UN chief appoints Indian bureaucrat to inaugural Internet Governance Forum Leadership Panel

Secretary within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Alkesh Kumar Sharma is amongst 10 eminent individuals from around the globe appointed by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on his inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Leadership Panel.

In line with the mandate of the IGF and as really helpful within the Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the Secretary-General has established the Panel as a strategic, empowered, and multistakeholder physique to assist and strengthen the IGF.

In addition, the Panel consists of 5 ex-officio members, together with Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology Amandeep Singh Gill in addition to senior representatives of the present, instantly earlier, and instantly upcoming IGF host nations.

The Panel will handle strategic and pressing points and spotlight Forum discussions and attainable follow-up actions, with a purpose to promote higher impression and dissemination of IGF discussions in accordance with its Terms of Reference.

The 10 members of the Panel have been appointed by the Secretary-General following an open name for nominations, and according to an equitably distributed, multistakeholder configuration of ministerial-level Government representatives, executive-level representatives of the non-public sector, civil society and the technical neighborhood, in addition to “at-large” outstanding individuals within the area of digital coverage.

Others members of the panel are Vint Cerf from the United States, Hatem Dowidar from Egypt, Lise Fuhr from Denmark, Maria Fernanda Garza from Mexico, Toomas Hendrik from Estonia, Maria Ressa from the Philippines and the USA, Karoline Edtstadler from Austria, Gbenga Sesan from Nigeria, and Lan Xue from China. They will serve a two-year time period throughout the 202223 IGF cycles.

The IGF is an consequence of the Tunis section of the World Summit on the Information Society that occurred in 2005.

In the Tunis Agenda, Governments requested the Secretary-General to convene a “new forum for policy dialogue” to debate points associated to key parts of Internet governance.

The mandate of the Forum was prolonged for one more 10 years in December 2015, throughout the high-level assembly of the General Assembly on the general evaluate of the implementation of the World Summit on the Information Society outcomes. The seventeenth version of the Forum will happen from November 28 to December 2 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

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