On 13 February 2024, Merrin Muhammed Ashraf represented the Global Digital Justice Forum and IT for Change at a virtual consultation convened by the co-facilitators of the intergovernmental process for drafting a Global Digital Compact, which would be annexed to the Pact for the Future. The goal of the consultation was to allow civil society representatives to share their overall views and expectations and to offer concrete suggestions to achieve a meaningful and transformative Global Digital Compact to strengthen digital cooperation. The Zero draft of the Compact is intended to be circulated by the end of March.
In her statement, Merrin highlighted the significance of the Global Digital Compact as an opportunity to reshape our digital future with democratic integrity and distributive justice. She emphasized the need for a strong and central role for civil society and social movements in global-to-local digital policy making and called for a clear separation of roles, responsibilities, and powers of the different actors in distributed decision-making, lest the multilateral policy spaces be held hostage to a corporate takeover.
Merrin’s statement proposed some specific axes for action, such as initiating a treaty process on digital human rights, mobilizing public financing for digital infrastructure, introducing a digital development tax, designing a binding global governance regime for data that operated on the principles of data flows with human rights and equity and recognizing data sovereignty as inextricably linked to development freedoms, evolving a binding multilateral framework to guide future trajectories of AI design, development, and use, instituting accountability measures for Big Tech corporations including, and internationalizing governance of Critical Internet Resources. She underscored the urgency of reclaiming the internet as a global commons and harnessing digital resources for gender-transformative and ecologically compatible development. Finally, an empowered, coordinating agency for coherence across the multilateral system was called for as non-negotiable to translate vision into concrete action.
See the full statement here.