Declaration of the 1st Children's Forum at ICANN

(transcript)
Hello, nihao, barev, Bonjour, Ahlan W Sahlan! You must be wondering why I am saying Hello a lot of languages. It is because we are children from all over the world, coming for the first Children’s Forum in ICANN.

We’re here to tell you all that children can’t participate into Internet Governance nowadays, but we really want to.

But why do children need to participate into Internet Governance?
Firstly, children are 30 to 40 per cent of the internet users of the world. And ICANN advocates the concept of multi stakeholders should decide the policies of internet. And we think that children are the major stakeholder in the internet world. Therefore, we hope that children can also participate into policy making.

Secondly, according to the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 12, it is stated clearly that the child who is capable of forming his or her own views has the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child. We think that internet is surely a matter affecting the child, so the child should participate in the policy making of the internet.
However, this is not implementing well in ICANN.

The major current problem is that:
Firstly, we went attend some meetings of ICANN on Monday, and the concepts were very abstract and difficult that we couldn’t even understand a word of it. And in the meeting, they didn’t indicate clearly who is speaking and it made us very confused.

Secondly, there are not enough ways for us to express our views. The only way for us is the At Large Organization. However, the ALO is for all individual internet users, instead of specifically for children. Children may need an independent forum held in a child friendly way instead of formal meetings. Moreover, there might be a lot of conflicts between the other people in ALO and children.

Therefore, we urge the ICANN to think of how to include children’s participation in meetings and we really hope to receive an answer, Thank you!