Thank you, Mr. Ambassador and Katherine [Prizeman]. My name is Debra Decker, and I am with the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, DC, with offices in Belgium and non-resident fellows around the world. Given all the work the committee needs to do, I wanted simply to emphasize to the OEWG that some of its work might be expedited with the help of civil society institutions. The Stimson Center, for example, has this year been hosting along with the Washington Foreign Law Society a webinar series on Cyber Legal Accountability. The goal has been to highlight and progress existing efforts on accountability, a topic of concern to many governments and society in general, especially as it relates to international peace and security.
How can international accountability efforts best be progressed? Supplementing this webinar series, we are proposing to research past efforts to address other security risks that the international community have had to address, such as in the nuclear, chem and bio areas, to find lessons that might be applied to the cyber area and then, with input from countries and other stakeholders, to develop alternative models of accountability. We already have a number of governments interested in supporting this research, and we will be inviting other interested governments and organizations to support this effort. This research and our companion webinar series would supplement the excellent work that others – such as UNIDIR and the Paris Call with CyberTechAccord – have done. We want to leverage existing efforts. Our emphasis is on identifying and supporting models for accountability that would strengthen the development and acceptance of norms.
There are many other critical questions around which stakeholders can unite and help address, and I encourage you to identify these to galvanize stakeholder efforts. For example, our exploration of accountability could be complemented by others’ efforts to work with States to develop models for norm implementation, perhaps like the UNSCR 1540 does with its implementation matrix. Such work can be done, for example, in conjunction with the work that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Oxford are doing. We like others seek to support your important efforts. Thank you.
Contact: Debra Decker, Senior Advisor, Stimson Center, Washington, D.C., [email protected]
