Appendix 1:
ISF Declarations

1. Barcelona Declaration
2. Newark Declaration
3. "Challenge 2025" - looking for it...
4. Bristol Declaration
5. Vienna Declaration
6. Seattle Declaration

The Information Society is a society in formation. Only the first signs of this future knowledge-based society are evident, and yet they already cause great concern about its impact. In the current European context of high unemployment, whose unacceptable level may put in jeopardy the very structure of European societies, legitimate fears arise: to what extent and how can the information society contribute to job creation in Europe?

The Information Society Forum has been working on this issue for two years. Representatives of a wide range of social and economic groups have taken part in the exchange of information, analyses and debates organised in the framework of this Forum. This Barcelona declaration expresses the intellectual consensus built up through this consultation.

1. The relationships between technology, productivity, growth and employment are complex. Any simplistic approach to the problem is dangerous. Globalisation, new business strategies, and the relation between technology, productivity and employment are at the heart of economic growth and the improvement of living standards. Their complexity precludes any simplistic approach to the problem. Technological innovation and diffusion is a process of "creative destruction". It does involve job destruction through sectorial shifts from industry to services, changes in skills profiles, and new division of labour between industrialised and developing countries. But at the same time, it leads to job creation in new emerging activities, and, above all, in the whole economy, because technical progress has proved to be a major engine of economic growth and increase in real income, and is even more so to-day with globalisation.
2. The promotion of the Information Society could be and has to be a key pillar of European employment policy. According to the best available knowledge and state-of-the-art economic analysis, empirical evidence points to the potential positive impact of the emergence of the Information Society on employment in the medium term. The group is convinced that the promotion of the Information Society could be and has to be a key pillar of European employment policy.
3. The challenge is to develop the necessary conditions to fully exploit the job potentialities of Information Society. The challenge for Europe consists of building up the best conditions to fully exploit the job potentialities of the Information Society. Urgent actions are required to raise the awareness of current and future managers, to improve the business environment that will allow companies to develop and create jobs through the best usage of the new technologies, and stimulate the required changes in the work conditions and skills. The social partners should act, be involved and commit themselves. Government should favour their involvement. Because of the global nature of the Information Society, international dimension should be taken into account.
4. The modalities of growth in coming years should be different as different economic conditions are present. Among these new modalities and mechanisms:
• Economic growth as observed in past decades was too aggressive to the environment, causing resource depletion, environmental destruction and extreme energy consumption. Future growth will be conditioned by the capability of European economies to strike a better balance between a hard, manufacturing and material-intensive economy and a soft, information-rich service economy based on human capital.
• The export of products to developing countries will compensate less and less for the lack of domestic demand. The products consumed by the developing countries will be manufactured on the spot with our exported technology, our know-how, and our capital.
• The general decrease in working time now being experienced by Western economies will lead to the development of more part-time employment, better fitting the need of companies for flexibility and the desire of individuals for free time.
5. Growth alone will not solve Europe’s unemployment problems. Productivity will probably increase at a rate very close to the increasing rate of output, leaving no room for important new employment. In addition, it is estimated that some 8-9 million European citizens are discouraged from seeking a job because of the level of unemployment. Any upturn in growth is likely in the first place to increase the rate of participation and only partially affect the unemployment rate. Growth is indeed a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Structural adaptations already underway have to be strengthened and enlarged, and growth will smooth its social and economic costs.
6. In this context, the development of the Information Society is at the root of sustainable growth. It will reinforce intangible investment as a factor of competitiveness; it will accelerate the shift from physical consumption to the usage of information, from products to dematerialised services, from investment in productive capital to investment in human capital, and from transport to teleworking or teleconferencing. It will cause the development of a totally new marketplace: electronic commerce. Consequently, the substitution of labour by capital, whose excess has been so detrimental to European employment over the last decades, will slow down, if not reverse. The Information Society will contribute to more labour-intensive growth in Europe which is not harmful to the environment.
7. Market forces alone will not solve Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society nor eliminate unemployment. All the mechanisms at work are far from being clearly understood. Further studies are required. However, the group is convinced that market forces alone will not solve the Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society, nor eliminate unemployment.
8. Public authorities have a key role to play in this domain. Public authorities at all levels - European, national, regional, and local - have a key and urgent role to play in this domain in order to speed up the transition. The adaptation of the regulatory and legal framework has indeed to be achieved, but structural reforms have also to be implemented. Barriers to entry, conditions to start-up, impediments to innovation, and shortage of specific skills are particularly detrimental in this domain because the Information Society is just emerging and, as any new phenomenon, is more sensitive to factors impeding new business initiatives and innovation.
9. Budgetary resources exist at all levels for new active employment measures related to preparing people and organisations for the Information Society. Currently public resources are used in a wrong way. The 200.000 million ECU spent by Member-States on their labour market policies, as well as the Community funds at their disposal, offer enough budgetary resources for active measures: installing computers at school and enabling everyone to become IT-literate, multiplying the resources to teach and train specific high-tech skills, promoting best practices and diffusing them, speeding up the uptake of teleworking and other new forms of productive organisation, giving incentives to investment in new multimedia services and applications, developing pan-European venture capital and secondary capital markets to finance start-ups in multimedia, content and information services sectors.
10. The Luxembourg Summit should establish lines of action for European as well as national policies in this domain. The Forum urges European authorities as well as national governments to consider such measures as priorities of European employment policy, and expects clear lines of action from the next European summit in Luxembourg in that direction.
11. The Information Society Forum is ready, at the request of the Luxembourg Summit, to provide further insight into the contribution of Information Society to more-labour intensive growth in Europe.

    Barcelona Declaration headlines

    Final text of the Information Society Forum Group under the chairmanship of Mr. Majo

    1. The relationships between technology, productivity, growth and employment are complex. Any simplistic approach to the problem is dangerous.
    2. The promotion of the Information Society could be and has to be a key pillar of European employment policy.
    3. The challenge is to develop the necessary conditions to fully exploit the job potentialities of Information Society.
    4. The modalities of growth in coming years should be different as different economic conditions are present.
    5. Growth alone will not solve Europe’s unemployment problems.
    6. Information Society is at the root of sustainable growth.
    7. Market forces alone will not solve Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society nor eliminate unemployment.
    8. Public authorities have a key role to play in this domain.
    9. Budgetary resources exist at all levels for new active employment measures related to preparing people and organisations for the Information Society.
    10. The Luxembourg Summit should establish lines of action for European as well as national policies in this domain.
    11. The Information Society Forum is ready, at the request of the Luxembourg Summit, to provide further insight.

1. The advent of the Information Society will shape our future. The Barcelona Declaration formally expressed the deep conviction of the Information Society Forum that the pervasive usage of information technologies will significantly contribute to preparing for employment and to job creation. It argued that the modalities of growth in coming years would be different from the ones in the past as different economic conditions are present; market forces alone would not solve Europe’s delay in entering the Information Society, nor solve the European unemployment problem. It was not calling for additional budgetary expenditure for employment policies, but for making a better use of budgets by focusing on investments in the future (equipment, human capital, RTD, work opportunities). It recommended that the promotion of the Information Society be part of the co-ordinated employment policies launched in November 1997 at the European Summit on Employment in Luxembourg.
2. This message has been acknowledged. The Information Society has a transversal dimension in the "National Action Plans for employment", which the Member-States are currently implementing in respect to the four priority pillars of the Guidelines: entrepreneurship, adaptability, employability and equal opportunities. The President of the European Commission welcomed the Barcelona Declaration and proposed further consultation.
3. The emergence of the Information Society is currently accelerating in Europe; the economic and social context in which the employment policies take place is consequently changing rapidly. From a simple contributor to job creation, the Information Society policy has to become a genuine driver and should shape employment and learning policies to the new realities. Change is so deep for the very organisation of our European societies that the design and the means of the employment and learning policies has to be thought about in an economy where productive organisation is based on flexibility, making best use of human resources and on effective use of plentiful information, where multi-skilling of employees will become usual and life-long job exceptional, and where the boundaries between labour, training and leisure will fade away.
4. Industrial change triggered by globalisation and technological progress will force companies to adapt their productive organisation more rapidly and constantly. It notably requires a continuous upgrading and even a shift in the skills of their employees, in particular towards information and communication technology skills. Up-to-now inflows and outflows of employees, which respectively stemmed from the entry of new worker generations into the employment market and from the retirement of old generations, were sufficient enough to accommodate the general renewal of required skills by the European economies, about between 2 and 3% every year. This demographic process is nowadays too slow to meet the companies’ requirement, which has escalated up to nearly 10% renewal of skills every year, with ever-greater demand in the area of ICT skills. Experts consider that the majority of jobs, which will exist by 10 years, are not known today. The knowledge cycle is now shorter than human professional life.
   • The groups recommend that employment policies further evolve increasingly hand-in-hand with the recognition that learning and training throughout one’s life is a pre-requisite to maintaining employment and employability
5. There is no other alternative for the societies at large to implement systems of life-long learning. This, of course, affects training systems of employees, but also education systems. It will be the responsibility of education systems to provide the students with basic and generic knowledge, which will allow them to renew their skills all along their professional life, as well as to prepare them culturally and mentally. Students should be able to leave schools and universities self-confident in their capability to adapt according to their professional life requirements. The role of learning institutions, including schools and universities, is essential to face this challenge. A fundamental requirement for education and training systems to face the new challenges is affordable access to information and communication technologies and provision of appropriate content.
   • The groups recommend that the national education and training systems be assessed and profoundly restructured with the aim to prepare people to learn throughout their lives and to provide citizens with the basic knowledge to use information technologies as a necessary tool to this learning.
6. Industrial change is foreseeable in terms of general trends and broad orientations, but the details, which would enable companies to make operational decisions in good time are impossible to anticipate. In this context of uncertainty, companies have to adopt flexible organisation that is rapidly adaptable to the changes in their environment when they occur. Such adaptive reactions are a prerequisite for their competitiveness. Adaptation generally entails extra-costs to the companies because of their administrative and regulatory business environment: labour market regulations (part-time workers, teleworkers, constraints on working time), fiscal rules (lack of fiscal incentives to human capital investment), social security protection rules (constraints to mobility) and administrative burdens. All these barriers are to be revisited with the aim to alleviate undue costs and facilitate companies’ adaptation to industrial change.
   • The groups recommend that the public authorities regard the adaptation of the business environment as a priority in order to make it more conducive to adaptive organisations of companies. Constraints and undue costs to continuous adaptation should be systematically identified in the Members-States and measures to remove them should be undertaken.
7. The same issues arise for the overall industrial fabric, which has to become more flexible and evolve continuously to grasp the market opportunities. Start-ups and entrepreneurship are key elements of dynamism of industrial fabric. The job creation generally lies on very few dynamic companies: 3% of the firm population accounted for 80% of job growth in the U.S between 1991 and 1995 - 6 million out of an additional 7.7 million jobs. Numerous obstacles have been identified and denounced by different documents, which explain the relative weakness of the European economies to trigger start-ups and allow their rapid development. Among others, the group would like to emphasise that, in most European countries, the economic and social systems present substantial difficulties for self-employed. The fiscal rules and the social protection systems do not award risk-taking people. This is particularly detrimental to entrepreneurship.
   • The groups recommend that the administrative, legal and financial barriers to the start-ups be effectively removed by the Member-States. A steering group should be established at the European level to assess the effectiveness of the national policies to dismantle these barriers, and to diffuse the best practices.
8. The advent of the Information Society will have in-depth consequences on work organisation. In the industrial era, the work organisation generally required that employees worked during the same period of time and at the same place. By contrast, in the information age, a major part of value-added is virtual and can be transmitted and stored: temporal and geographical simultaneity of work is no longer a constraint. The only remaining constraint is the time to deliver the customers, which is becoming the critical moment of production. This has several consequences. The concept of weekly working time, symbol of the industrial revolution, is evaporating: the work contracts based on pre-established working time will progressively give way to contracts based on tasks to be achieved. This is exemplified by teleworking. New forms of so-called atypical work are developing, such as temporary, part-time jobs or cyclical work over the year. They fit much better with both the requirements of some specific workers and the need of company for flexibility. In a certain way, demand and supply of labour might match each other with fewer constraints in the information age.
   
   Finally, the contractual boundaries between work, leisure and training are blurring. The increasing time spent on learning is likely to be taken from labour, and reduction of commuting time and leisure simultaneously. In future, learning is more likely to take place within a "community" context: in multinational companies with distributed working and learning environments, and in urban or rural localities where widened use of education and cultural resources is made possible by high bandwidth interconnection of schools, colleges, libraries, museums, specialist service providers and industry. Public/private partnership with local ownership is a key factor, and the evolving community context where the "traditional" barriers begin to come down encourages the re-engineering of the organisations concerned as they adapt to new technologies, new ways of working and new responsibilities.
9. Companies, workers and public authorities have to trigger change in the work organisations and training, and share their own part of the burden. Public authorities should ask social partners to negotiate collective agreements allowing work contracts based on the notion of tasks to be fulfilled, rather than on the concept of weekly working time, when appropriate and relevant, in particular for non-manufacturing tasks. Consultation and incentives should be preferred to legislation.
   • The groups recommend that the public authorities guarantee that both advantages and burden of increased flexibility is fairly spread over employers and employees, that flexibility and a learning culture be encouraged, and that the social security protection be not dependent on the differences in types of contracts.
   Responsibility for training mainly lies with the companies in whose interest it is to invest in their human capital. Because the trained workers might leave and transfer their know-how towards competitors, companies could lessen their effort. To face this risk, some incentives to training are required.
   • The groups recommend that measures, such as fiscal incentives to training, be identified and implemented to raise the level of training by companies. Additionally a system of accreditation should be used to track an individual’s progress in acquiring core skills. This notably concerns ICT skills. It also recommends that training be better valorised in the unfolding of professional life.
10. Additionally, flexible organisation of companies requires less and less functional qualifications from the working force, but instead it demands a greater capacity of integration within a networked process of production, and often within a wider cultural context. With the computerisation of most repetitive tasks, the workers will accomplish more and more intelligent tasks requiring initiative, creativity and capability to decide. Efficiency of workers will be less assessed against their individual know-how, but rather against their faculty to work in team and to face multifaceted tasks. This involves "learning to learn" in new ways. Work in the Information Society is typified by more autonomy for the individual worker, performing an increasing complex combination of subsequent tasks, empowered to do so by the support of more powerful and user-friendly Information and Communications tools. However, the potentialities provided by information technologies cannot be taken for granted: pilot introductions of new ways of working and learning can speed up better understanding of new opportunities, boost the integration of new ICTs in the work process, and encourage re-organisation in the workplace.
    • The groups recommend that the national employment policies be focussed as a matter of priority on promoting new ways of working, training people to make the best use of new and advanced ICTs.

Working Groups I on "employment" and VI on "lifelong learning" of the Information Society Forum endorse the view that use of state-of-the-art information and communication technologies is vital to job creation. They emphasise the need to promote work reorganisation, and concurrently to develop a culture of learning throughout one’s life.

Newark, May 1998

Members of the Information Society Forum together with participants at infoCity@Bristol.98 assert that the principles of accessibility, affordability, cultural diversity, empowerment, equality, freedom of expression, open democracy, public service and especially freedom of information, must be at the heart of development and promotion of the Information Society.

The key to active citizenship is access – regardless of age, ability, gender, sexuality, ethnic origin, social status, income, and religious or political views – to the information each person considers is needed to participate fully in society, and to opportunities to express freely ideas and opinions.

For information and communications technologies (ICT) to play an effective role in reducing the democratic deficit and creating an open, informed and informing society, everyone has to have the opportunity to share in the benefits through:

• access to awareness of the potential of the technology;
• access to appropriate training in its use;
• affordable access to the technology;
• access to the decision-making process about the ways in which the technology
• is applied;
• access by individuals to personal information held about themselves;
• access to systems of redress if such information is inaccurate or is used improperly.

To facilitate democratic participation:

• local and national administrations need to devise and implement coherent strategies, incorporating public consultation, to create a user-friendly infrastructure for the Information Society and, in particular, frameworks for inter-agency co-operation to simplify and improve access to public services;
• educational institutions need to develop accessible systems of service delivery which encourage everyone to make use of opportunities to gain skills and continue education throughout their lives;
• hardware and software manufacturers and information service suppliers must be encouraged to develop comprehensive, harmonised systems that are genuinely accessible by adopting design-for-all policies through the active participation of user groups. Recognising that the market approach cannot of itself guarantee social inclusion, and that many of the most innovative information and communications products come from small companies, the production and distribution of harmonised design guidelines would assist in combating some forms of social exclusion.

With the convergence of ICT it is vital that coherent and harmonised codes of ethical conduct be established, alongside provisions for copyright and data protection and protocols and technical means of assuring the reliability of information reaching the internet.

These values and aspirations which echo those outlined in the EC Report People First, The Next Steps (1997), should rank alongside the final principle of the Bonn Ministerial Conference Declaration (July 1997) that ‘opportunities for becoming computer literate should be available to people of all ages and from across the social spectrum’, and the principle of lifelong learning described in the ISF Newark Declaration (May 1998) that ‘education and training is essential for the use of global information networks’.

The Information Society presents many exciting opportunities which public administrations in the European Union urgently need to grasp. If they do so, then they can achieve a well-planned, well-ordered and efficient transition to what may be called an "Informed Democracy", within the Information Society. If they fail to do so, public pressures may force them into hasty and improvised adjustments that will fall seriously short of expectations.

Among the many attractions of Information Society technologies is that they enable governments to fulfil much more effectively their democratic obligations to preserve and strengthen individual rights and to improve the efficiency and quality of public services. In an "Informed Democracy", new applications of telematics will facilitate better decision-making and create more effective and coherent links between national administrations, and between them and European institutions.

But it is the ease and quality of their links with the citizen that will be crucial. People must have access to electronic communications with the Administrations, from public buildings but also from their homes. At the same time, easy physical communication must be accompanied by a guaranteed right of access for all people to public information.

This transformation to an "Informed Democracy" cannot be done cheaply, even though the cost/benefit ratio of public services will be much improved. But the substantial costs of equipment, of training and of adapting public databases and information systems should be regarded as investments capable of yielding real medium-term returns.

After a great deal of reflection on the strategy needed for moving forward towards an information-oriented administration closer to the citizens, we have identified six objectives and a series of recommendations for achieving them.

Objective One: Arrive at a clear definition of the citizen’s rights to public information.

If much improved access to information is the key to strengthening both citizenship rights and the individual’s personal and professional development, the issues of "what rights to which information, at what price and subject to which safeguards?" still need detailed definition.

We believe a pragmatic approach is necessary based on the assumption that certain information is vital to ensure the individual’s full participation in society and to meet his or her essential needs. These needs derive from the practical, social, cultural and democratic aspects of daily life and are covered by a broad consensus throughout the European Union. They imply that guaranteed rights should include information on employment opportunities, health care, education, personal security, emergency assistance, transport, culture, protection against exclusion and discrimination and participation in the political process. Exercise of these guaranteed rights must, of course, be conditioned by strict respect for the equally important right to individual privacy.

We recommend that the essential information to which the individual must be guaranteed access should be identified through a process of close and continuous dialogue between Administrations and citizens. Telematics would be a very important instrument for facilitating this dialogue, permitting an interactive relationship capable of generating public services that are a great deal more customised than at present.

We further recommend that governments establish at national level the rules for accessing public information and for exploiting new services derived from that access. These rules must assure secure communications between the citizen and public administrations through adequate data protection, authentication and electronic signature systems.

Objective Two: Public services must be widely provided by electronic means and public information made universally available to the citizen.

Preparing public administrations for an Informed Democracy requires them to re-engineer their organisations and functions so that they can fully exploit the new information technologies to provide better public services to the citizen. The objective for administrations at all levels (local, regional, national, European) is to transform themselves into efficient and integrated networks able to present a single interface to the user of public information and public services. Clearly, this implies a major task in removing existing political and technical obstacles to communication and co-operation between them.

We recommend governments and the European Union to speed up the recasting of their public administrations and institutions through a more intensive use of new communications tools, the introduction of appropriate training schemes and the creation of new functions and hierarchies. Responsibility for driving information resources must be given to highly qualified people occupying senior management positions.

Objective Three: Public-private partnerships

Public administrations cannot achieve the transformation we believe necessary exclusively by themselves. As far as the supply of public information to the citizens is concerned, the private sector’s financial, intellectual and technical resources need to be tapped, although its involvement must not weaken data protection and the citizen’s right of general access to information. Private initiative should be encouraged to develop new value added services based on public information.

We recommend governments and the European Union to promote on a harmonised basis public/private partnerships for supplying public information.

Objective Four: Public information should be available as far as possible without charge when supplied in its original format - even though this will mean upgrading the quality of current public databases - and a system of affordable charges would be justified when information has been refined more closely for the needs of the user.

We recommend governments and the European Union to define a common approach to pricing the supply of public information in Europe.

Objective Five: Stimulate the identification of benchmarks and best practices by means of pan – European initiatives.

We recommend the Commission to present within two years a single, comprehensive interim report on initiatives being taken concerning public services and information society in the context of:

• The 5^th Framework Programme
• The IDA Programme
• The TEN Telecom programme
• The Info 2000 programme.

Objective Six: More continuous monitoring of actions undertaken by the member states would strengthen the Forum’s capacity to advise on priorities and to identify bottlenecks.

We recommend the Forum to set up an information platform at the European level to collect continuous information on Member States initiatives for applying new technologies to public services. An expert group of highly qualified individuals with a good knowledge of administrative systems at both the European and national levels should monitor the work of the platform and report annually.

The Information Society Forum firmly believes that quality of life for all citizens in the Information Society will depend on the success of efforts by nations and the world at large to ensure sustainable development. While public debate has already focused on the needs for sustainable development in the environmental, social and economic spheres, the Forum calls the attention of the Member Countries of the World Trade Organisation to the importance of safeguarding cultural sustainability. An Information Society in which cultural practices are reduced to the status of commodities traded under pure market criteria will, the Forum warns, be one in which cultural diversity is so impoverished that innovation is stifled. Such an impoverished world of culture will not work in the economic or any other sense and is clearly not sustainable.

The Forum is aware of the significant impacts that the Millennium Round of international trade negotiations may have on cultural diversity. It appeals to all WTO Member Countries duly to take into account the needs of sustainable development in the cultural domain as much as in those of the environment, labour and consumer protection and civil rights. The Forum will shortly report on the need for sustainability in all senses: here, its Task Force on the General Agreement on Trade in Services of the Information Society Forum reports on the cultural issues.

1. The Information Society Forum is a group of some 140 independent experts from across the European Union and Eastern European countries. Members are drawn from a wide range of professions, such as academia, consumer groups, industry, trades unions, parliaments, public bodies and associations. The Forum advises the European Commission and EU Member States on a wide array of issues dealing with the social, societal, cultural and linguistic aspects of the Information Society. In the last two years it has worked intensively on the question of how to ensure sustainable development for the 21st century.
2. The Forum recalls that the development of the Information Society has an important cultural dimension. Asserting and enhancing cultural diversity and cultural identities and broadening participation in cultural life is one of the prerequisites of democracy. Our societies need to safeguard the fundamental Human Right expressed in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states that "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits". The exercise of this right necessitates effective frameworks for safeguarding our cultural heritage.
3. In line with the 1982 Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies passed by the World Conference on Cultural Policies, and with declarations of subsequent intergovernmental conferences, the Forum takes a broad view of culture. It includes the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterise a society or social group. It comprises not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs. The Forum also concurs with the position held by some 140 UNESCO Member Countries, as expressed in their 1998 Action Plan on Cultural Policies for Development, which states that heritage must be understood as all natural and cultural elements, tangible or intangible, which are inherited or newly created, because through these elements social groups recognise their identity and commit themselves to pass it on to future generations in an improved and enriched form.
4. Globalisation propelled by technological innovation challenges the traditional parameters on which the wealth of cultural identities of our societies has been based. Information and communication technologies radically change the way people communicate with each other word-wide. As the internet becomes a major resource for information, learning, communication and entertainment, the new global communications systems link cultures ever more closely. But these developments also pose risks and challenges to cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the promotion of global cultural industries and international trade in cultural products.
5. Freely imparting and receiving information is at the heart of democracy. Information is an indispensable prerequisite for people to agree on commonly shared values and actively to participate in the cultural and social lives of their communities. The Forum emphasises that it is a well-established principle of the European Way for the Information Society to regard the media as crucial facilitators in promoting local, regional and national cultures and languages and in reflecting the needs of their audiences. Given the pervasiveness and impact of the audio-visual media in the daily lives of citizens, these media, including public service broadcasters, play a unique role in the exploration and preservation of the national heritage, and in the promotion of diverse cultural traditions and indigenous cultural identities.
6. The Forum believes that the further liberalisation of services sectors targeted by the Millennium Round will help foster prosperity and development on a worldwide basis. Open markets will contribute to stable and continued economic growth. At the same time, the global trade régimes must recognise the legitimacy of societies actively to promote and foster their cultural diversities and to support the unique role of the audio-visual media for the preservation of our cultural heritage through appropriate frameworks.
7. Against this background the Forum calls the attention of WTO Member Countries to the Action Plan on Cultural Policies for Development adopted in Stockholm on 2 April 1998 by the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development convened by UNESCO and signed by 140 of its Member States. The Forum concurs with and reaffirms the findings and recommendations of the Action Plan, and in particular reiterates the following passages stating that the Intergovernmental Conference:
   1. recognises the principle that sustainable development and the flourishing of culture are interdependent, and that cultural creativity is the source of human progress; and cultural diversity, being a treasure of humankind, is an essential factor of development;
   2. recognises that the defence of local and regional cultures threatened by cultures with a global reach must not transform the cultures thus affected into relics deprived of their own development dynamics;
   3. affirms that cultural policy, as one of the main components of endogenous and sustainable development policy, should be implemented in co-ordination with policy in other social areas, on the basis of an integrated approach; and that any policy for development must be profoundly sensitive to culture itself;
   4. affirms that cultural policies should promote creativity in all its forms, facilitating access to cultural practices and experiences for all citizens, enrich the sense of cultural identity and belonging of every individual and community and sustain them in their search for a dignified and safe future;
   5. recommends to Member States to adopt and put into practice a broader vision of national cultural policy in accordance with the actual conditions in each country, and endeavour to encourage the participation of civil society, including the media;
   6. recommends to Member States to promote the development and use of new technologies and new communication and information services, stress the importance of access to information highways and services at affordable prices and the equal use of languages, and encourage the use of new technologies in public services;
   7. recommends to Member States the idea that cultural goods and services - in the definition of the Mexico City declaration referred to above - should be fully recognised and treated as being unlike any other form of merchandise.
      
      For local, regional or national governments to support the production and use of such goods and services is not a threat to international competition or to open markets. On the contrary, it supports innovation and social and cultural development for the long term. All - including the traders in mass commercial culture - benefit from such support for innovation.

The Forum, therefore, appeals to all WTO Member Countries participating in the negotiations of the Millennium Round to:

1. recognise the importance of cultural sustainability;
2. acknowledge that cultural goods and services are significantly different from other products;
3. acknowledge that domestic measures and policies intended to ensure access to a variety of indigenous cultural products and services are legitimate public interest objectives;
4. refrain from applying the General Agreement on Trade in Services to services related to the communication of audio-visual content to the public, which are directly linked to the cultural, political and social interaction and sustainable development of societies. The distinctive nature of these cultural content and services applies irrespective of technology used and includes preceding stages of production and distribution of such content as well as its promotion and specific regulation.
5. honour the spirit of the Berne Convention and the letter of the majority of states' Authors' Rights laws, acknowledging the significance for the diversity of cultural expression of individual authors and artists having rights and responsibilities in their creations.



Brussels, November 1999