is the scope that there is to share and a lot of the time we don't have to be thinking of something that we have to create, you know, from new, but that there is something that was there already we cannot adopt, you know, for other really things, and there are a lot of people, countries in this case, stake holders who are proffering that support, I thank you very much, and as Jasmine said, we would like that web site to be our means of really engaging people across the Commonwealth. We would like to see more interaction on that and I think you're want ones who can help bring that about. Thank you all very much and I hope that you have a good idea on the rest of it, thank you.
(End of session. )
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