It’s easy to miss the bullet holes in the walls of Haider Muthana’s office.  They form eight neat craters in the ceramic tiles that cover one half of the room.   Muthana is the head of the parliamentary directorate responsible for the internal organisation of Iraq’s Council of Representatives, supporting the legislative process and the work of the committees.  The fact that his office was once the garage for Saddam Hussein’s cars, when he made speeches at the conference centre that now houses the parliament, tells you much about the circumstances in which the parliamentary staff and politicians operate.

The conference centre is a large brown, ugly building, characterised by cracked windows, fraying carpets and exposed electrical wires hanging from ceilings and walls around almost every corner.  The centre was never designed to be a parliament, and the staff and committees have found makeshift homes where they could find them, often only reached by lengthy walks up stairs or down meandering corridors.  The effect on the building of the mortar fire, IEDs and gun battles that were routine until very recently, have not made things any easier.   So, by comparison with the dilapidation in the rest of Iraq’s parliamentary building, the bullet holes and pockmarks are easily overlooked.  Yet, the changing state of Muthana’s office – and of that of the CoR more widely reflects the slow and incremental political progress in Iraq.

A recent report from the International Crisis Group was damning in its criticism of the parliament’s record in exercising effective oversight over Iraq’s government.  It’s difficult to argue with many of their conclusions.  But it’s also easy to underestimate the scale of the task that has faced both politicians and parliamentary staff.   A few years ago Iraq exhibited the most extreme form of zero-sum politics.  There was no trust between the political blocs – and very little trust even between members of the same parties.  Those divisions still exist.  The tensions between Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law party and Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiyya, are the most obvious and constant challenge to the functioning of government and parliament.  It took a year to form the government and get the committees appointed.  There remains a huge backlog of legislation and intra-party negotiation on all matters is tortuous.

But there are small signs of improvement.   The current Speaker of the CoR is a formidable figure who has brought some order to proceedings.  Where previously MPs ambled into the plenary session until it was quorate, one of the first acts of Speaker Nujaifi was to oblige MPs to register their attendance – fining MPs for non-attendance and publishing their names.

The Speaker recently won a significant battle with the government in ensuring that the Supreme Audit Institution and Transparency Commission reported to it rather than to the Prime Minister, and will appoint its members.  And, the committees – which are the engine of the parliament – are starting to find their feet and to work on a cross-party basis.  The Human Rights Committee, for example, is closely watching the creation of the independent Human Rights Commission, and the Finance Committee will shortly start to grapple with the state budget.  At the same time the conference centre itself is slowly being overhauled.  Although the first stone of the new parliamentary building was laid in late September, it will take several years to complete.  In the meantime, there is a continuous buzz as offices are refurbished, new carpets laid and windows replaced.  Muthana’s office itself has become a more professional and comfortable place with new furniture, partitioned walls, and additional staff in the last year.

If you look for them, the signs of change are starting to happen.  There is no doubt that the challenges for Iraqi politics are massive.   The gains remain fragile and the differences may be limited and easy to miss – like bullet holes covered in polyfilla – and their significance should not be overstated.  But for all that, neither should they be dismissed.  Political change most often starts with the small things, which we hope may be indications of a much deeper shift.

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Digital communication technologies present significant new challenges for protecting the right to privacy. UNESCO has commissioned Global Partners to map the key challenges and opportunities for privacy protection on the Internet, and to produce a global overview of legal and regulatory approaches affecting privacy on the Internet. The project is being delivered together with Toby Mendel (Centre for Law and Democracy) and Ben Wagner (European University Institute), and is being overseen by an advisory committee of regional and international privacy experts. The final report will provide the informational foundations for effective policy making by both states and Internet companies to better protect privacy online.

It brings with it a huge range of challenges and opportunities, not least the
challenge of governing in a world which is fast changing, decentralised and
trans-boundary.

The issue of governance was on the agenda at the World Summit on the
Information Society in 2003 and 2005. The model adopted was the Internet
Governance Forum – an annual open forum where all stakeholder groups
(governments, businesses, civil society and the technical community) come
together to discuss internet governance issues.

The IGF does not make decisions or recommendations but allows multi-
stakeholder, bottom-up policy to be made and shapes norms through an
inclusive global dialogue.

The sixth Forum was held in Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of September, but
the future of the IGF is uncertain. Various countries have tired of the dialogue
approach and calls for new internet policy bodies abound. Many of these
come from developing countries concerned that the ‘institutional gap’ is being
filled by actors who are economically or politically powerful. These include
the OECD, the Council of Europe, and global companies, many of whom are
western-based.

In recent months, IBSA (an initiative by India, Brazil and South Africa) has
called for a new global body, and China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
have jointly suggested ‘an international code of conduct for the information
society’.

These challenges to the multi-stakeholder model are worrying. Top-down
policy making is not well-suited to the internet, which is a fast-changing
network of networks – some of which are publicly owned, the majority
private. Furthermore, the inclusion of stakeholders other than governments
is essential to prevent heavy regulation and protect openness, inclusivity and
consideration of the broader public interest.

At the same time, some concerns about the IGF are genuine, and if it does
not contribute effectively to governing the internet, it will be sidelined.

As we look towards the 2012 IGF in Azerbaijan, the challenge is daunting,
but clear: the Forum must realign itself to be effective in the changing world of
internet governance.

A working group on improving the IGF is investigating whether it might make
non-binding recommendations. This would be a positive move, enabling it to
more directly influence decisions in other forums.

Similarly, in Nairobi we heard growing calls for the IGF to develop a set of
multi-stakeholder principles for internet governance by 2015. As the only truly
global principles, these would have significant influence.

There were also calls for human rights to be the main theme of the next
Forum. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in many senses, the
international Magna Carta, such a theme would allow all stakeholders to see
shared valued in a people-centred internet environment.

Dixie Hawtin