Stéphanie Dupuy

The UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which was adopted unanimously the day after September 11, 2001 during the UNESCO General Conference, was an opportunity for States to reaffirm their conviction that "intercultural dialogue is the best guarantee for peace and to reject outright the theory of the inevitable clash of cultures and civilizations. » (Koïchiro Matsura, Director-General of UNESCO). This Declaration has the merit of considering cultural diversity as «the common heritage of humanity », and as biodiversity for nature, it makes for its protection an ethical imperative indistinguishable from respect for the dignity of the individual. The Declaration is very important because it can be a tool for development to humanize globalization and is the promise for the survival of the humankind.

This is why we have been engaged during the preparatory committees for the World Summit on the Information Society to guarantee its presence in the Declaration of Principles and in the Plan of Action of the WSIS. And OIDEL, representing the Cultural diversity caucus in Geneva, was pleased to take note of the reference to the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in the final versions of the WSIS's official documents.

Conscious that intercultural dialogue can defend essential values like peace, we have been studying this argument for more than one year and finally ended up with a text. This text, untitled «Intercultural dialogue and information society », has been submitted, at a WSIS's fringe meeting, to several specialists coming from different cultures and professional backgrounds.

We present here some of the important points discussed during the meeting:

The importance of an education on human rights, the need for an active tolerance, the problem of a cultural hegemony which can lead to racism and fundamentalisms, the necessity of a culture of peace, the important role of international documents, the example of school as a place of multiculturalism, the serious problem of richness, like the technical one, in the hands of a privileged minority. During the fringe meeting, held like a round-table, we also had the opportunity to get to know an extremely interesting project in the public health area, done in partnership with four French speaking medical faculties from different continents.

After the positive response we received from this round-table, we thought to continue this work until Tunis 2005. The first step of our suite program will be a working group organized at the University of Geneva next April. We also have the intention to constitute a permanent working-group on intercultural dialogue and information society, a virtually library on human rights and the intercultural, and to submit our text to specialists of different cultures and religions to create some sort of "mirror texts", basically the same arguments treated from different point of views.

With the help of several authors coming from both the academic and NGO's background, we have been trying to excise some fundamental principles from this dialogue between cultures. The goal would be to find a way of dialogue between different cultures and to do that we need to find some common principles and values. To begin with, it is therefore essential to get to know the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity.

The text «Intercultural dialogue and information society» is available in French ("Dialogue interculturel et société de l'information ») on the web site www.aidh.org, and will be soon available in English and in the other U.N. languages in the same site.

Stéphanie Dupuy
representing the Cultural diversity caucus of the WSIS in Geneva, OIDEL.