On 27 February SCO Secretary-General Vladimir Norov met with Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Houlin Zhao.
The SCO Secretary-General underscored the ITU's crucial role in producing standards for information and communication technologies and services and briefed his partner on work being carried out in the SCO to provide international information security.
Vladimir Norov noted that worldwide web access currently stands at a fairly high level with around four billion people using the internet, with 71 percent of internet users being young people aged 15-24.
Ensuring international cybersecurity has been on SCO's agenda for quite some time. Firstly, crimes using ICT could cause significant damage to the critical infrastructure of member's states. Secondly, the internet is used to disseminate extremist and terrorist ideas, recruit young people, traffic drugs and launder illegally obtained funds.
In 2009, the governments of SCO member states signed an Agreement on Ensuring Information Technology, which outlined the major areas of joint efforts in this field.
Vladimir Norov pointed out that there have been impressive results in this field. Thus, in 2018 alone, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the SCO, as part of its efforts to counter the use of the internet toward terrorist and extremist ends, banned access to over 165,000 internet resources, including over 3,000 social network accounts that contained material of a terrorist and extremist nature.
In June 2009 the SCO Summit in Bishkek approved the Concept of SCO member states cooperating in digitalisation and information and communication technologies, which would make it possible to step up the exchange of knowledge as well as information and advanced practices in this area. One of the Concept's goals is to close the digital gap that exists between the member states in order to boost information security to ensure equal and safe access to modern ICT.
Speaking about the global aspect of cooperation, the SCO Secretary-General said that member states call on the international community to make efforts to create peaceful, safe and cooperation-based information space.
"The UN should play a role in drafting universal international norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviour of governments in the information space. Management structures of the key internet resources must become more international, more representative and more democratic," he emphasised. Vladimir Norov recalled that as early as 2011, at the 66th session of the UN General Assembly, SCO member states presented a Code of Conduct for Information Security, which was actively debated and finally adopted in 2015 as an official UN document. The crucial feature of the Code is its emphasis on peaceful conflict resolution: the document stipulates that countries are obliged not to use ICT to violate each other's peace and security and not to interfere in the domestic affairs of other states or undermine their political, economic and social stability. In 2017 the leaders of the Organisations' member states approved
that a universal code of conduct and basic principles and norms of responsible behaviour of states in cyber space be drafted, and that the aforementioned Code of Conduct be seen as an important step in that direction.
In turn, Zhao Houlin highly praised the SCO's international efforts. He noted that ITU's 2007 Global Cybersecurity Agenda is an effective tool for international cooperation in providing cyberspace security. Also, a document entitled a Guide to Developing a National Cybersecurity Strategy was drafted, which focuses on the issues that countries should take into account when implementing their national cybersecurity strategies to protect information.
The ITU Secretary-General noted that all SCO member states are also union members and closely cooperate on joint programmes and projects.
He also informed Vladimir Norov about events the ITU has scheduled to provide cybersecurity and suggested that the SCO Secretariat representatives consider participating.