Appointment of IGF Leadership Panel

Building on the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the UN Secretary-General appoints an inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Leadership Panel as ‘a strategic, empowered, and multistakeholder body to support and strengthen the IGF’. The Panel’s key functions are to: provide strategic inputs and advice on the IGF; promote the IGF and its outputs; support both high-level and at-large stakeholder engagement in the IGF and IGF fundraising efforts; and exchange IGF outputs from the Forum with other stakeholders and relevant fora and facilitate the feeding of input of these decision-makers and fora to the IGF’s agenda-setting process.

Publication of Our Common Agenda

The UN Secretary-General issues the Our Common Agenda report, outlining his vision on the future of global cooperation. Among other elements, the Secretary-General envisions the adoption of a Global Digital Compact (GDC) to ‘outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all’. The GDC is to be agreed up during a Summit of the Future, planned for September 2024.

Report of the First UN OEWG on Cybersecurity

  • Reaffirmation of the results of the previous reports of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), as well as that international law, and in particular the Charter of the UN, is applicable to cyberspace
  • Norms do not replace or alter states’ obligations or rights under international law – which are binding – but rather provide additional and specific guidance on what constitutes responsible state behaviour in the use of ICTs
  • Recommendation that states voluntarily identify and consider CBMs
  • Recommends that appropriate to their specific contexts, and cooperate with other states on their implementation
  • Comprehensive capacity building measures in the field of ICT security

Consult the first OEWG Report (2021)