Source – United Nations:

. . . As I expressed during the past Connect Americas Summit, celebrated in our country this past July, we should continue to harness our respective wills to reduce the digital gap and to maximize Internet access to more and more people across the world.

Each step in this direction is key to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.

Nevertheless, 1 am still uneasy about the risks that the misuse of cyberspace can have for boys, girls and adolescents.

Our task will not be complete if we do not assume the responsibility of facing up to one of the most important social and ethical challenges of our time: the protection of children and young people from the threat posed to them by the misuse of cyberspace.

For that reason, we manifest our support to the initiative that the International Telecommunications Union is carrying out in this regard.

I invite all the States here represented to share experiences in order to establish and harmonize, on the basis of international telecommunications criteria, norms that will allow us to guarantee that minors are no longer exposed to the risks and dangers that are disseminated through cyberspace.

This should not in any way be interpreted as limiting or distorting freedom of expression and the universal use of the internet, which we defend with conviction.

Panama is preparing draft legislation in order to establish “minimum regulations” geared towards protecting our children and adolescents from the dangerous content spread through the internet and other electronic media.

We are working to approve this initiative in consensus with approval of all of Panamanian society.

We must become allies and “close ranks” against internet sites that promote pornography in general and child pornography, in particular, obscene and lascivious conduct and physical, sexual and emotional violence.

Let us combine efforts and concerted actions against sites that facilitate the making of weapons or explosives, that incite illegal drug use, against those that stimulate racism, xenophobia or any other type of discrimination that is contrary to human dignity.

Let us apply measures against those who dedicate themselves to showing, using and spreading minors’ personal information and to making al! kinds of threats against our boys, girls and adolescents.

Let us harness information and communication technologies (ICT) for the benefit of development and for a better quality of life for our infants, and let us not permit that the benefits that accessing and using the internet offer us put them at risk. . . .