| 3. NGOs at the PrepCom
Generally speaking, NGOs had sufficient opportunities for
participation in the Regional PrepCom. However, the possibility of NGOs
having a level of participation equal to that of the governments, like
the level of participation the NGOs had at the European Regional PrepCom,
was neither achieved nor even discussed. There were a number of
instances in which the participation of NGOs was limited in Santiago.
The request for NGOs to be allowed to intervene in the Drafting
Committee, where the most important political debates among governmental
delegations developed, was not approved. This led representatives of
civil society organizations, primarily the indigenous leaders, to leave
the Plenary when Chilean President Ricardo Lagos addressed the PrepCom.
In the inaugural session of the Regional PrepCom, Francisco Estevez
of the Ideas Foundation was allowed to make a presentation summarizing
the debates and conclusions of the Citizen’s Conference. This was an
exceedingly positive act as it informed governments of the proposals of
civil society organizations. Civil society organizations were authorized
to make oral interventions in the Plenary and more than 100
organizations took advantage of this opportunity.
The organizations could, in principle, attend all of the Drafting
Committee’s deliberations. However, due to physical space limitations,
they were not always able to remain in the room where the debates took
place. Access to the documents that were being discussed was never
simple. On the one hand, because they were working in "real
time," many of the proposals were presented and discussed at the
same time and there were only manuscript versions of them. On the other
hand, when these proposals were reproduced, on several occasions there
were not enough copies made for all of the organizations who needed
them. There was also an occasion in which the Secretary General of the
Conference indicated that copies would be distributed only among
governmental representatives.
 
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