Welcome Remarks
Meryem Marzouki
On behalf of IRIS and the program committee of the conference, I am pleased to welcome you in Paris for this third conference on The Public Voice in Electronic Commerce.
The goal of this joint conference between trade-unions and NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) is to make the civil society voice heard at the international level, in order to influence, as far as possible, decisions made in our names, by national governments as well as by international organizations.
This conference is held in conjunction with the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) Forum on Electronic Commerce. It is also held right before the Millenium Round of the WTO (World Trade Organization), which will be started by the end of next month. There will be other events organized in Seattle, but this conference should be already understood as a call for the civil society to keep watch and ward over these negociations.
This year, the third Public Voice conference is co-organized by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and IRIS (Imaginons un Réseau Internet Solidaire). We are hosted by the Trade-Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC). The conference is sponsored by the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC), with the help of the Trans-Altlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). I would also like to thank the OECD for its logistic help.
The programme includes four panels, on the following topics: protecting consumer rights, privacy and personal data protection, Internet access and development, and the future of work and quality of life. We will also have an open session on the public participation to Internet governance. The conference will be opened by two presentations, by Herwig Schlögl, OECD Deputy Secretary General, and by Yves Cochet, Vice-President of the French National Assembly. The programme will end with the summary of the key outcomes of the conference, presented by Marc Rotenberg, EPIC Director, followed by the response given by John Dryden, Head of the OECD Information, Computer and Communications Policy Division.
Finally, I would like to thank all the participants to this conference and the members of the programme and organizing committees, and I hope that we will have a fruitful day of discussions.