From: Thomas Rickert
Time: 28 January 2015
CC: Mathieu Weill; León Felipe Sánchez Ambía
To: Lise Fuhr, Jonathan Robinson
Subject: CWG-Stewardship accountability dependencies
Dear Lise and Jonathan,
Thank you for the very useful call last Friday, 23 January. It was
helpful to hear updates from the CWG, and I hope the overview we provided
of the CCWG's face-to-face meeting, Frankfurt 19-20 January, was
informative and showed we are working in the same direction.
We held a session in Frankfurt to discuss the draft "CWG-Stewardship
accountability dependencies" document, and the summary outcome of that
discussion follows. You can also find details of the sessions, including
staff notes and transcript on the CCWG wiki at
https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=51418500
We first presented your letter to the group and then, at the end of the meeting, came back to that point and discussed our response.
• Budget Accountability and Transparency
While the CCWG is considering reinforcing ICANN's accountability with
regards to budget, the mechanisms would most probably not specifically
address the IANA budget at a level of detail the CWG is likely to ask for. Therefore, we encourage the CWG to recommend
measures to enhance transparency regarding the IANA budget and we will
support requests for increased transparency.
• Accountability for (re)delegations
To the extent that the Board may take decisions on this area, the CCWG intends
to recommend accountability mechanisms that would be relevant and
supportive. We expect to recommend a strengthened reconsideration process
for Board as well as management/staff decisions.
• Independent Review of Board Actions
CCWG is discussing introducing binding mechanisms of redress to the
independent review process for certain decisions of the Board. We are very
much in tune with CWG approach.
• Independent Appeals Panel
We expect CCWG recommendations to be supportive to the CWG proposals, we
aligned in our thinking/approach, but the CCWG is cognizant of the fact that the CWG might need to explore its own mechanisms .
• Control over ICANN Board decisions
When we met, this was a new section of the document and CCWG members had
not had chance to review before the meeting. The CCWG is now considering
options to challenge and overturn ICANN Board decisions. We are very
aware of the need for caution so as not to undermine the bottom-up nature
of the ICANN policy decision-making process. Community oversight of Board
decisions would probably not extend to the ability to mandate a specific
decision, but rather to overturn a Board decision or require the Board to
make a decision in the case of inaction.
This avenue of work will be one of the focuses of CCWG attention for the
coming weeks.
Kind regards,
Mathieu Weill, León Sánchez, Thomas Rickert
