Despite UN resolutions against the illegal Moroccan occupation of part of the territory of
Western Sahara, ICANN has decided not to delegate the .EH domain neither to the Government of the Western Sahara nor to Morocco. But unfortunately, with this decission, ICANN is supporting Moroccan only aim in this affair: to block the saharawi domain. Very sad and unfair.
ICANN’s report
A Special Meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors will be held on 16 October 2007, and an issue of the agenda will be the Delegation of the .EH domain, reserved for Western Sahara.
As you can read on their website, it will be for “informational discussion only”. But well, at least they will talk about it.
EH is the two-letter country code reserved on the internet for Western Sahara, as FR is the code for France, DE for Germany, ES for Spain, IT for Italy, etc.
Nowadays, EH is the ONLY internet top level domain in the whole world which has not been assigned to any entity to manage it. In 2005, after fulfilling all the necessary technical requirements, the Government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was the first institution asking the delegation of this country code top level domain, in order to give full access to the internet for the Sahrawi people, and to achieve the sustainable development of the information society in the Western Sahara. ICANN, as the responsible for the global coordination of the internet’s system of unique identifiers, is the organization which has to give the answer.
Although this application was on the meeting agenda of ICANN Board in January 16th 2007, it was not discussed. As IANA pointed out (IANA is the unit of ICANN responsible for the coordination of the Domain Name Services root zone), the Board had asked some more information about the political situation in the Sahrawi territory, information to be analysed in the following three months. But unfortunately, there has been no answer. Not yet.
The point is that there is a proper delegation request from a territory (Western Sahara) and its people (the Sahrawis). We all know there is a political conflict on part of the territory since 1975, due to the illegal occupation by Morocco, as stated by many UN resolutions, but this should not stop the Board taking a decission on this delegation any more.
It has been almost 2 years since the application was submitted, and there is a Country that is waiting for an answer. ICANN has to pass a resolution, and this application fulfils all the requirements and it can not be understood why this ccTLD is not assigned yet and why this decission has been delayed so far.
The Government of the Western Sahara officially requested the .EH ccTLD Delegation to IANA on the 23rd of November of 2005. Then, several meetings were held among Saharawi Government representatives, IANA staff and some ICANN Board members at Sao Paulo ICANN Meeting in December 2006.
In the meantime, broad documentation about this Information Society Development Project in the Western Sahara has been gathered and sent to IANA. All the documentation submitted shows that the delegation will fit the interests of the local Internet community (through the support of several local organizations) and the civil society, and it shows that the organization which will run the TLD registry fulfils all the technical requirements.
The Government of the Western Sahara also sponsored the San Juan ICANN meeting in June 2007 to show the Internet global community the effort going into the .EH delegation project.
