 Welcome everybody to today's event, which is the launch of SDG 16 data initiative report for 2021. And my name is Massimo Tomasoli. I'm the permanent observer for International Idea to the United Nations and the RetroGlobal Programs at International Idea. We have a panel composed of members of the partnership. The SDG 16 data initiative is composed of 17 partners. And today in the panel we have five of the 17 represented. All the partners contributed to the global report as they are contributing also to the online web resource. With data, the SDG 16 data initiative is an initiative aimed at tracking progress on the implementation of the 2030 agenda as regards SDG 16 on peaceful, inclusive and just societies and accountable institutions. And it is also a partnership that complements official data with non-official data. Some of the institutions part of the partnership are actually producing such data. And others are actually elaborating aggregating data from different sources in order to integrate the vision by all member states, all stakeholders, including from the civil society in monitoring progress on the implementation of the agenda. As you know, SDG 16 is a goal in itself, but it is also an enabler for the agenda as a whole. So it is very important to monitor progress on its implementation in order to understand where we are going in terms of reaching the sustainable development goals by the year 2030. And the challenges posed by the pandemic have been great. This year, the launch is also part of a broader initiative, which is called the Global Democracy Coalition Forum. Today, around the clock, a number of similar events and initiatives are being organized in order to inform member states who will attend the Democracy Summit scheduled for this week. And this is an interesting panel because it will try to make the link between the quality of institutions. And in our perspective, the perspective of international idea, at least the working of democratic processes and institutions and the achievement of sustainable development. So, without further ado, I want to introduce quickly the members of the panel. Sara Long from the World Justice Project, Halcon Jorlow from PRIO in Oslo, the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Ivana Bielic-Vucinic from the Global Forum for Media Development, Tobi Mendel from the Center for Law and Democracy and my colleague Miguel Angel Lara Otaola from International Idea. Before giving the floor to Sara, just a word on your possibility of posing questions to the panels. Some questions have already been collected at the time of registration. You can still submit questions if you are watching this event via YouTube on the chat function. Okay, so thank you very much for your attendance, fellow panelists. It has been a great pleasure to organize this launch. I give the floor now to Sara Long from the World Justice Project. Thank you Massimo for that introduction and for the opportunity to participate in today's important discussion. Just give me one moment while I share my presentation. Right. So today I'll be speaking about findings from the World Justice Project's 2021 Rule of Law Index. The Rule of Law Index is the data initiatives endorsed data source for providing complimentary indicators on SDG 16.3 which measures rule of law and access to justice. So before I delve straight into some of the findings of our 2021 Rule of Law Index, a few words about what our Rule of Law Index is. It's a quantitative assessment tool designed to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived around the world. The 2021 edition of the index includes 139 countries, 11 of which were new for this edition of the index. The data that is used in our index is primary data coming from 138,000 households through a poll conducted by local polling partners and also surveys to practitioners with expertise in civil and commercial law, criminal law, labor law and public health. So between our household survey and our four expert surveys, we ask more than 550 perception and experience-based questions that are used to calculate our index scores. And one important note is that data for the 2021 edition of our index was collected between October 2020 and May 2021, so in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. And our previous 2020 edition of the index was actually released on the day the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. So this really gives us an important look at changes to rule of law as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now what does our index measure? We calculate overall rule of law index scores for countries using eight primary factors or outcome indicators. Those are constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice. So we take a pretty robust conceptual approach to defining the rule of law and to measuring the rule of law. And each of these eight factors is further broken down into 44 sub factors, which I won't go into, but there's a few of note that I'll be discussing today. So what is the outcome of this exercise? What I have here on the screen is just a snapshot of countries overall rule of law index scores on a scale of zero to one, with one being the best possible score or perfect adherence to the rule of law, which by the way, no country has achieved a perfect score of one. I'll be discussing some high level findings and trends, but if you want to explore the data further, you can download the report and view the country scores and rankings, as well as the individual country profiles that shows regional and income group comparisons or explore the data online through our interactive data portal. Now onto the findings. So the first finding was that for the fourth consecutive year in a row, more countries declined than improved in rule of law performance with 74% of countries covered in our index declining and only 26% improving. And the countries that declined account for about 85% of the world's population or 6.5 billion people living in countries where the rule of law has declined in the last year. So that's pretty striking. And you can see here on this scatter plot on the x axis, it plots countries 2021 index scores and on the y axis, the percentage change. And you can see pretty easily from the red dots that a large share of countries saw declines in the last year. And this just is a different view of the same finding. I'm showing that the specific countries on the map with the largest improveers and decliners for each region noted on the map. But one important thing about this decline is not only that it's a sustained trend for the fourth year in a row, but that it was much more severe in the last year. So we can see that between 40, 46 and 57% of countries had declined in the last year for the last four editions of the index. And this year it was 74% of countries. So this is pretty stark. And if we take a deeper look at what is driving these trends, we see three factors that that perform particularly poorly over the last year. Those are constraints on government powers or also known as checks and balances, fundamental rights and civil justice with 70% of countries declining and those three factors. And this decline in civil justice is particularly striking because this is a reversal in the previous trend. So in the 2020 edition of our index, we actually saw more countries improving than declining in the last year. So this is a really noteworthy reversal. So what did we see happen to the rule of law during COVID? So one, we saw declines in constraints on government powers. This was seen in 70% of countries. And declines were the most pervasive in South Asia, the MENA region, and the EU and North America region. We also saw closing civic space during COVID-19 and this is defined as declines in three sub factors measured in our index. Freedom of opinion and expression, civic participation and freedom of assembly and association. So you can see on the top left, this map shows that 82% of countries experienced a decline in at least one of these dimensions. And then the histograms show the number of countries that saw improvements in blue or declines in red in at least one of these areas. Similarly, we also saw delays in civil criminal and administrative justice during COVID-19 with 94% of countries experiencing delays in at least one of these areas. And civil justice was particularly affected with two thirds of countries experiencing increased delays in just this area of justice. So similarly, the top left, we can see all of the countries that experienced at least one of these delays. And then we can see the number of countries that experienced a negative or positive change in the three histograms for civil and administrative proceeding civil justice and criminal justice. The last finding was rising discrimination in the last year, 67% of countries experienced declines in our sub factor 4.1 on equal treatment and absence of discrimination with declines being the most pervasive in Sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region. So I spent most of my time talking about, you know, the state of rule of law and, you know, changes in the last year, but I want to end with a quick note on what are the data challenges and opportunities themselves. There's three main challenges. One is poor availability of official data for the official 16.3 indicators. The indicator measuring crime reporting only has data available for about 50 countries and this has remained steady for the last five years and the new indicator on access to civil justice because it is new has no official data available yet. We also saw during the pandemic that national statistical offices reduced and halted data collection with 96% reporting in June of 2020 that they had to either temporarily or permanently halt face to face surveys. And these problems come on or layered on top of an already weak justice data ecosystem with over reliance on administrative data that is oftentimes fragmented not comparable and leaves out the experiences of those who don't turn to formal justice institutions. There's lack of coordination among producers and users of justice data and there's an underdeveloped culture of monitoring learning and evaluation as compared to other social sectors such as health and education. So what is the path forward. Collect and use the right data. This of course includes non official civil society data like data produced by the members of the data initiative, but also data from a variety of sources including administrative survey data. Citizens generated data and other new and alternative forms of data. Strengthen capacity to collect and use justice data. This can be done through partnerships between official and non official data producers. And also by collecting data as part of other routine and ongoing data collection efforts to minimize cost and logistical challenges and then improve the use and demand of justice data. There's this new 16.3.3 indicator on access to civil justice and this reporting requirement creates an opportunity for countries to systematically collect new justice data. Also, you know, we're not just collecting data for data's sake. We need to collect data to make the case for more investment and better policies and services that help people meet their justice needs and this can be done through producing data that shows the costs and impacts of rule of law and access to justice. And in order for data on justice and rule of law issues to actually be put to good use, it needs to be intuitive and user friendly to decision makers. So those are my main recommendations with that I just like to thank you and I look forward to the rest of the panel's discussion. That is terrific. Thank you very much, Sarah. Sarah Long is director of access to justice research at the World Justice Project. From what she said, and if you attended also our launch last year, you can already see that while last year we were focusing on the challenges posed by the pandemic in terms of gathering data. Now we have already trends, analysis, and this is extremely interesting, but still there are challenges also for data collection and access to the right data. And this I think is something that we hear throughout the panel rather consistently. Now the floor is to Okon Yellow, senior researcher, Peace Research Institute Oslo. Okon. Thank you, Tomasi. Yes, so I'm a senior researcher at Prio, the Peace Research Institute Oslo. And I'm going to talk about government censorship and violent conflict. So I'm going to focus on SDG 16, see SDG 16.1.2 specifically. So this is an indicator that is supposed to measure the total count of conflict related deaths divided by the total population expressed per 100,000 population. So SDG 16.1 relates to violence and conflict, but in the interest of time, I'll try to focus on this indicator specifically in this talk. So in collecting these data, we rely on what we call the UCDP conflict, the UCDP data. This is a partnership that Prio has with Uppsala, and it collects data on several aspects of conflict. The parties that are involved, where they are located, several things. We collect these data thanks to journalists, thanks to the work by journalists around the globe. And in a few days, Mariah Assange and Dmitry Muratov, they will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021, for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace. And this is a, the research community on conflict data have a great gratitude to journalists like Mariah and Dmitry. Because journalists around the globe, they enter dangerous areas to report about events that are ongoing, and we use these reports, these news reports, to code conflict data. And about 80% of all the conflict events that we code are based on these reports from journalists. So this is a hugely important source for what we know about conflict around the world. Unfortunately, there are several governments that don't want the journalists to do this. So this is ironically illustrated by another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Abhi Ahmed, who is currently facing a conflict in his own country, Ethiopia. And as a part of that conflict, the Prime Minister has banned journalists and has censored freedom of expressions in various ways. And this is very common in conflict settings that governments try to limit the freedom of expression. And this is often, very often because they are committing atrocities that they do not want the world to see. These are active efforts by governments to avoid the world to know about their lack of commitment to SDG 16.1.2. During the pandemic, we saw a similar type of action by governments. So this is just what Sara just talked about, right? So we saw several governments limiting the freedom of expression and civil liberties in different ways. And this also affects our ability to get these types of news reports and then in effect to systemize the data on the progress on SDG 16.1. Because we are unable to get the reports from the different areas around the globe. Censorship of this kind have many effects on data collection. And the main problem is that we cannot really assess the extent of the problem, right? So we know what we know. So if the blue circle here represents what we know and the black circle represents what we don't know, we simply do not know how large that black circle is, right? So we have no idea of knowing what we do not know. And I want us to keep this in mind when I now start to go into the trends for 2020 and 2021 in conflict-related deaths. So just to refresh, we're looking at SDG 16.1.2, which relates to conflict-related deaths. And if we take the sum of conflict-related deaths around the globe and divide that by the population expressed in per 100,000, we will get this pattern, right? And we can see that in 1994, there's a huge spike and that's the genocide in Rwanda. But other than that, the world in the past 30 years has stayed just right above and right below one conflict-related death for 100,000 population. There was an exceptionally peaceful period between 2000 and 2010, but then we saw this bump again. And this is the period after 2011 and most specifically the conflict in Syria. If we zoom in on this period and divide it by the different areas where conflict is occurring, Syria is this large bulk in the middle here. So between 2011 and 2019, the overall trend in conflict-related deaths was very determined by what's going on in Syria. So whenever the conflict in Syria escalated, so did the total numbers. And when the conflict in Syria de-escalated, so did the total numbers. 2020, which is the last year we have data for, broke this trend. So this was the first year where the number of conflict-related deaths in Syria decreased, but the total number of conflict-related deaths increased. There are several reasons for this. I've noted here in Mexico, among other things, due to a drug cartel war going on in Mexico. But I want to bring focus to Africa. Africa in the past year has seen an increase in the number of conflicts and also then an increase in the number of conflict-related deaths. Now we believe this is connected to the Syrian conflict, in that militants who took part in the Syrian conflicts, and I'm thinking especially of IS, have later moved into Africa to find new allies and new headquarters in Africa, which has escalated conflicts several places there. This could be like a one-time fluke or something we only see in 2020, but there are several headlines from 2021 that points towards political instability in Africa. I'm thinking of two coups in Mali, another coup in Chad, a coup in Guinea, another coup in Sudan. So these are different political instability signs that could imply that we will see more conflict-related deaths in Africa in the years to come because of several regional conflicts. Most recently, Ugandan troops entered the DRC to combat the ADF. So I believe Africa will be a continent that we need to pay attention to when it comes to tracking the progress on SDG 16.1 in the years to come. Now as I said, it's unclear how much of our data covers of the true number of conflict-related deaths around the world. We don't know what we don't know. So one of the things we are now trying to develop at PRIO is crowd coding. So establishing a platform where anyone could log on and report conflict-related deaths, report conflict of any kind really inside the platform. And we believe this is one potential addition to our data collection on SDG 16.1.2 in the future because it is necessary that we do not rely on what the government's report of this. We need to find statistics that are non-official. And this is one of the potential avenues we now see. All right. I'll close my remarks there and look forward to that discussion. That's terrific, Alcon. And in your presentation, you actually already made a very important link to the next presentations because you focused also on the importance of journalists, independent investigative journalists for reporting on conflict-related deaths. And now the next speaker is Ivana Bielic-Vucinic, a Project Manager at the Global Forum for Media Development. Ivana, you have the floor. Thank you, Mastimo. Thank you to, I want to just say thank you to International IDEA for organizing this event today as well as organizing this forum. So I will be presenting on behalf of GFMD, Global Forum for Media Development, but also on behalf of Center for Law and Democracy, who also, who prepared Toby Mandel, who will be speaking after me, actually prepared this chapter. And I will be talking a little bit about the SDG 16 target, SDG 1610 target. And actually, Mastimo, you're right. Alcon gave a fantastic introduction to what we are going to talk about. And just to say a few words about GFMD, we're a network of around 100 journalism support and media development organizations working in around 50 countries. And we promote, support and highlight the importance of free independent pluralistic and viable media and public interest journalism in the pursuit of democracy, human rights and sustainable development. So the SDG targets SDG 1610 states, calls on states to ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms in accordance with national legislation, international agreements. And there are two indicators which we follow. This is the indicator 1610 one, which is looking at the safety of journalists and their ability to perform their work and this is something Alcon just referenced. So, and it's measuring the number of verified cases of killing, kidnapping, disappearance, detention and torture of journalists associated media personnel. And the second one is just journalists also including media workers, trade unionists and human rights advocates in the previous 12 months. And the second one is number of countries that adopt and implement constitutional statutory and or policy guarantees for public access to information. There are various methodologies that are developed by UNESCO and civil society experts possess national progress on SDG indicators, both of these indicators. So, to continue on what the HACON was saying, this target 1610 is actually, the values covered by this target, the freedoms in general and access to information in particular are important not only in their own right, but also for the sustainable achievement of other human rights as well as wider development objectives. This was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 when they said that the freedom of information is a fundamental human right and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated. Now, to go back to the indicators 1610 one and 1610 two, there are official sources and unofficial sources. Official source for the first indicator. These are officially tracked and reported by UNESCO International Labour Organization, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And some states also maintain statistics on such killings. The database that UNESCO uses to track these reports on journalists who have been killed is called Observatory of Killed Journalists. And the civil society reporting effort that is measuring the killings and attacks on journalists is done by Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ. And this is a slightly different methodology because it verifies and investigates circumstances behind death and looks whether it was connected and if the motive is related to their work. Now this is important because there is an assumption for this indicator that even though these killings and attacks are crimes, they're looked at a little bit more broadly. It is considered that when the attacks happen on media journalists and media workers and journalists, that it's actually with the goal to stop them from reporting on important public matters of public interest, conflict, corruption and other important issues. And as such, it is considered to be attack on human rights and the right to information and ultimately attack on democracy. And this is why this is measured, although it is a bit of a narrow indicator, it doesn't really portray the situation in the freedom of expression world, so to speak. The other indicator and the monitoring of the other indicator is done in two lines. One is monitoring the adoption of the formal guarantees of the right to information and the other is monitoring the implementation of the formal guarantees for rights to information. Again, we have official methodology which is UNESCO survey which is completed on a voluntary basis by states as part of self-assessment exercise. There are, if I'm not mistaken, eight questions. Five are referring to adoption. Three are referring to implementation of the RTI. And there has been an increase in a number of countries which have responded to the surveys from 43 in 2019 to 102 in 2021. This is because, in part, because the surveys have gotten considerably simpler, which made it easier for the states to complete them, but also they become less data rich. And non-official data, civil society data, is the RTI rating developed by Central for Law and Democracy in collaboration with Access Info Europe. It is a different type of methodology which uses 41 different indicators to assess whether the legal framework contains specific rules which support RTI. And then for the monitoring of implementation, as I said, the last three questions of the UNESCO survey refer to this, and then the Foyanet methodology is the methodology that looks at the implementation of RTI guarantees. I won't go into much detail about this methodology. Please look at the report. It's very comprehensively explained. But there are some, it's significantly deeper dive. For example, this methodology makes blind requests for information to each authority, and assesses the quality of responses both procedurally and substantially. And there are other methodologies that are being developed. For example, something that is called comprehensive methodology developed again by CLD and supported by German Gees. And it also adds the element of key informant interviews, self-assessments, office visits, blind tests, etc., etc. Now, because these non-official methodologies include the key informant interviews and other more in-depth tools, the effect of COVID to implementing these type of methodology has been much stronger and direct than the effect to, for example, UNESCO survey, which is conducted virtually. I'm talking about the other impacts of COVID-19 pandemic. Looking narrowly at the indicator 16-10-1, it is hard to deduct because it's tracking the number of killings. And the CPJ reported 49 deaths, which is the lowest number, while UNESCO reports similar numbers. So not significant change, but the CPJ report is showing some trends that are connected to the COVID-19. For example, they've indicated, and this is something that is in line with ACON's presentation, is that they indicated there are less, in 2020 there were less deaths, combat-related deaths of journalists, which indicates that, and they conclude this is because of the travel restrictions. And the journalists were not allowed to report from conflict areas. There was also their fear of journalists who are being jailed and in custody, and the health risks for them to contract the COVID. And in 2020, at least two journalists died after contracting the coronavirus, according to CPJ. Now, for the impact on the second indicator, it is more direct and it's visible in the data. The rate of new adoptions of the ATI laws dropped with just one new law passed in 2020 in Kuwait, and so far in 2021 there were four that were passed. Many countries adopted amendments to their RTI laws due to COVID, either suspending them entirely or significantly extending the time limits corresponding to requests. Now, this is also very important for this initiative, which is the STG data initiative. So getting the data is something that the RTI laws are supposed to enable. The COVID-19 tracker on the RTI rating website recorded 23 countries which formally instituted legal or policy limitations on access to information due to COVID-19. And many countries informally suspended RTI rules. Our recommendation in this time is just to remind everyone that the access to timely, high quality information is imperative during the global health crisis. And that it's one of the key pillars required to slow the spread of virus, mitigate the impacts and underpin collective societal responses. Journalism is the best antidote to fight the misinformation that is during the crisis, and this is again introduction for the next speaker, I believe. And the recommendation is to fully respect safeguarding naval rights to press freedom and freedom of expression, rule of law, access to information, privacy and digital rights, and only restrict them as international standards permit. To allow journalists covering important global issues such as COVID-19 pandemic to exercise their freedom to seek, receive and communicate information without being harassed, intimidated or attacked. Thank you so much. I would conclude here. Thank you so much, Ivana. You're actually already introduced the next topic and viewers will download the report. We'll see that these are flows, the logic of the global report. So the next speaker is Tobi Mendel, Executive Director, Center for Law and Democracy. Tobi, you had the floor. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I was about to apologize for not having a PowerPoint, but it's not that I was too lazy just to prepare one, but actually I prefer to speak without one. So I'm not going to apologize, but I will mention that I don't have one. Probably I'm the only one. Also, my presentation is a little bit different because each of the other presentations relates to one of the specific areas of the SDGs and data collection, whereas my report, which is on the chapter disinformation, disrupting progress towards achieving the SDGs. It's really about a cross-cutting overall cross-cutting issue and not an area where we have specific non-official collection of data per se, although there are lots of civil society groups that are collecting data about it. And I want to start by defining my terms because people throw around the terms disinformation, misinformation, fake news, false news, quite a lot, and sometimes different, even at the official level, different definitions are used. And for purposes of the chapter in the report, we keep it fairly simple and I think focused on the core essence here. Disinformation is verifiably false information, which the person spreading it knows is not correct. So it's knowledgeable and verifiably false. Misinformation is again verifiably false information, but where the spreader is not aware or doesn't care perhaps about whether it's accurate or not. So quite different phenomena. And I think that everyone is aware, everyone at least who goes online, so I guess everyone who's watching this conference, is aware that there has been a massive spread, a tidal wave, if you will, or an onslaught of mis- and disinformation growing over the past few years and much fueled by COVID, such that the WHO talked about an infodemic alongside the pandemic, but that phenomenon has started well before COVID took place. And I just touched briefly on some of the reasons for that. And the first is unfortunately disinformation works. If you want to achieve a specific goal, whether it's political, economic or ideological, disinformation will help you get there. And I think if you look just to take one little tiny snapshot from within that, a significant amount of the disinformation about vaccines is originally produced with some companies that sell alternative health medications or remedies. So, and COVID has really helped their businesses. I'm not absolutely not saying that all of those companies are involved, but there are certain players among them and they're spreading that information because they want people to remain at risk from COVID. The second reason is that it's hardwired into the business models of the platforms. Basically, the platforms do well when information moves more. There are more clicks to put it simply, and disinformation is sexy. Or to put it in a more academic sense, and as some of the articles about it have written, it has a considerable cognitive advantage over the truth. People like it and they read it and they spread it more. And I think we also have to recognize that around the world, and this is not particular to any country, although it may vary from country to country, there's a very significant sense of alienation that has been growing. I would say for the last 30 years in many countries, whether it's because of discrimination or mistreatment of another sort, exclusion from the political process, poverty. And many times people that are faced with those kinds of, I would say, severe forms of alienation, they just don't care. So they're happy to spread this sort of information. And then finally, I would mention the role of misinformation as what I like to talk about is a disinformation laundering. So analogous to money laundering. So someone malevolently puts disinformation out there, a relatively small number of actors, but then sort of hosts of people spread it, share it, click on it, like it, do whatever for it so that by the time the ultimate reader gets it, it's being cleansed, and they're now getting it from their friends and colleagues and groups. So it looks like it's some reliable sources so it's a real important laundering effect for disinformation. We'll touch very briefly on a human rights analysis. It's important to know that under international human rights law, the guarantee of freedom of expression for the most part protects the spread of even disinformation and certainly misinformation. And that may seem a little counterintuitive, but if you ban these things in a general way, as opposed to banning specific sorts of disinformation, like for example, telling lies about people that harms their reputation. So we have defamation laws for that. Those are permitted. But if you generally ban disinformation, you are going to capture a lot of perfectly legitimate speech, even speech by professional journalists, scientific debate about emerging facts. So it's the harm done by general bans on disinformation are so serious that international law doesn't permit that. Moving now to talk about the harms. So I think the harm is probably to every one of the SDGs, certainly every one of the goals and, you know, in one way or another. And I mean, the impact, for example, on health, the most obvious and blatant in our conversation today. And it's been shown that disinformation and misinformation are significant drivers of vaccine hesitancy. So they basically undermine society's key tool to address COVID-19. And a lot of the discussion about this focuses on Western countries and a lot of Western countries are seeing their vaccine hesitancy rates hold vaccinations at sort of 70 to 75% of the population. But there's a much more serious problem in a lot of other countries. For example, I was in Jordan recently, the vaccine that just one or more vaccine rate in Jordan is 41%. I checked that today and you can walk in anywhere in Jordan and get vaccinated. There is no shortage of vaccines in Jordan. People are just not getting them. So the vaccine hesitancy in countries like that much, much more serious problem than in the western most Western countries. And I would like now to focus on SDG 16, which is, of course, our topic of discussion. And I think the impact there is a little bit more subtle, but absolutely no less harmful. I think that vaccine, sorry, the misinformation underwind democratic elections, and we have some very good example, very bad, but well documented examples of that. They fundamentally undermine trust in public institutions. So people disseminate lies about what the government is doing. People believe those lies. And it really undermines the ability of public institutions to have a trustful relationship with with with society, and that in turn undermines everything that SDG 16 stands for that you read out earlier. So I think that's probably the most profound impact and it promotes conflict within society. I mean, just looking at some of the issues that we've discussed, and it also seriously undermines the assessment of progress towards the SDGs. It clouds up the data. So alongside direct data, you get false data. It obstructs the data collection process. So it impacts on every aspect of the process. I will now, and lastly, talk a little bit about some of the remedies that are available in this space. And there are no easy fixes here. This is a deep and profound social problem. And at the first set of measures, I think both states and platforms should be engaged on all of these. And the first one is regulatory measures. I said before that states can't blanket ban false or disinformation, false news or disinformation, but they can certainly make sure that in targeted areas they're banning particularly harmful statements. For example, in the 2020 joint declaration of the International Special Reporters on Freedom of Expression, they specifically called on states to ban statements which undermine people's right to vote. So people are spreading false information, for example, about where to vote so that people don't know how to vote and their right to vote is undermined that kind of targeted banning. Of course, the platforms can go much further and many of the platforms, for example, have banned all false statements about vaccination. Secondly, I think it's very important for both on platforms and governments to counter mis and disinformation, for example, by tagging false statements and linking to accurate information for officials and others to increase the flow of reliable information to the public for governments to adopt strong right to information laws so that people can access information, pull information from government. And finally, I think media and information literacy programs are very important for both platforms and government. We need to raise our citizens awareness about what is disinformation, how it flows, how to identify it, that sort of thing. And I will end by saying that I think the longer term solution, we also need to address the root causes, including the alienation that I talked about earlier. In other words, we need to deliver all of the SDGs. With that, I'll stop and hopefully we can have some discussion later on. Thanks a lot, Toby, and we certainly want to have discussion and you have been all very disciplined and we are on track. You introduced a very interesting perspective which looks through the lens of disinformation at the agenda as a whole and also SDG 16 properly. And now we, we have perhaps a similar perspective provided by my colleague, Miguel Angel Lara Otaola senior democracy assessment specialist as international idea, who will base his analysis also on the global state of democracy report data that we just launched a couple of weeks ago in Brussels. Miguel, you have the floor. I'm Miguel, and I hope to keep the discipline that we've kept so far. So, let me share my screen. I also have a PowerPoint presentation. So, well, thank you. Thank you again. And it's an honor to share this panel with with you colleagues and partners from the SDG 16 data initiative. So, in the presentation that I'm making today, I will highlight three key topics. First, I will present international ideas global state of democracy indices and show why they are relevant for tracking progress on SDG 16. And for complementing official data to I will give a few examples of how the global state of democracy indices from idea can be used to track this progress. I'll be focusing on four specific targets out of the many targets on SDG 16. And finally, I will show how these indices are not only useful for measuring SDG 16, but as a measurement for democracy as a whole, which is as Massimo said earlier, an enabler for achieving the rest of the SDGs. Okay, so first, I start with a global state of democracy indices at international idea. We measure the quality of democracy and we start with the premise, which is our very comprehensive and very broad definition of democracy. For us, democracy is popular control over public decision making and decision makers and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control. So, our definition of democracy is not focused just on having free and fair elections periodically or just on fundamental rights or on the rule of law. So it encompasses all these components of democracy trying to cover different models of democracy worldwide. From this main definition, which you can see at the center, it's the blue circle in this, in this figure, we take, we created five attributes for democracy representative government, which has to do with having free access to power. Fundamental rights, which has to do with access to justice and civil liberties checks and balances on government. And partial administration and participatory engagement. So we have five attributes that in turn are divided into sub attributes. We have 16 of those. And to create these, we draw on 116 different indicators. And for this, we have data for 165 countries for the last 46 years because we start measuring in 1975. And this is also it's worth mentioning that it's a data set that it's updated every year have not been an exception to this. And so why are these in this is relevant. Well, they are a good compliment to official indicators and to official data, because it's high quality data from an independent institution. As an idea, we have, they're very rich. As I said, we have 116 indicators so we can get information on many different aspects, ranging from gender equality to access to justice from clean elections to judicial independence. And we also, as I mentioned, we have a very wide coverage. 165 countries for 46 years and counting. And well, during the pandemic, you know, the lockdowns and the situation around the world was no obstacle. The way we create and we estimate the synthesis, we gather from other high quality and reputable data sets. Meet them from the University of Gothenburg, the international and country risk guide, the political terror scale, a number of you and statistics. So we were able to collect this data during the pandemic and we were able to deliver our updates on time. Now, I will focus and show you how the indices can be used to track to monitor for specific targets of SDG 16, which are these. The 1st 1 is 16.3, which has to do with the rule of law and equal access to justice. The 1st 3 bullet points relate to the official indicators. The proportion of victims of violence on sentence detainees and proportion of the population who have experienced a dispute and who access the formal or informal dispute resolution mechanism. However, as we all know, and here I'm amongst specialists, the rule of law and access to justice go beyond police reports convictions and the use of dispute resolution mechanisms. You know, the rule of law is not only about this. It's also about the quality of those mechanisms, right? So this requires that justice systems meet certain standards. Like judicial review, the right to an effective remedy, the right to a fair and public hearing do process the presumption of innocence. So there are many things that are associated to the rule of law and access to justice that are not necessarily considered in the official indicators. And that's why here I present to you a couple of our sub attributes in the global state of democracy and this is that can be used to track progress in for this indicator. 1 has to do with access to justice and it has 5 different indicators access to justice for men for women. Judicial corruption decision judicial accountability and a fair trial and the other 1 has to do with judicial independence. Related to the independence and impartiality of different types of courts, compliance with the judiciary and the strength and impartiality of the legal system. We have 6 indicators of those. Here in this figure, you can see an example of the use of our data, the global state of democracy indices to track and to measure access to justice in this case from 1975 to 2020. In this election of countries countries that have highest and lowest scores. And here you can see, you know, significant changes in some of those, like, you know, South Africa mid nineties after, you know, Apartheid Poland with a transition after the fall of the Berlin wall. Etc. Just an example of how this data can be used. A 2nd example is target 16.5, which has to do with corruption and bribery. It has 2 official indicators the proportion of persons who have paid a bribe to a public official or were asked for a bribe. And the proportion of businesses that paid a bribe to a public official. However, this is also a little bit narrow because as we know corruption is not limited to the payment of bribes by individuals or businesses. Corruption can happen anywhere in the government in the private sector in the courts and the media and businesses, and can also involve anyone, politicians, public servants, business people and regular citizens. Therefore corruption can take many forms and not only, you know, be focused on bribery, bribery. It can also involve using a public position to gain certain influence to provide public jobs to your friends to your family. So, since this is also a little bit narrow here, what I'm doing is proposing the use of 1 of our sub attributes in the global state of democracy indices to measure or to complement measures that exist. Which is in this case, the absence of corruption and has 5 specific indicators that consider a broader take on corruption and not just focused on bribery. It includes, you know, theft, executive embezzlement, bribery, corruption through different ways, nepotism, patronage, favors, etc. This figure again shows how we can use the global state of democracy synthesis data to track, in this case, the assets of corruption, which is related to target 16.5. And it also shows a number of countries. Here you can see, for example, Turkey and Venezuela, which have experienced decreases in the last 2 years. And well, that has to do with Erdogan and in the case of Venezuela, Chavez and then Maduro countries who have lost their democratic status. The 3rd example has to do with this target, which is 16.6 effective accountable and transparent institutions. There are 2 official indicators as you can see the 1st one has to do with primary government expenditures. And the 2nd 1 with the proportion of the population that is satisfied with their last public service service experience. However, then this is another way to show that official indicators can be a little bit limited. Because having effective transparent institutions is not only about how reliable your national budget is, or how people are satisfied when they go and they get their driver's license or whatever they come in contact with public services. It's more than that. In fact, this target is related to integrity in the public sector and to having institutions that listen to the public that respond to their demands and concerns and that deliver quality public goods. So for that, the proposal made in the chapter and presented here is we could complement this by using 1 of our sub attributes, which has to do with predictable enforcement and has 6 different indicators. That also measure other aspects of public administration, meritocratic criteria for appointments, the presence of transparent laws, etc. So it's a broader perspective on having effective and transparent institutions. This figure again shows an example of how this data can be used to track or to complement the tracking of this indicator and also has a number of countries. Then, last but not least, we have a target 16.7, which has to do with responsive, inclusive and participatory decision making. Again, this has 2 official indicators. The proportion of positions in national and local institutions, public institutions that are integrated by different groups by sex, age, people with disabilities and different population groups. And indicator, the second indicator, the proportion of the population who believe that decision making is representative, inclusive and responsive. However, responsive, inclusive and a participatory decision making is more than this. It's not only about having representation in Congress or in public bodies. It's not only about having a seat. It's also about having a voice and making this voice effective and not only in public bodies, but across different aspects of society. So, since representation is a little bit more than that, again, here, what we propose is using this closed state of democracy sub attributes, which has 3 sub components and 24 different indicators that measure aspects of gender equality, basic welfare and social group equality. This figure actually compares 2 of our sub components, which are part of the social rights and equality sub attribute. And basically shows a strong relationship between gender equality and social group equality for a selection of countries, which have experienced some increases and declines in the last few years. And most importantly, and here I get may you wrap up the please. Yeah, this is my last slide. And with this I linked to what Massimo was saying at the beginning, the global state of democracy indices are useful for for tracking SDG 16 and those targets and others. But they're also a key measure. They're also key to measure democracy, which is a catalyst for sustainable development and why a catalyst because democracy provides an enabling environment where citizens have a voice governments are transparent and accountable. The law is respected and rights are guaranteed. And with this, what I'm trying to say is that democracy matters. Not only must democracy be not sacrifice for sacrifice for development as some voices argue, but actually has to be fostered to achieve development. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Miguel and sorry for putting a bit of pressure on you, but we are just on time. We have now 30 minutes and we received already some some questions. Some of them were actually submitted at the time of registration and I'll try to address them to some of the panelists but please feel free to jump into any of the possible questions that you might feel like responding. There are some related to the issue of the rule of law. Therefore, they could be more related to Sarah's presentation Sarah longs presentation. One is from Amary Carl from the New York City bar association. She's asking about best practices of actual work on the ground. So impacting outreach education engagement with citizens in democracy law service. So, any examples in that area. There is also another question that may be related to this broad area of the rule of law comes from Owen Pell. It's posted on the chart. Maybe you can see it. Oh, and Pell is a president of the Auschwitz Institute for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities and he's asking, what about impunity as a form of corruption. What are any links with absence of checks and balances as to government power. This could also be for Miguel. In addition to Sarah and there is a more general question that anybody from the panel may wish to address. It was posed by Juliet Coleman security women. She's the director security women. And she asked that what progress has been made to integrate gender disaggregated data to monitor progress on SDG 16. I will stop with these first three questions and any of you fellow panelists may jump in. Sarah, maybe. Yes, I'd be happy to comment on a few of those. I'll take the last one first because I think it's kind of straightforward and it actually relates to a comment in the chat that I saw came in from Mariana. I know in their SDG 16 survey, they and their reporting platform have proposed a number of disaggregations, including disaggregation on the basis of gender. So this SDG 16 survey that the co custodians of the 16.3 indicator are working on will collect data on all of the survey based SDG 16 indicators, including on rule of law and access to justice. And this will include a requirement for reporting gender disaggregated data. So I think that's a great, a great step forward though. I'm the other panelists might know of other developments. I also wanted to comment on oh and Pell's question about the relationship between corruption and impunity and to what extent corruption itself is a check. I don't know if it's possible for me to just share one of my previous slides quickly if the moderator can just give me sharing permissions. Absolutely, please Amanda. So what I have up here on the screen are the, the eight factors of our rule of law index and indeed the way they were conceptualized is these first four factors are really factors of the rule of law that constrain the exercise of power and the second eight. Sorry, the second four factors are factors of the rule of law that really look at like service delivery. So ensuring order and security access to justice, etc. So, you know, kind of this idea of absence of corruption being a broader check that that's definitely the case and, you know, in our factor on constraints on government power, it looks at, you know, balance of power across different branches of government, but it also includes sanctions for official misconduct and independent audit as also forms of checks on government power. So, and then in addition, you know, judicial independence, undue influence and the like are also measured in our factors on on civil and criminal justice. So as as Owen points to they're not as, you know, kind of eight clean buckets, there's definitely a lot, a lot of kind of cross fertilization across the factors in our index. Thank you very much. Anybody, Toby, Toby, you want to and then Miguel. Yes. Just jumping on on two of them at the first is corruption or impunity as a form of corruption. And I mean, Ivana talked about killings of journalists and the number of killings as the indicator 1610 one. But I think a very important sub strata to that is the lack of prosecution. So impunity for those who have killed those journalists, which is still, although there have been some improvements in recent years still bats about 90% impunity. So incredibly high. So basically, you know, you're free to go and kill a journalist or not free, but you're like unlikely to be prosecuted. And of course, in many, many of those cases, the journalists are investigating corruption, you know, usually investigating long doing of one sort or another and often corruption. So I think that it's a strong link there. And just to kind of an interesting challenge on the gender disaggregation in the area of indicator 1610 to so access to information. So it's very interesting to see how many women are making requests for information and whether their requests are getting treated equally and all that kind of thing. But a challenge and we do have some information and information we have suggest that women are significantly lower levels of requesters. I'm not sure if we yet have information that shows that they're getting their request or getting treated less well, although that wouldn't be necessarily surprising. But one of the one of the challenges here is that in better practice states are not actually supposed to monitor who is making a request. You should be able to make even an anonymous request. You shouldn't be able to have to provide identifying data like your gender, like your nationality like anything like that. So, if so, it's a little bit of a catch 22 that if states are observing best practices in this area, you were actually denied the gender disaggregation data that in a way we need or that we want. So it's an interesting challenge that access to information advocates have kind of whistled it. Thank you. Thank you, Toby. Miguel. Thank you, Massimo also to go to all one's question. Yes, of course. Corruption and impunity impunity and corruption. They go hand in hand, especially at the highest levels. And that's why one of our five core attributes has to do with checks on government. And this attribute is divided into three key aspects. One is having an effective parliament. And some of the indicators within effective parliament has to do with the effective oversight of parliament on the executive. That's one key piece of information. Another one has to do with having, as I explained earlier, an independent judiciary and one of the indicators within this is compliance. And finally, the third sub attribute of this attribute is media integrity, which includes a range of indicators, but also includes some of them that are relevant to this corruption of the media at the highest levels. In addition to those sub attributes that make up checks and government, we have a measurement for corruption. And this includes also measurement of how the executive is behaving. This is the way that we are arranging it now. So it's kind of like this associated, but we are currently undergoing reform process. And for next year, it is very likely that all these sub attributes will be grouped within a new packaging directly addressing the rule of law. And of course, within this impunity is key. So please feel free to take a look at the reports and our global state of democracy indices where you can find data on these attributes and sub attributes that I think will be useful for your work. Thank you very much, Miguel. And I would now go on with another cluster of questions received at the time of the registration. And thank you also Sarah for addressing Mariana Neves question in the chat on the 16.6.2 indicator. Now, the other questions that we received, there was one that actually was again addressed to those who spoke about information. Karolina Wilmen, these has been already partly covered, including by Miguel's last comment on the integrity of the media. But she's asking for any more specific views or comments on the role of independent media and reliable information to contribute to SDG 16. Karolina Wilmen is director of the Foundation Irondelle. Then Adam Carroll, director of the UN program director of justice for all is asking why trends in rising authoritarianism are doubly, doubly alarming because of the reach of surveillance and other technology. How can your data help map the crisis in social values that accompanies these shifts with populist nationalism also on the rise. Will the United Nations be able to prevent the genocide of repression as we seem it unable or unwilling to do for some specific cases. Anybody wants to pick up on these? On these elements of rising nationalism and the attack on minorities, maybe some of you might have. Yes, Miguel. Well, not necessarily that, but it has to do with it in the last block. There was a question on gender equality. And I would like to just to briefly mention that we have a sub attribute that measures this and tries to go a little bit beyond and to aggregate different measures. Normally, especially in our field when we're talking about gender equality, most studies focus on the number of female legislators in mostly in the lower chamber. That's that's important, of course, but with our indicators, we try to look at other aspects. So we, we look at years of schooling comparing female years of schooling versus male years of schooling. Participation of women in civil society organizations. Kind of like the distribution of power between men and women in the society. And we also look at women's political and economic rights. And I link this to the last part of the question that you asked Massimo, because, you know, women, unfortunately is one of the groups that is at disadvantage globally. So I think it's very important to keep a track on that, not only for SDG 5 that has to do with gender equality, but also as a threshold condition to basically all the other SDGs, because, you know, you cannot have a democracy within an unequal society. And especially where 50% of the society is, is left behind and doesn't have a proper voice. Thank you, Miguel. I saw Okan who raised the sand and again, Toby. I also, it's extremely difficult to answer directly to the questions and the direct kind of link between open media and avoiding these repression and avoiding autocracy. But we do know that so first of all, we know that world leaders and autocratic leaders are very attentive to media freedom. So we have several studies on we have, for example, one on journalist killings where we know that there's an amazing paper on how journalists die when journalists are killed. There's usually increased repression afterwards. Right. So so autocrats do several attempts at making sure that whenever they're going to do repression, they will they will first make sure that information about it will not come out. So there's some studies on that. And we have some studies on how social media is being censored, how media is being censored and how it's being manipulated by governments. And it's clear that even though openness might not have like a direct effect on democratization and avoiding conflict in these things, it certainly is a precondition, right, because so much of how we avoid these things relies on people acting and holding their governments responsible. And in order to do that, they need to have information. So, so information we believe is a very important precondition for other, other factors that must also be in place in order to avoid, avoid these things. If I could also just have one minute to comment on the gender issue in the, in the former round of questions. So it's extremely difficult to collect data and group it down by gender and age and other type of things that that's the main hindrance to collecting data on this. And one thing we are trying to collect data on is sexual violence, where gender of course becomes a very important aspect. But there are a lot of a lot of self censorship issues when it comes to sexual violence, people don't want to talk about it, governments don't want to talk about it. And it's also not clear how that plays out in the gender dimension. We can easily imagine that sexual violence against males will be even more self censored than against females. So this is a very messy and difficult thing to track, but we are trying to to collect data on on some of these aspects when as it relates to conflict. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Toby and then maybe. Yes, Sarah and perhaps also Ivana on the independence of media afterwards, Toby. Okay, thanks. And so thanks Carolyn for your for your comment. And I just want to mention that the quote I did earlier in my presentation about a considerable cognitive disadvantage was coined by foundation and in the report, of course, the appropriate credits are there. I didn't give them in my presentation. That's not enough time. I think that I mean, and I didn't also mention the idea of promoting independent quality media as an antidote to disinformation. But of course it is a very, very important part of the solution. How exactly states should do that depend a lot on their information infrastructure and the situation. But what we're seeing is a massive decline in funding basically for independent media as resources advertising resources and related resources shift to the online space. And I think we need as societies to start to recognize quality information as a public good public interest information as a public good and to fund it like we find roads and hospitals and education. And I think very few societies. I mean, a few places have done a little bit in that in that regard, but nobody has really done a lot. We don't see any country funding public interest information in the way that they fund roads, for example. And I think we eventually we need to get there because the market model is simply not working for that sector. And I do think it's a very important part of the response to disinformation and a lot of other and also just, you know, the spread of positive information that fuels addressing the SDGs. I will also just say a couple of words about the issue of nationalism and genocide and sort of those awful but unfortunately growing phenomena in our societies because they are also very much part of the wider picture of disinformation. And it's cousin, if you will, hate speech or hateful speech. And which also has seen a massive increase predating COVID through the digital space. And I think we do we do absolutely need to try to find better ways to address that again not easy because you're always kind of finding the balance with freedom of expression and not limiting legitimate discourse about difficult topics. Which may look like they're intolerant, but actually are just people discussing things or societies having hard discussions about whatever it is that they need to have and actually promote intolerance. So, but that but that those are those are closely related phenomenon although they're slightly different. And I think it's part of a similar package in many of the measures that I talked about as antidotes or remedies to disinformation. I think also apply to hateful speech. Thank you, Toby. Sarah. I also wanted to comment on issues related to nationalism and authoritarianism and to what extent these these data tools can can track issues with with attitudes relating to these issues. So I wanted to just share that one thing that the world justice project has been trying to do as part of our general population pull our household survey is to collect data on on attitudes. These don't factor into a rule of law index scores, but taking advantage of the fact that we have these ongoing data collection exercises to a large number of households around the world to collect data on these themes. So, for the last year or two, we've added some questions to our general population poll that ask people, you know, which of the following two statements, do you agree with? It's more important to have a government that can get things done, even if we have no influence over what it does or it's more important for citizens to be able to hold the government accountable. Or, since the president was elected by the country, they should not be bound by laws or the president must always obey the law in the courts, even if he or she thinks they're wrong. So we have had some questions like this that we have started asking to kind of try to track some of these issues relating to shifts and attitudes. And then just another thing I wanted to flag relating to authoritarianism and populism is that many other organizations and data producers have been measuring the relationship between trust and rising populism and support for authoritarianism. I know the OECD has guidelines on measuring trust and I know Edelman has also been measuring this through their barometer for a while. And so I think, and this is also something that we ask about as part of our household surveys, perceptions of trust and also perceptions of corruption as they relate to a number of institutions. So just wanted to flag that it is kind of in our underlying data, but that is available if anyone's interested in learning more. Thank you, Sarah. Maybe Ivana, do you want to come into this? Yes. Before I give the floor to Miguel again. Yes, Ivana. Thank you, Massimo. I wanted to also reflect on what Caroline asked about how can journalism contribute to the SDG goals in some other ways. It can contribute by advancing SDG accountability as well. And there are two groups in this profession. Those are the media and the journalists and then us, media development organizations, organizations that are promoting and protecting the safety of journalists that are supporting the media development. So there are two elements in this and media and journalists are best advancing SDGs but doing their job, I would say, professionally and reporting acting as a watchdog doing the investigative journalism and covering corruption, etc. And then us on the civil society side are supporting their work and that's the best we can do and that's what the GFND and the Tobis organization is doing by supporting the coverage of media, by supporting, you know, maybe educating some on SDG 16 goals, etc. And I also wanted to reflect on on the gender thing that if for me it's important, interesting and relevant that, for example, for the indicator SDG 10 one, when you when we look at the killings of journalists, not many of these women. But when we look at more recent forms of attacks on journalists such as online attacks. There we have a gender factor there and most recently in UNESCO and some of our members like Deutsche Welle and other members have released reports that are talking about the online attacks on women journalists. So that's something that should be I think unexpected to be explored even further in future. Thanks a lot, Ivana. Now I have Miguel again will raise his hand. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Massimo on the issue of the rise of populist authoritarianism. I wanted to say that just two weeks ago, international idea launched the global state of the democracy reports from this year and amongst many things including this report. So we not only have the data just presented on the global state of democracy in business. We also have a regime type classification showing which countries are democratic, which are hybrid, which are authoritarian from 1975 to 2020. And there you can see the evolution throughout the years and you can see that the trend for the last few years is that we've been losing a few democracies. Also, one of the things that we include in the report and that we measure is democratic erosion. We also measure democratic backsliding. So you can see the countries which have had the greatest declines in our different attributes. So you can see which countries declined where they declined and how big their decline was. You can also see which countries were democratic five years ago, 10 years ago, 45 years ago, and which are no longer democratic. And we even in the first few pages and I just share the link of the report there if you want to see it. We included this beautiful graph showing for the last 46 years, the number of countries that have moved either in a democratic direction or authoritarian regret direction every year. And you can see, worryingly, that in the last 10, 11 years since the global financial crisis and now with the COVID-19 pandemic that I think for the last 11 years in six of those 11 years, we've seen more countries moving in an authoritarian direction. And then, you know, we have the list of countries there, Turkey, Venezuela, Benin, Serbia. And you can see in the indices website, but also in the report why these countries have eroded or have had democratic breakdowns. In some cases, you know, as you know, from the literature, it's not necessarily a military coup. It could be someone who is really popular elected democratically that starts undermining democracy from within. In some cases, they start with the formal institutions, the judiciary, the election bodies. In other cases, it starts with the attack on journalists and the media. So anyways, the global state of the democracy report is quite comprehensive and we have a global version of that, but also regional versions for the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia and the Pacific, where you can see almost virtually for every country what's what's going on there. And not only see this evaluation, but we also, what we try to do this time around is to provide policy recommendations for different actors to defend, to support democracy worldwide. Thank you. Thank you, Miguel. Well, you may recall that Sarah, long in her presentation, the first slide was about the fourth consecutive year of a worsening trend in terms of the rule of law globally. And that goes hand in hand with what you just said about, I think that there are five consecutive years of countries moving in the opposite direction than towards democracy and regressing into authoritarian or hybrid regimes, which is an element that comes out from our report. And maybe the two things could be seen as related Sarah, perhaps the rule of law is a very important pillar of any democratic system. I have a few more questions and only four minutes to go before we wrap up. And I want to pose them to you and but really give you perhaps one minute each to react before we close. And one actually something that I can react immediately. So why by Mohammed, Dan Cobo director of programs in action aid Nigeria asked, how can we get access to the data generated for a wider usage. Now, that is easy to answer in the chat function. My colleague Luis Consuegra, who is the coordinator of the SDG 16 data initiative for this year, posted a link to the global report. The link is to our website SDG 16.org at SDG 16.org, you can find the data and you can actually work extract the data for your own analysis. So, so why but I stand ready to help you and to provide you with more indication in case you need them. Then there are these are the questions. One is about. It comes again from Owen Pell. It's about the possibility of establishing an NGO assessment tool or standard that would help us identify NGOs and distinguish them from quasi NGOs that could be corporate sponsored or government sponsored NGOs the gongos in order to distinguish them from other civil society representatives. It's a wider question about, you know, assessing the quality of NGOs when we talk about stakeholder engagement that is an important issue who wants to take up this question. Yes, Toby. So I'm one of the other issues my organization works on is the freedom of association, which I think is linked closely to that question. And I just want to just apologize that I'm in a hotel room at the moment. So that's why I'm not by myself. I mean, I don't I don't know if anybody does that, but I think it's certainly possible to identify the core characteristics of a wheel NGO, as opposed to a gongo or controlled NGO or something. You know, there's nothing wrong with gongos. It's not a it's not a negative thing in any way, but some, you know, some arms length, but controlled organizations serve important functions in society. Nothing wrong with that, but they're not the same as independent NGOs. And I think, you know, that's what the question is about. I think it would be perfectly possible to identify the key characteristics of what we and the proper name for it. I'm saying real NGO. That's not a very elegant name, but the proper characteristic of it and then go out and rate, of course, the number of entities that are existing in the world is in the many hundreds of thousands. So I don't think it would be very easy to apply it to everybody, but to develop a pool at least for that I think could be done. Yes. Yes. And there is also analysis available on these. I remember the work done by Civicus, for example, with their yearly report on civic engagement in the world. Now we have reached the end of today's session. I wanted to know whether you can just summarize with one sentence, your key takeaways. And let's go in the order we followed. So Sarah, the key takeaway from today. Oh, that rule of law is declining and that's troubling, but I think the positive takeaway is that we have data to monitor these issues and to design appropriate policy responses. So I think that's the silver lining. Thank you. Support your local journalist. That's very, very quick and good. Access to timely, high quality information is utmost importance in this time of crisis and journalism and this panel has proved the importance of journalism across the different SDGs. So that is a silver lining, actually, that it is being recognized as very important. Toby. So disinformation is an attack on many of the human rights and developmental values that we hold dear. It's not easy to address in a way that still respects human rights, but we can do that and we need to do more in that space. Miguel. Thank you. There can be no real development without democracy. Thanks. Thank you very much. So let me wrap up with answering the last question that was posed a game by our very active participant open pale again. He asked, is there part of the project that will seek interaction with national statistical offices. Yes, we are actually in a conversation with them, in particular through the prior group on governance statistics. And this, this will continue in future. We always try to engage in a conversation on the margins of the UN statistical commission. My key takeaway is that really we have to report on adoption of frameworks, but also on implementation. The pandemic pose the particular challenges on both elements on both accounts. We saw how important it was for the rural law for information and for conflict related issues, as well as for assessing the quality of democracy. Before completing these conversations of today, let me thank you all for having followed these conversations, the panelists for having been so inspiring and discipline in their presentations. And I want to thank also my colleagues, Luis Consuegra, the coordinator of the SDG 16 data initiative, Amanda Suric, who coordinated the organization of these meeting and thanks to whom we were able to share the presentations and do all the work. And Annika Silva Leander, who coordinates the Global Democracy Coalition Forum, which this meeting is part of today. Thank you very much to be continued. We are nine years from 2030. I hope we'll be able to not only report on challenges, but monitor more and more on achievements and implementation. Thank you everybody. Nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you so much.