 Welcome everyone to the webinar on Land Rights and Mine Action. Let me introduce myself. I'm Christelle from the Mine Action AOR. I'm co-hosting this webinar along with Shoba Raouh from the Housing, Land and Property AOR. Thanks to all the colleagues who are joining us today. We have a very good mix of field practitioners, colleagues from Geneva, and a few donors. Looking at the profiles of those who have joined us, we have diverse participants, deminers, experts in housing, land and property, general protection specialists, and some shelter experts. Now a few grand rules or housekeeping rules, given that this is a WebEx supported webinar. So the panelists, our pre-panelists, will speak for 30 minutes, 10 minutes each, and then we will have about 50 minutes for the discussion, and then a few minutes for the wrap-up. It is the first time that we use WebEx, so please bear with us. We don't master the technology fully. The user guide is over 100 pages, so we're trying to limit our use of the functionalities, and the next webinar will do more. Right now we're going to mute everyone to avoid having people talking at the same time, except, of course, the panelists. If you wish to speak during the discussion, please click on the raise hand button, or you can also send us a comment or question using the chat box. If you would like everyone to see your comment or your question, send it to the host, and then everybody will be able to see it. Feel free to ask questions, remember there's no stupid questions, and we'll try to answer them either during the webinar or we'll follow up later. There is an FAQ on the GPC website related to our topic, so if there are many questions coming up, we may decide to update it. We will record the webinar for colleagues who were not able to participate, and then we'll post it on the GPC website. If the connection gets interrupted, please close the browser window and join the meeting again. We'll now elaborate further about the objective of this webinar and introduce the speakers. Thank you. Thanks, Christelle. Good afternoon, everyone. So basically there are two objectives. The one to focus one issue was about working together, so increasing the collaboration between the Mine Action AOR and the Housing Land and Property AOR. So that's really, really key for us. Also to maximize our resources, to ensure we have more joint protection analysis. So that's really the objective number one. The second really focus here to start off with the webinar and to carry this work onward is basically looking at the global study that was conducted from 2010 to 2014. There was a global study by GICHD. That's the Geneva International Center for Mining and the HLP AOR, Mine Action AOR and UN Habitat. And this was a study that covered some seven-odd countries. Professor Unroh and Mr. Rafalad will be speaking about it further. But it basically looked at Angola, Cambodia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Yemen, Colombia, et cetera. And we would like to see what progress has been made after the study and all the recommendations that came from the study and to build on that. And there was also a study that was done by Displacement Solutions and the Norwegian people's aid in Myanmar, which also came up with some really, really interesting recommendations and principles of engagement. So we would like to hear more from the field colleagues and that's why we're really happy to see so many colleagues who have joined us today from Iraq, from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, to get your perspective on what is actually happening with these studies and how do we take this forward, you know? So that's basically the objective. So increasing more, you know, enhancing our coordination between the two AORs and working better to ensure, you know, better protection outcomes. As far as the speakers go, we have three speakers, one based in Afghanistan, the other one in Canada in one, three hours, and the last speaker from who's here with us in UNFPA. Our first speaker will be Mohammad Bakili. He is currently working as the Chief of Staff of the UNMAS in Afghanistan and he's got more than 20 years of work experience in humanitarian demining. So he's worked in Afghanistan and in Somalia in various roles and responsibilities. So he has a massive experience as far as field work is concerned on humanitarian demining. Our second speaker, I mean, he needs no introduction for the Housing, Land and Property colleagues. He's Professor Unruh. John Unruh, his specialty is basically restitution claims in post-conflict countries and he again has 25 and more years of experience in working in different contexts in Asia, in Africa and Latin America. We're really happy to have Professor Unruh here, especially considering that he was also part of the study. So he is also bringing that institutional memory for us and he also has worked with, you know, various donors, with World Bank, with UN, with NGOs, you know, really a big spread. And lastly, we have Mr. Rapillat, Pascal Rapillat, who is the Chief of External Relations and Policy here with the GICHD. Again, another expert in the field and he has also more than 10 years of experience with GICHD. Yeah, and also a lot of experience that he comes with as far as policy work is concerned of demining. He has also worked with the Swiss Foreign Ministry, so he also comes with the government background and he's also worked with the French National Commission on Antipersonnel Landmines in France. Yeah, so that's a really rich source of experience and expertise. Over to you, Christelle. Thank you very much. So we're going to start right away with Mohammed Waqeel to give us the field practitioner's perspective and using the wealth of experience that Afghanistan has. So Waqeel, you have the floor. Thank you, Christelle. Do you hear me? Yes. Okay. Okay, I'm Mohammed Waqeel, the Chief of Staff for Onmas in Afghanistan. So good afternoon, everyone. I'm talking about the land rights and mine action. So just checking, Christelle, I'm clear. Should I go ahead? Perfect. Go right ahead. Thank you. The issue of land rights, actually the aim of my presentation today, is how can humanitarian mine action contribute to land conflict and very brief overview of the housing, land, and property issues. We had, as Showa mentioned, a global study in 2010 run by GICD and Afghanistan was part of that study. Briefly, I will talk on the land rights, how much complicated land rights is in Afghanistan very briefly, and then how land mines make the land rights more complicated. What are our current processes and what are our recommendations? Before moving into the actual land rights issue, just briefly mentioning that Afghanistan is a landlocked country. It mainly has rocky mountains and deserts with very little vegetation makeup. And some of the land rights issues in Afghanistan, that there is a general vagueness in land tenure system or land rights issues. Land, as I mentioned, it's a very shortage of land, because Afghanistan is a landlocked country. And the issue of land grabbing is very high in Afghanistan. The institutional capacities, the human resources, and the coordination in relation to the land rights had been found very weak during our study in 2010. The issues of refugees, the rapid population growth and urbanization, corruption, literacy, the ethnic conflicts, these are some of the challenges that currently exist in Afghanistan. The lack of inadequate irrigation infrastructure is something we also highlighted. The first agenda, I called it land rights, is a complicated issue in Afghanistan. So how it's complicated? There is the land reform and property rights. It has been found to be a major issue. So the first constitutions or related document was from 1923. And then in 1970, there was a major land reform in Afghanistan. And later on, during the Russian-backed government, there was also reform in the land issues. Then Mujahideen took over in 1987. So again, in 1992, sorry, they drafted a new constitution. So it shows that there have been several decades or several times the land issues have been changed. 1996, when the Taliban regime came to power, they actually ignored all the constitution, the figures constitution. So these were the constitution changes or reforms over the past 30, 40 years. Also Afghanistan had since 1979 several conflict periods. 1979, the Russian invasion into Afghanistan. And then 1989 to 1992, the Russian-supported-backed government. The internal conflict which erupted in Afghanistan, 1992 to 1996, that also contributed both to the land rights and the mine action issues. Taliban came into power in 1996. Again, a lot of refugees, IDPs, and also new mine kids in Afghanistan. And the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, post-2001, it's also the fighting is ongoing. The IDPs and refugees are moving around the country, I could say. The major issues, I could mention it once again, the absence of rule of law. There is no clear policy. The war and conflict in Afghanistan, as I briefly mentioned, is contributed to both land rights and land mine. The tribal and ethnic conflicts, the homeless list, the illegal grabbing by warlords and influential groups, the urbanization and also the land mines. So these are the major issues. The land mine and ERW makes land rights more complicated. Again, what are the contributing factors? The unavailability of contamination, records, or maps. While our non-technical survey conducted their first start at the communities or on the ground, so we didn't have the proper maps and records from the warring factions. So that also brought a lot of confusion that we are all the actual boundaries of the mine fields. We are actually covering the lands of the states, the lands of the private lands. So that was a major issue. The lack of information on the land rights, when we started the mine action back in 1979, actually to be honest, we didn't know about the land rights issue. So it was like an emergency mine action period. So our aim was to focus on reducing the civilian casualties, supporting the humanitarian and development reports. So land rights was actually, we didn't hear on that time, honestly. The lack of mine action policy on land rights, that was for many years at the beginning of the mine action, there was no clear policy. And also the lack of coordination during the non-technical survey and technical survey, because there was no proper policy and guidance. So the coordination of our survey teams with the land owner or the local showers or the government, that was a major issue. And the principle of Dounohar, actually probably both of our practitioners and implementers, they were not very well aware of that principle. I could mention some of the examples, a few of the examples, actually we had money. There was a hill, we call it Nader Khan Hill, in the capital city of Kabul. And back in the end of the 90s or beginning of the 2000s, we started the clearance of that hill. But by the time the clearance of the hill, which was located right at the center of the city, so the land grabbers or local people, they were constructing their houses. So later on, when we finished the clearance of that land or that hill, we realized that that was a state-owned land and the land owner, because there was no proper coordination with the government or lack of policies. So that has grabbed by the land grabber. The second example was in east of Afghanistan, in the host province, the district was called Mandusli. On that part of the land, on that district, was part of our operational plan, but due to the land rights problems, people didn't allow our clearance. And that delay on the clearance due to the land conflict which took like one year. During that one year, unfortunately, one of the civilians, a young boy was killed because of that land dispute and not allowing the clearance. The third example, I could say, it's also in east of Afghanistan, a province which is called Nuristan. The issue between the two tribes, it's a very mountainous province and there is a very limited land for agriculture. So there is a tribe conflict for many years and the first time that we sent our land technical survey team, we did the survey, but they didn't allow us to clear. So several civilian casualties has happened on those villages. Later on, beginning of 2007, sorry, 2007-08, we started to hire the community-based designers from these two tribes. We made some progress, but again, due to the conflicts and no agreement between the tribes, we couldn't do it. So that site or that village or that district is still contaminated. The fourth example is the mechanical demining operations in the west of Afghanistan, a province called Herat. We deployed one of the mechanical machines with having that mechanical machine was equipped with flail and also the tailor. It was a flat area and later on, the community people, they stopped the demining operation, mentioning that you actually destroyed our land because by using that mechanical flail or a trailer, the style erosion was happening and the style was becoming totally like that. So the community stopped our demining and then we deployed different tools and later on, we realized that we shouldn't use such machines in Afghanistan, so we stopped the using of those machines. The current processes, actually after we did the study in 2010, on the land rights requirement, we included the land rights in our land release AMAS, the Afghanistan Mine Action Standard. So based on AMAS, our implementing partner revised their SOPs or standing operating procedures. Our nanotechnical survey hazard form now includes the issue of the land disputes. The first time they go to the village or the community, they ask whether there is a land dispute who is the owner of the land. Also, we are asking for the permission of proper demining toolkits. For example, whether the community is happy with using the machines on those areas. During the technical survey or the clearance, we are using the proper community liaison in order to avoid any land disputes or talk to the local shoras, talk to the district governor or the village local helpers. So in order to have a better coordination with the community. And during the handover of the lands back to the community, we revised our form with some statements in order that it shouldn't be considered as a legal document or it is just a certificate of clearance. So those are the current processes. My recommendations or our recommendations that further enhancing the policy on the land rights for the mine action. So it needs to be further publicized or should declare policy of land rights for the mine action globally. The land rights awareness, we see still that it's an issue. It needs still that we should publicize the issue, the land rights issue and the community, the mine action family and also integrate land rights and land release activities. In any part of the process of the land release, the land rights issue should be fully integrated. And the fourth recommendation that we need to identify the state owned and privately owned mine contaminated areas. In Afghanistan, exactly we do know that the remaining contamination like over 1,000 square kilometer of contamination that we have in Afghanistan, exactly we don't know that which part of the 1,000 square kilometer contamination is belong to the government and what percentage report is a private owned areas. So by this probably I will stop here and I will be happy to receive any questions or comments now at the end of my presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Vakil. Really appreciate the, especially the examples that you have given of the lack of coordination that for the non-technical survey and technical survey with the HLP actors on the ground, the land disputes that actually contributed to the delays in your humanitarian demining and the community actually getting upset with you using mechanical, some of these machines that actually spoiled the quality of the soil. Thanks a lot for those examples. For sure, Professor John will pick up some of, some of the recommendations that you have given. John, will you please now stop your presentation? Certainly. Can everybody hear me? We can hear you. Great. Good afternoon. What I'll focus on is how exactly humanitarian mine action can interact with land rights and inadvertently make things worse. So what I'll do is draw on the study that Shobha mentioned that was done in 2010 by the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining and go over the six primary issues that emerge from that study. First hour, a little context. This interaction between land mine experience efforts and land rights has always been there. It's always been fairly problematic, but only recently have it really become sort of a drastic. Fundamentally, land, of course, rights to land is always political. And this is especially the case after a war when the state was likely occupied one side in the war and other groups occupied or sympathetic to another side in the war. So that after a war, we have a particular situation in terms of land rights. We have a hyper-politicization of land rights. At the same time, however, most of the states and customary institutions that used to deal with land rights have collapsed or been damaged. And so these institutions, of course, can't endure armed conflict, and so they're no longer working. So we have an acute problem with the politics of land rights, but we don't have the institutions to handle those. So this is the scene, the scenario that mine action then inserts itself into. And this is why you can find itself in a particularly difficult situation with regard to land rights. So this situation is particularly important as we move forward from conflict to post-conflict to development and we receive mine action occupying sort of all three of those spaces. Just a little bit about the study. It, as I said, was connected by GI CHD in 2010. It looked at how mine action interacted with land rights in a number of countries, Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, and Yemen. And then a workshop was conducted in Cambodia to bring the findings and the reports and the researchers altogether to discuss what common patterns have emerged. Those common patterns revealed six, primary problem issues with how mine action creates or worsens land rights problems. So I'll just go over those and explain those six primary issues. The first one is lack of awareness on the part of the demining organization themselves. So they're frequently unaware of the exact nature of the land rights system that they're moving into to conduct mine action. In many cases, as Walkhill noted, there's confusion. There's confrontation even over who has rights to what land. Is it the state? Is it a tribe? Is it customary? Is it religion? So when the demining organizations move into an area, they're unaware of the relationship between these different claims to land. The problem can be that whoever they see first, often government, can just simply claim that they own all the land, particularly if that's in the law, that the state owns all the land, such as in Angola. And so then they start to demine on some of those grounds, not realizing that they're actually going to cause a great deal of conflict once land is released because then it creates this claiming and counter-claiming. They also don't know how their demining efforts affect lands that are adjacent to or next to the areas that have been demined. So this is a fairly large effect that a number of the studies found. We had focused initially on what are the land rights of the areas that have been decontaminated and are going to be released. Those are important, those kinds of rights, but there's actually a broader ripple effect, if you will, on adjacent areas that could become very, very conflicted as well. So when valuable areas are demined, the areas next to those, of course, become more valuable and there could be conflict over those areas as well. Many Mind Action organizations can hire local staff members that are not aware of communal or customary rights to land that can be asserted. This is the case in South Sudan. Hold on, John. John, hold on. It seems I've been muted. Yes, sorry, John, you were muted for a while. Could you kindly repeat after the South Sudan example? Sure. So we're talking about lack of awareness about land rights on the part of Mind Action organizations. And we're talking about how the awareness about the exact nature of land rights. Does the state own it? Does the tribe own it? Or do these different groups claim on both the same land? And in many countries, we see laws that state that the government owns all land. In reality, of course, government control can become very diluted, even a little few kilometers outside the national capital. And in reality, local groups in a customary way or tribal way actually have de facto control of the land. So that if an unaware, demining organization arrives in an area thinking that the government owns all the land, it's going to release the land to government, creating an enormous conflict. So that's the first of our problem, lack of awareness. The second is just simply the physical occurrence of removing landmines that can start competition and land grabbing. If we look at areas that were mined, these aren't places that are marginalized or in the middle of nowhere where the mines will have no impact. The mines are placed in areas where they will have an impact. So these are areas that are valuable. They're urban areas, they're roads, they're valuable agricultural lands, et cetera. And so when we remove mines from these areas, we free up these valuable areas. And of course, as you can imagine, in a post-war context where there is not a lot of robust rule of law or institutions to carry those out, a great deal of land grabbing can go on for these very valuable areas if we're not really clear on who the intended beneficiaries are to be. So removing landmines can be a very smart competition. Can you hear me? Yes. Good. The third is our highly valuable notion of doing no harm and how landmine organizations interpret how they hope to achieve the do no harm. Most of them try to do this by remaining neutral in land complex, but that effort to remain neutrality actually causes harm. So that we found in this study to be a particularly interesting finding, a little counterintuitive, but because removing mines is always a very, very political act and because local communities always attach a mine action ordinance, I seem to be getting muted often. Hello? No, you're fine, we can hear you. Okay. I just have to mute newcomer. There's still a few people joining us, so I'm muting them as we go. Okay. We can hear you fine. Keep going. Okay, great. So we're talking about how mine action organizations attempting to be neutral in the face of land conflicts actually does harm. The presence of a mine action organization in a local community or an area of a city, they come with uniforms, with equipment, they're at a high capacity, so they inadvertently automatically are attached to government. If that government has a record of being abusive, of grabbing land itself, of occupying one side in a war, then that attempt to remain neutral becomes very, very political and inevitably the mine action organization is seen as being attached to one side or another in conflict. So this idea of doing no harm by remaining neutral is fairly problematic. In Afghanistan, our understanding is that they've developed engagement criteria that stipulates that all land disputes can actually be resolved before any clearance can be good. That's good, that's nice, but again, back to lack of awareness, if the mine action organization talks to the state, talks to government and has shown a law that says all land belongs to the state, then that can be as far as they pursue it. They're not going to be thinking, well, that's the law, but in reality, what is the claims situation? The fourth problem area is prioritizing which areas are to be de-mined first. So as we know after many wars, there's many, many areas that need to be de-mined but you can't de-mine all of them at the same time and so you have to prioritize which areas are going to be first, the second and third. Usually rows are prioritized first in order to facilitate the movement of humanitarian efforts. And then residences, residential areas, including cities, are de-mined next. And then finally, agricultural land. And this can seem very, very logical, but one of the problems that emerges here is that agricultural land can actually end up being de-mined years later. So that if people return home and then have no place to farm because their farmland is still mined, they actually have to encroach on elsewhere's land, causing land conflicts in order to engage in agriculture. At a broader scale, we're looking at a food security problem for a country if agricultural areas are put off and not de-mined until much later because then in aggregate we have a reduction in agriculture. Frequently we know that mines are placed in the bread basket agricultural areas of countries during war to depopulate or to reduce the food supply of one's opponents. So the valuable agricultural areas can be heavily mined but de-mined last. And it creates a lot of conflicts again as those who belong on that land have to go into somebody else's land in order to engage in agriculture. The fifth item is the information sharing and transparency. Mine action organizations attempt to do a very good job at communication. They're best at doing this with government and with their mine action counterparts. They're less good at interacting with local communities and becoming very clear with intended beneficiaries the status of the land. So that if local communities and frequently they're not next to the land being de-mined, they could be scattered elsewhere in a country, often or in other countries, adjacent countries. So finding the beneficiaries to land to be released can be difficult and communicating with them the status of the land. When is it cleared? When is it to be released? It can also be a problem. If that isn't given a robust effort, then you have a situation where land is released but the beneficiaries don't know so they don't return. That allows that land to be then claimed by others which causes land conflicts. Conversely, if there's confusion over the status of an area to be de-mined, is it released? Is it not? This causes rumors among the dislocated population and these sorts of rumors can be very, very confusing causing some people to move back onto land that has not been decontaminated and therefore put themselves at risk. So this idea of communication is needed and what the study also found was that the mine action organizations did not always have the best coordination or relationships with other humanitarian or development NGO efforts that can engage in this sort of organization. Many technicians that work for mine action organizations are ex-military personnel so their work culture is not one of transparency and effective communication and so we found that a great deal of work needed to be done there. The sixth primary problem is women's land rights. As we know after a war because men are mostly the combatants there's a great surge and increase in female head of households after a war and so for female head of households to try to reclaim land is a particular problem because in many customary land tenure systems and in many state land tenure systems women are second class systems and have a very reduced set of rights. So if this is known that they cannot reclaim their land and then of course others will attempt to claim their land. In many cases women are less aware of land rights than male head of households. They're often likely to be less literate for that fewer livelihood options and so they don't know where to go and so we felt that a particular form of outreach is needed. Inheritance for women is a particular problem. If the male head of household is gone in a number of countries we would think that the female head of household has been inherited before the land. This is actually problematic in many customary societies this is Afghanistan and South Sudan the land actually reverts to the deceased male head of households brothers or in some other scenario like that and the women and often her children can be left unconnected to land rights. So that particular vulnerability of an increase in female head of households and yet at the same time the inability of rule of law customary and statutory rule of law to effectively promote women's land rights and facilitate their return to land that have been demined is an enormous problem. So those are the six broad issues of course the countries were highly varied and there was a number of smaller issues that were pertinent to individual countries but broadly those are the patterns that we saw we saw emerging from the study and I'll wrap it up there. Thank you. Thanks John. Thanks a lot. I'm really really happy that you touched upon the issues of the women's housing land and property rights. I mean it's a pity that we don't have a female speaker here with all three men but we'll do better in the next webinar of ours we'll get more female speakers. I request now Pascal to speak. Yeah. Good afternoon all everyone. My name is Pascal Rapia I'm head of external relations at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining. The acronym is GICHD I know it's a huge challenge including for GICG staff so we call it Geneva Center for the purpose of today's presentation. I mean we heard from Waliq for us that land property and land rights is a major or are major issues in Afghanistan. We heard from Professor Unruh that mine action can exacerbate land rights related challenges. So in my part I will focus on some specific measures that mine action organization can deploy to mitigate those challenges and some of them are already alluded to both by Waliq and Professor Unruh. Of course I mean perhaps the starting point of our discussion is really that mine action is first and foremost about releasing land. It is really it's an activity which involves a change in the status of land and boundaries and it has de facto an influence on land rights. It's about transforming inaccessible areas into accessible and extractable land so it is that important to have as much clarity as possible on land rights and land ownership before undertaking clearance operation. Mine action by definition is a humanitarian undertaking and we should always ask ourselves if the land is given back to the intended beneficiaries and those most in need. As a matter of principle it is beyond the mandate of mine action organization to fix land problems. However there are a range of actions that they can take to ensure they do no harm and respond to the land issues they encounter. So as I said I will focus on specific actions. Nine specific action as identified and captured in this famous now GACG policy brief issued a few years ago. And these actions are mainly targeted at mine action organization. However some are also relevant for other actors in particular donors. So let us start the first action and probably the most important one we heard already about it is for mine action organization to liaise with humanitarian and development organization dealing with land issue. Such land rights special organization can advise mine action actors on land rights issue in a specific local or national context. This is really key and I concur with also Professor Hoonruh the statement that mine action is somehow in some cases disconnected from the broader security and development framework and sectors. There is still although a lot of progress has been made there is still much more to do to make sure that mine action doesn't work inside or that it is connected to broader security and development issues and including land rights run. And of course these go through a dialogue through exchange through exchange with organization involved in this broader security and development nexus including land rights organization. The second specific action recommended and that could be undertaken by mine action organization is related in a way also to what Walik referred to a stress the lack of information on land rights on the side of mine action organization but also the side of communities. It is really key that mine action organization raise awareness about land rights with affected communities at both the planning and also the service stages. And I mean also it has been said mine action organization interact directly with local communities that one of the most high capacity and well resourced actors present in rural areas. So informing local authorities local communities about the land rights would reduce prospects for land rights if this is deemed to be too delicate for mine action organization they should partner with NGOs who are able to engage in this community work or simply refer communities to the right organization. Third mine action organization should consider land rights when setting mine action priorities. We should avoid clearing land that is disputed if there is equally high priority and disputed land that needs to be cleared. At the same time information should be cleared and actually this might encourage dispute resolution to move forward. Fourth promote community participation in priority setting. To use community liaison and surveys to identify community priorities concerns regarding land use and perceptions of dangerous security is key. We shall not forget that the intended beneficiaries of many humanitarian demining activities are frequently marginalized people and lacking also adequate legal protection and awareness and information about the legal rights. So obtaining this information prior to any survey and clearance will decrease the risk of or preempt illegal land grabs and the reclassification of areas once cleared. This will require locating and contacting beneficiary communities before they return to the released land in order to identify the needs. And of course this can be a real challenge if confronted with IDPs or refugees who are not actually yet who have not yet returned to the land. Another fifth point as what he explained he told us about an example when mechanical assets were being used and that actually it destroyed soil so it exacerbated some tensions. And this is true actually also when you meet in clearance is undertaken in border or boundaries other matter of fact using mechanical assets can destroy boundaries other man-made or natural boundaries and thus it would be recommended to switch to other type of assets mainly animal or manual demining assets. Sixth, we should really ensure also a formal land over process. This is true for a number of reasons and including in order also to capture some land related issues although I mean again land over land over hand over documentation will not equal to any legal documentation in terms of land rights or land ownership but still it can include and be used as an information also on land different land dimension. Another dimension which is key is post-clearance assessment. Again here a lot of progress has been made in mine action but still we don't do this enough and post-clearance assessment should be really promoted and become actually a regular part of any mine action detaching and this is related also to the outcome and we get back to this later but what mine action is seeking to do is not to destroy each number of mines or to clear each kilometer square meters of land. What mine action is meant to do is to allow development is to allow access is to allow the development of infrastructure of agriculture this is key that the outcome we should be talking about and if we are talking about those type of outcome there necessarily other matter of fact the issue of land rights will come into play so again post-clearance assessment is a key and key requirement. At the seventh point I will mention the importance of and here I'm sure that Shobab will be happy about this we cognize the special needs and vulnerabilities of women and it's true that there is a high proportion of female headed households after most wars which are more vulnerable to land grabbing so we really need also to ensure that included and actively participating in surveys and consultation in order also to take into account the specific needs and priorities most of the time they will also be the only memory of a household during war and post-war time. At an eighth point I would say include land rights in tendering and contracting processes. This is true for the UN organization for example in particular UNMAS which is contracting other organizations to do mine action but it's also of course very true for donors we can actually and should perhaps include specific land rights related provision agreement when funding mine action and of course if a donor is asking for specific requirements I can tell you the mine action organization will follow so this can be a very strong initiative. And then the last point I would like to mention I alluded to it is this issue of reporting really again it's important to measure progress in terms of development and not be limited to the number of square meters cleared. So these were really specific nine recommendations or measures that mine action organization and donor for some could take to mitigate land rights issue it doesn't mean that the issue is solved of course there is still a lot of work to be done and to be implemented and when we started to work on this topic together with the other organization there was little understanding of the impact of mine action operations on land rights issue so I think it would be really interesting to look at it now and whether there has been any change between 2010 and 2017 as we speak in terms of understanding of those issues. A second perhaps perspective dimension would be also to look at how land issues could be better integrated into priority setting processes. This could be another question to be addressed. At the GSSD at the Geneva Center we have developed a tool which relies on the geographic information system and it allows users to rank hazards according to the proximity to vulnerable assets. This tool is designed to be used by a right range of stakeholders who can define their own impact criteria and weight them relative to one another. So for example land rights status could typically be a criteria that is taken into account. For example, less priority may be placed on hazards that are affecting land for which ownership is not clear and alternatively higher priority may be given to hazards that are impacting communal land rather than land owned by individuals. And last at the third point of my conclusion the increasing mine action work in urban environment deserve attention. It changes in a way to some extent my organization are working. There is a difference between a mine field in Cambodia and urban clearance work in Syria and UNMA knows this very well and the same is true for a number of mine action NGOs. These are totally different situations different context and there might also be different dimension in terms of land rights if we compare those two different situations and context. So to sum up I would say that mine action is not a purely technical undertaking it is related to broader issues and often takes place in complex environments. Mine action can be political and this is where actually the very DNA of mine action might need to perhaps evolve or be adjusted also because it's true that mine action likes to be perceived or to perceive itself as a purely technical sector but it is not it is working in specific context and there are more let's say political dimension that need to be taken into account. There is of course there are in a way two major also humanitarian principles somehow that might not contradict but that need to be balanced in our efforts and I mean on one hand there is this the fact of the importance of national ownership it's really key national governments should be the one responsible for setting priorities so it shouldn't be up to mine action organization to define priorities that said they should influence priorities they should also help guiding national authorities and governments if need be to set the right priorities taking into account land rights issues and of course there are situations where the government is lacking capacities in really immediate post-conflict scenario where typically there would be for example the United Nations unmasked who would be managing a program mine action program at a country level and that is then also of course a possibility to discuss priorities. To conclude my last sentence will be that the silo approach must be a thing of the past and mine action should be increasingly linked to broader issues to broader security and development issues including land rights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I will pick on one of the issues that you have raised about priority setting and if I can request Bakil, if you can start off with how does priority setting take place on the ground? I mean how do you prioritize you know as to what area to be demined and if you can talk about Pascal about your this tool that you have developed is that something that's used only in the GICHD office or is that a global tool that all humanitarian demining actors are using and yeah because for me one of the things that really it's a bit worrying because when you look at land disputes I mean you know some of these disputes can take forever can take years to be resolved so how do you if you are in a you know this is a humanitarian setting you know you want to do work within what a year funding so how do you convince the donors that this land dispute can take two years or three years and then we will demine the area so Bakil if you can talk a bit about your priority setting and then Pascal if you can yeah Thank you Shobha within the minehatch program in Afghanistan the priority setting is happening actually 2016 by onmas but now it's handed over to the national authority the government but we are supporting so there are we are doing at the national level setting the impact classification of the minefields there are almost 14 different indicators for example civilian casualties the blockages to roads infrastructure agriculture grazing land so different indicators then we are waiting those indicators for example the civilian casualties if it's happens within the minefields or close to the vicinity of the minefields it takes for example three scores the blockages two scores the vicinity of the minefield to the community for example so these by adding these scores then we are classifying the minefields into high impact, medium impact and low impact but generally this is the desktop analysis because these information are captured so we are taking them from the database or the MSWAT the mine action database and then we are doing the contracting before that we are checking we are asking the implementers where we do the contacting so to physically check those minefields whether if there are anything is changed so we could replace the hazards with the one with high priority for example the one we are doing at this level or centrally probably later on at the community level there is a new school is building or a new road is passing the community so the priority of the minefield could be changed so it's both a mix of the desktop and also field assessments that we are doing okay thank you and about quality again well now the two levels referring to is actually which we recall Prisma property setting in mine action and it's rebased on IMSMA which what it just referred to is IMSMA stands for information management system for mine action it's system which allow to plan and manage operations it's based on the GIS functionality geographic information system so basically it allows to produce maps where we can record both the contamination but also the work done and now this Prisma is somehow a nomination of IMSMA it's a subsequent or a NABN feature if you want which will allow a management program to set a number of priorities up to each program to set their own priorities right and then those priorities can be captured in those maps and then those maps will be also then helping guiding the work the priority setting exercise we were mainly thinking about priority in terms of proximity to schools for example to medical centers things like this to residential areas and so on but definitely any priority criteria can be added or developed by a management program so land rights for example could be one of the criteria and then it would appear on the map and it would also help among other criteria to set priorities okay and then you do this mapping do you overlay the Vakil do you overlay the cadastral information by any terms is the Razi sharing the cadastral maps at all do you ever overlay both the maps can you say sorry so the Afghan Government cadastral services the Razi were to give you their cadastral maps would you overlay that with your you know the contaminated information and then decide that if there are land disputes if there are possibilities of land grabbing if you know that you know this is a place where you could have very many vulnerable people or possible war lost owning the land that you don't be mine I mean is that kind of overlapping also done or this is something that you could be looking at in future it is very interesting while Pascal was speaking actually that some of the issues that we have to consider it's the benefit of this webinar so we haven't done actually so that overlaying of the cadastral map to show that for example the land is belong to the government or it's a private land we are all the grabbing of land is happening or something so it hasn't happened yet so but we are looking to that to somehow to include that in our prioritization system so one of the things during the my discussion on the prioritization for example we did a study few years back and then we realized that for example women within the communities they are very worried about the closest mine fees to their community because their children shouldn't approach their so the buffer within the community for example like a kilometer buffer from the center of the community to the closest so these have been also considered or the view of the women is part of our prioritization system but regarding that question that you mentioned we are planning to to apply that into our system because we know that the minors have excellent maps and in countries where mapping could be a challenge this could be also shared with the HLP actors so that they can also use your maps I want to draw in Professor John here about this Pascal this very interesting issue that you know this study which we did some years ago was very rural focused if we are to look at John you have worked extensively in Iraq and Syria and written a great deal can you look at some of the HLP issues and how different that would be from a rural context to urban context and you know give us a bit of a flavor of what that will look like you know the HLP from you know John can you hear us? Yes certainly I can do that we currently have a project in Iraq which looks at return of two housing land and property from people from areas that have been received being retaken from ISIL and one of the things we are finding is that there is a great deal of IED's land mines explosive remnants of war in booby trap in dense urban areas so of course the point of all that is to so fear to return ease and it does another point can be to cleanse certain areas of certain demographic groups in an effort to pursue demographic change the current government in Syria has been accused of using explosives for that reason as well and so that demining those areas can be sort of problematic in the same rights way that rural lands can be but of course it involves many more people and it can be particularly problematic where you have residences that are in tall buildings so it's one thing to have settlements of single story or two-story buildings spread out each one with a compound in an urban area it's another to have multi-story buildings with different families living on on different floors some of which are booby trap or mine others are not so the problems can be particularly intense there so one of these is that if a family seeks to return home and they think that an area is mined instead of returning home they'll go somewhere else which means they become a secondary occupant in someone else's house so if that person decides to come home and finds that secondary occupant there they didn't have to go somewhere else to live until someone's out of their home so they have a bit of a domino effect there in urban areas as these mines are present we're not really familiar with the technical specifics of how urban areas are be mined if you can imagine a lot of this comes out of a survey about which areas are mined and that survey interacts with local communities a survey depends on a local community to communicate to mined national organizations where they believe the mines are and where they are or not so that interaction with local communities is very important it was once thought to be a shortcut in terms of mined actions to simply hire the people after a war hire the people that laid the mines themselves given that there's often a lack of record keeping that goes on and so that's good but that's employment and of course everybody wants employment after the war you don't really know who you're hiring and so that's turned out to be a difficulty also in urban areas is the nature of warfare and how mines are laid so as we see in in Iraq there are moving lines moving front lines to occupy an urban area and they get pushed out by another side in the war. If both sides are laying mines or IEDs etc. in an urban area with no record keeping you have waves of mine laying in urban areas with no record keeping so the ultimate product of that can be very very difficult to sort of retake so they are particular issues I should have mentioned the study that was done in 2010 by the Geneva Center did focus on rural lands and so this is a gap this is something that actually needs to be looked into further this interaction with urban lands Thank you, thank you John Do you want to ask the question please? Yes please let me maybe briefly introduce myself first, I'm Sieg Seblom I work for the Dutch mission in the field of disarmament at the disarmament delegation thanks a lot for the three gentlemen for giving their presentation it was really interesting I have a question that is for my neighbor here for Pascal Rapier or maybe for Professor John Onra it's also fine in what ways could donor states or states in a position to provide assistance be improving how they acquire knowledge and challenges of mine affected states? There are different ways and it's a very good question because actually the education if I may say so of donors is absolutely key because there are the ones providing the incentives for certain measures to be taken by mine action organization and programs and there are a number I would say of opportunities and organization also we can contribute to provide information to promote interaction and exchanges between mine action experts and donors and I don't want to make too much publicity that's not the purpose but as a matter of fact we at the Geneva Center we're organizing every year a donor seminar in April for three days which is targeted at donors and aims at informing them on the fundamentals of mine action and what needs to be taken into account in any contracting arrangement or grant agreement then of course we have a more formalized forum which brings together the main donors and which is coordinated by UNMATH that is a mine action support group which meets twice a year once in Geneva, once in New York and this typically would be also I guess a forum whereby donors could be at least sensitized to certain issues which are important for mine action When I joined this business I was wondering why the mine action community was not talking to the good humanitarian donors group and I hope we get an invitation at some point I work on it but it's not just the mine action community but the HLP community would also want to engage with the donors we haven't had any consultation but yes we can look at that we can of course look at maybe from an academic perspective if I can be so blonde to ask you as well Sure, to how can donors assist I'll agree with Pascal because they provide funding to the mine action organizations we found in the study that we were talking about that the international particularly mine action organizations are very sensitive to the desires of the funders because these demining efforts and activities are contracts and they're competed for between the large scale mining organizations and so in submitting one bid or one's proposal you of course have to be very keen on what the donors want the donor says the demining organization needs to look at HLP in these ways then that's a strong incentive to push for certain standards to infiltrate the mine action community the other one is exploration so I think we've heard from from the other two speakers myself that we would like the mine action community we would like them to do more cooperate do surveys, interact with local communities etc it's not just an exercise except if you talk to the deminers themselves it is a technical exercise they're military and so I don't think we can expect the actual demining organizations to do to do too much if however the donors were to push them to cooperate and push them to interact with donors who do interact with local communities who are in a position to understand local HLP issues find community members engage in local development etc that sort of interaction can then bring the capacity of the donors and the NGOs they fund into this cooperative game with the demining organizations so that when we look at solving land disputes we're not expecting the demining organizations to have a hand in land dispute resolution but that they know who to vote they know who to work with to engage so those two things use the power of being the funder to push for standards in terms of HLP and then push for cooperation because the donors have a great deal of capacity in terms of local community development and interaction that the demining organizations jump have I just wanted to add a couple of other issues one is as John mentioned the whole issue of land grabbing and also you know if the donors have leverage with these political with these governments and if you see that many of these you know you will find parliamentarians or you know government ministers who will be grabbing these lands so if that happens I mean you it's your tax money it's your money donors money that has contributed to the demining can be request these governments to shape up and then to be much more accountable to their population and not grab the land that actually belongs to some vulnerable population you know so that would be an advocacy support that you can provide so yeah that's one the second issue that I was thinking of is more yes you know the new way of working and humanitarian development nexus and you know that's all great can you look at more longer term funding instead of making it annual funding you know the Jan to December funding is awesome but activities like this that would require a bit more negotiation bit more community engagement you know can be look at you know three years funding so that if the land takes a bit more time you know give us a bit more leverage so that you know we don't have to ask for no cost extension or you know come back to you and return your money but to use the money more effectively that's and my pet project the woman's housing and property right you know can you request humanitarian demining organizations to give a gender breakdown of how many women really benefit from their activities you know because usually I mean globally we know that you know it's the men who own most of the land so can we request action actors to tell us you know how much of the land actually what percentage was benefiting the woman after their demining activities you know the woman really own this you know it gets transferred to women yeah yeah so these are some of the issues that comes off the cup you know but of course we can come up with the whole list of you know talking points for donors yeah we have a question from one of the participants from Omar Azabi when it comes to IDPs what kind of legal instrument can be used to lobby towards local, regional or national governments and he's referring to article 11 of the Kampala Convention state parties shall take all appropriate measures whenever possible to restore the lands of communities with special dependency and attachment to such lands upon the communities return, reintegration and re-insertion so we wanted to talk a little bit about this issue of IDP return and refugee return and how this impacts our issues so I don't know if any of the panelists wants to take this question on the legal instruments maybe I start with you John. Certainly yes that's a very good question because there is a number of legal instruments including international legal instruments regarding land and property and housing as a right and in some cases there's some strong push for this being a human right and so this was the case in Bosnia and in other areas there's a tendency to reverse the cleansing and so we see that right being the push for refugee and IDP return and restitution of property and so frequently this can be a condition upon the re-admission of a country that has been at war to the international community meaning international economic community so that the donors including the UN can be very clear that unless there's a strong return program a restitution program for IDPs and refugees then it's going to be difficult to have good relations with the neighbors and the rest of the international community so we can often see a heavy legal hand come from the international sector in this regard to push strongly for return to HLP by IDPs and refugees. Of course in many cases it's not the case right, in Bosnia and so the urban areas have suffered a great deal of destruction and so simply returning to one's house that is now destroyed is a problem but the same legal structure is there that defines restitution as a set of remedies so restitution doesn't just mean return to one's HLP and that's all it can mean that but it can mean a broad host of other remedies which includes alternative lands compensation vouchers a very wide variety of what are called remedies within restitution so the legal domain internationally particularly is quite strong and as we're almost guaranteed to see in Syria when and if that war comes to an end it's a very strong approach by the international community to have the domestic government respond in a way in terms of domestic laws that can reflect the desire of international agencies in this regard okay Pascal do you want to add anything nothing no, thank you okay now I would like to give the floor to Dominique Wolsey from the Gender and Mild Action Program who has has a comment hold on Dominique I'm going to unmute you can you hear me now okay sorry I have no camera so I'm just a disembodied voice over the internet but I had a few comments to make firstly just on the point you made about land release beneficiaries I would just point out that I think most humanitarian mine action organisations do disaggregate their land release beneficiaries at this point which is the best practice that we recommend at GMAP sorry it's the Gender and Mild Action Programme is the organisation I'm with and our role is obviously the promotion of gender equality and consideration of diversity within the mine action sector but I've got two main points really and they're about community liaison and about handover and it was very interesting to hear the speakers earlier talking about the importance of speaking to communities and community liaison but I would point out that you know when we speak to the Shura or the clans or the tribal representatives or the village council we've got to think about who those people are and in a lot of context they represent or patriarchal systems of systems basically and we've got to be careful as actors in the sector not to accidentally leave people out of the conversation and that goes beyond gender as well that also refers to different communities within countries that have ethically diverse societies that there are perhaps a division between communities and only one side of that is being spoken to but you know when we're asking about who owns the rights to this land and we're only including one group of people who may say well this is communal land or something we've got to be careful to try and I would advocate for trying to widen the net a bit in terms of who we speak to outside of those limited fora basically and I would also extend that as well to hand over because we've had a number of examples in the work we've done at GMAP where we've seen in impact surveys women in communities and I think Afghanistan was one of these countries where they weren't aware 6 months to a year after the clearance being completed that the land was safe and sometimes hand over ceremonies widely used but not universally used as ways of informing communities that the land is now safe to use but who attends those are we in a country where men and women are not expected to be at public events together and how do we reach people that don't normally get access to those public forums so yeah I suppose that was my point really in that just speaking to the local representatives in the system of government that exists in mind-effect countries isn't always going to really get us the best results in terms of reaching everyone who will benefit from the clearance and that's me I'm finished okay thank you thank you John, Vakil or Pascal do you want to take any I can only concur with what you just said the acrylic from GMAP indeed I think the disaggregation in terms of data based on gender and and age is a well is a process which goes well within my action I think we quite advanced at least on that dimension thanks Pascal now I agree with you Dominic especially about looking at populations I mean there could be specialist groups as well you know nomadic groups who may not have ownership rights on land but they may have the right of passage and those are also rights that you need to be mindful of and in very many of these countries the nomadic groups at the end of the many conflicts they are also the ones that are denied some of these land rights so completely agree with you that you have to look at diverse groups of populations not just and also on the point of the Shuras who do the Shuras represent are they another form of political elite that you are than handing over the land to and if the Shuras are again the ones that are sorting out or resolving these land disputes you know who is your counterpart in these contexts you know I completely completely agree with you Dominic you mentioned about the study is that a public study that we can get hold of and share with our I would need to I would need to go back and look I think it's probably some work that we've done for a partner organization which is the main way we work but I can check for you okay cool thank you so just Alex informed us that we have only 10 minutes to go before we wrap up any last thoughts any issues that any of our speakers want to touch upon Pascal, John, Bakil just the issue that Dominic mentioned the issue of the handover in some of the countries like Afghanistan it's really a challenge it's still a challenge for example in like 40 to 50 percent of the area that we are operating in the south of Afghanistan some others the security is not very good and the participation of women in some of these handover ceremonies in some cases it's not possible it's not the cultural problems that but we are trying actually after these studies and the inclusion of gender means teaming into blind action so we are advocating that if for example if woman participation is not possible in a public event so we should look at other means for example briefing the closest the girls children or boys children in the community in order to inform the girls or the boys within the community because normally in the past for many years only elders of the communities were attending the handover ceremony so it's an issue and we are having some problems still but we are trying to somehow reach to the women and girls and boys to have disseminated information to all members of the community. Thanks, could I just jump in there I was reading this earlier this week about an example in South Sudan where they were having a handover ceremony and they noticed that it was only the sort of senior men in the community that come so they invited some women along but they just sat at the back without really engaging so they decided to split the group into two because this was more culturally appropriate and they had a separate meeting for the men and a separate meeting for the women and they were able to do that because they had mixed liaison teams so I think that in other countries they've maybe faced these cultural barriers as well and come up with ways that were context appropriate to deal with it Thanks a lot Dominic thanks for that intervention John do you have any loud pop anything you want to share Just to touch again on Dominic's point about local community liaison in some cases it's clear who the local community is and in some cases it's not particularly if the land is contested or if those who were dislocated actually arrived a couple generations ago and can see themselves as newcomers and so this is an opportunity to get them off the land so that those that occupy the land well before them can now reoccupy the land we're running into that in Iraq where people are returning to areas retaken from ISIL only to find their residences being mined by the not by ISIL but by the individuals that stood on the same removed from the area a generation ago they're now seeking to come back so who exactly is the community it can be frequently a problem and then how to find the community and the goal of people were returning to their land and property many years after the war is over so what do we mean by community are they living next door are they dispersed are they a neighboring country so communicating to all or most of the community of beneficiaries as Dominic noted is a real trick that certainly still needs some effective work Thanks John. No thanks just perhaps as a final remark to thank you very much both of you for the organization of this webinar and my panelist colleagues I think we raised quite a few and identified a few dimension which would deserve further work we all understand I think and agreed that land wise needs to be mainstream further within mine action and so we'd be interested to know also about next steps of what you have in mind in terms of follow up to this webinar I think at first it would be interesting to have a trace of this discussion somehow somewhere and also then perhaps I don't know if there is any way through this system to hear feedback from participants to see also what is the level of interest whether demand for further work on this and I think this could well then guide or future consideration on this topic. Thank you. Thank you. That's a good wrap up Pascal. Thank you for that. We have had really amazing participation and colleagues have joined us from various countries from Nigeria to Niger as I was mentioning in the beginning Iraq, Afghanistan Turkey a lot of the colleagues from the Syria operation so the level of interest is Myanmar yeah so the level of interest is really really huge and yes I mean the study that happened years ago I think it's always good to revisit some of these studies and what has been the impact on the ground I mean Bakil has already touched upon some of the issues that have been actually mainstreamed into their checklist and questionnaires which is which is awesome but we do want to see where else you know what about the countries I mean the study was in seven countries no Angola, Yemen, Yemen I mean look at all the work I mean that needs to happen in Yemen so yes we will shortly want to revisit the study and Crystal and I we have a long way to go we have to actually touch base with all our members and also see how much our different members also want to commit and want to take this work forward IOM was part of the study the last level study and RC was also the Danish Demining colleague so we will of course touch base with all of them also to see how much interest they have you know to follow up on this and a few other yes we will be so this has been recorded so we will put it on the Binaction AOR or HLPAOR and of course GPC Alex we will be putting it online the recording so for those of us because we have a few colleagues who are in the field who could not attend today so we will have the recording to facilitate this and as I'm so sorry I'm killing your name we will have a one pager on what we can expect from the donors you know the donors approach on this issue the land rights and Binaction yes of course so that will be another issue that we will follow up on yeah so thanks a lot to everyone who's here with us and those of you who are not with us but have sent their questions and queries we will be in touch this is the start of a conversation and we will follow up with all of you thank you thanks a lot and if you have any suggestions as Pascal was saying any specific follow up that you would like us to do please do send in your through emails I mean you have all our emails please do get in touch with us thank you thanks a lot and have a great and great day the rest of the day and stay safe maybe I just add one word I want to thank Shobha for working today it's her birthday happy birthday thank you she agrees to join this webinar today so it's just to show how dedicated she is and therefore we will move forward with this thank you