Koïchiro Matsuura opens UNCSTD Meeting in Paris

Read the full discussion on the UNESCO website.

Welcoming the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development to its first meeting at UNESCO Headquarters, the Director-General highlighted the importance of the focus of the Panel’s meeting on the ways to promote “the building of a people-centered, development-oriented and inclusive information society, with a view to enhancing digital opportunities for all people”.

Referring to the lead roles entrusted to UNESCO and CSTD in the follow-up to WSIS, the Director-General explained that the current challenge is to ensure that “the new, more integrated, more holistic vision of the information society” that emerged from WSIS is “acted upon and translated into reality”.

In the context of the imminent release of the report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence (HLP), Mr Matsuura felt that a major element in the WSIS follow-up would lie in achieving complementarity of action among the many stakeholders of the information society. “The challenge is to build greater synergy and coherence among agencies, while still drawing on the full range of expertise across the UN”.

The meeting was held in UNESCO headquarters in Paris, November 6-8, 2006.

Editors Note: I was the first U.S. UNCSTD Commissioner, and am delighted to see the linking of UNCSTD and UNESCO. JAD