 Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today's event. My name is Laura Thornton. I'm the Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. And I'm super delighted to be here today with such an esteemed panel to discuss the Summit for Democracy's country commitments. This event is actually the first in the Global Democracy Coalition's webinar series. And the Global Democracy Coalition was formed in October last year convened by International Idea and Democracy Organizations. And the goal was really to create this informal group of folks committed to advancing the goals of the Summit for Democracy, which was hosted by the Biden administration last December. The Coalition hosted a really important forum ahead of the first summit, which brought together various panels on diverse topics related to democracy. And today the Coalition continues to serve as this platform for exchanges on democracy. As most of you here probably know, 100 countries joined President Biden's Summit for Democracy in December last year. And the aim was to affirm global commitment to democracy during a period of decline and rising authoritarianism. Many pledges were made and the White House announced that 2022 would be the year of action. And this is when countries would put forth commitments on democratic reform. However, what we see today, unfortunately, is the very aims of the Summit are being tested in real time. The threat of autocratic takeover that we discussed in December is in the theoretical thought exercise. It's happening in Ukraine. And so the stakes really could not be higher. And it remains to be seen whether the democratic community is going to follow through on their pledges, on their commitments made at the Summit to really defend democracy. Or will we fail this test? Taking our democratic commitments both home and abroad must start right now. And so far, frankly, the results are a bit mixed. As of early March 2022, according to the State Department's website, 50 countries have submitted commitments, so half. And these commitments really do vary in terms of depth and focus innovation. Some are generally quite lofty and others provide a lot more texture and concrete proposed actions. So it's not clear where the exercise leads us today. But to be fair, there are already several treaties and commitments such as UN conventions related to democracies that countries have signed on to, as well as initiatives like O.G.P. Action Plan. We'll hear a little bit about today. So there's a lot of areas in which we need to struggle to keep up on and another list of commitments to keep track of. The Summit yet, at least, does not also have a framework for monitoring and enforcement. So as such, it really does put the onus on civil society, media and other democratic actors, opposition political parties, parliaments to hold their leadership to account. That said, I think the process allows for plenty of possibilities. In addition to providing another anchor around which Democrats can advocate and attempt to hold their countries to account. There's also the possibility for global sharing and learning opportunities where countries may have made similar commitments, for example, the summit could demonstrate its greatest value by creating communities of practice around stubborn challenges to democracy worldwide. I have gone on and on about the need for more formalized clearinghouse of lessons learned and successful solutions, which I think would benefit all of us who are working on democracy. As a first step, though, we need to break down what we have to work with. And to do so, I'm really delighted to have three experts here that are going to provide an overview of the commitments made generally and on specific important topic areas, identifying commitment gaps and alignment with other democracy indicators, and hopefully recommending some steps forward for refinement and implementation. Dr. Annika Silva Leander is the head of North America, my former colleague from International Idea, and she oversees international ideas outreach in the region and engagement on Summit for Democracy. She's also the lead author of ideas global state of democracy report. Renzo Fala is responsible for research and data analysis for the state of open government report. He previously worked for independent reporting mechanism where he supported national researchers with research and writing. He also authored the paper Why Commitments Fall Behind, which describes main obstacles for implementing OGP commitments and maybe offer us some clues as well. And last but not least, Mark Bromley is the co-chair for the Council for Global Equality. He helped launch the council in 2008 to encourage a clearer and stronger American voice on international LGBT and intersex human rights concerns. Mr. Bromley and his colleagues provide regular briefings on trends impacting LGBT individuals globally. So our panelists today, we're going to weigh in on several questions, including some details about the commitments that we've gotten from countries so far through the summit. Based on also the areas of expertise of our panelists, OGP and LGBT rights. What are some of the gaps that you all have identified? Are there patterns that we can discern? For example, are countries commitments focusing on the right things based on other independent democracy assessments? Are they really addressing the needs that are there? And finally, I'd love to hear the three of you weigh in on prognosis for effectiveness and what can we do to ensure that the summit really moves the needle here? As for quick housekeeping, if you have questions, the Q&A box is already open. Please put your questions in Q&A and not in the chat function. Do check out the chat function though, because we'll use it to put in links and documents from the panelists. So without further ado, I would like to turn it over to my dear friend, Annika, to provide a broad overview of the commitments from the Summit for Democracy. And where do we see some room for accountability improvements in there? Thank you, Annika. Thank you so much, Laura, and good morning to everyone in the U.S. and good afternoon to everyone else. I'm going to share my screen. And if you could just confirm that you are seeing my screen, great. Okay, so I'm going first and what I will do is to provide you with an overview of the commitments that have been submitted so far by countries in follow-up to the first Summit for Democracy. And the data has been organized according to the indicators of the global state of democracy framework that International Idea has developed, so that we can compare the focus areas of the commitments with countries' performance on those indicators. And so we try to answer questions like what type of democracies made commitments in the end in writing? What are the most common focus areas of the commitments? How ambitious are these commitments? And what patterns do we see emerging? So this analysis that I'll present is not yet published and will come out later this month. But hopefully some of the inputs that you're providing today will help us refine the analysis. So don't hesitate to give us feedback in the Q&As that we can use to improve the analysis going forward. This data will be available next week on the Summit Commitment Dashboard that International Idea and Freedom House are developing, where we will help facilitate the information and data on the commitments made at the Summit. And finally, this data and analysis is meant to provide hopefully a useful resource for anyone out there, civil society, the media, or anyone else that wants to monitor Summit commitments and the progress from the first Summit towards the second one. So here are some basic figures to start with. So as Laura said, 110 countries were invited to the first Summit that was held in December last year and was hosted by the Biden administration. The EU and the UN were also invited to make statements. Not all countries attended. There were 12 countries that didn't show up. So 98 countries ended up attending and making official statements at the virtual Summit. So now we're four months after the first Summit. We're in early April. And so far, 60% of countries that attended have submitted written commitments. So it's 58 countries that have been published on the State Department website. So 40 countries have not submitted written commitments. Now, if we look at the focus of these commitments, almost all countries made commitments to strengthen democracy at home. 90% of those that submitted written commitments. But quite a significant number also made commitments to strengthen democracy abroad. 70% of countries did so. And then there were 35 countries that focused on both. So we use the number of pages as one of the proxy indicators to assess the level of ambition of the commitments. So it's just one of the indicators, but just to give you a sense. And there we see that more than half of the countries that submitted more than two pages of commitments. There were 10 countries that came up on top of the list with the US outnumbering all the other ones with 42 pages of commitments at home and abroad, followed by Kosovo, which also had a hefty number of 23 pages of commitments. But there were six other countries in Europe that submitted more than 10 pages of commitments. On the negative side, there were 16 democracies that submitted a disappointing number of pages of commitments, less than half a page of commitments. And that included both healthy democracies in the EU, but also weaker democracies in African Asia. So a mixture there. And all the commitments have been posted on the State Department website. We did, however, keyword search Summit for Democracy commitments and the name of countries, and we could only find six countries that had actually posted their commitments on their own country websites. So this may signal on one hand maybe low country ownership, possibly, and poor transparency around the country commitments, but maybe also some unclear accountability channels posed by the summit format in its current shape and form. Who are countries reporting to? Are they reporting to the US or to their own citizens and constituencies? Here we're looking at what the focus of the commitments were in terms of topic areas. We see that countries made commitments well beyond the three core topics of the summit. 23 broad issue areas were identified in which countries had made commitments at home and abroad. Now, if we look at the top of the list, corruption really topped the list of commitments that were made both at home and abroad. And there were other issue areas that were also high priority for both types of commitments. It was gender equality and media freedom, but followed by civil society and elections. There were some discrepancies between international and domestic commitments. Social group equality and human rights was a high priority domestically, but not as much abroad. Judicial independence and climate change were mentioned more often at home than abroad. Cyber security, for example, was only mentioned in the domestic commitments. In terms of topics of low priority at home and abroad, that included the focus on parliaments, political parties, local democracy, and maybe most interesting for the current context, security commitments. Only four countries had actually made commitments on security. Only a handful of countries mentioned commitments that focused on sanctions for human rights abuses. So we know that there are many more that are actually applying them in the current context. So that was also interesting to note. And then if we compare the commitments against performance indicators in those areas, we note that corruption commitments were equally made by countries that had low levels of corruption as by countries that had higher or mid-range levels of corruption. But if we look at gender equality and media freedom, actually commitments were made more frequently by countries with high performance on those indicators than with countries with lower performance. So a discrepancy there, the countries that actually needed to make commitments in those areas did so less frequently than ones that were already quite strong in those areas. Something that was interesting to note was the focus on democracy education. A number of high-income countries made commitments on strengthening democracy education, civic education, but also democracy education in schools at elementary, secondary school level and at university level. Now patterns across regions in terms of focus areas, corruption was a priority across all regions. So that was to start with. But then there were some differences between regions. So for Africa, elections was really the main priority, ranging from holding elections on schedule in the case of Congo to strengthening the capacity and independence of the Electoral Commission in Zambia to strengthening female representation in Liberia. In Asia, the focus was very much on civil liberties and transparency. In Europe, the focus was on transparency, media freedom, gender equality and a big focus on social group equality. Many countries in Europe made commitments to strengthen, to combat racism and antisemitism. In Latin America, there was a big focus on social rights and civil liberties. Now what countries made commitments? And actually the majority of countries that submitted written commitments were relatively healthy democracies in a comparative perspective. So those that may be in less need of making commitments are the ones that actually submitted written commitments, rather than the weaker democracy. So 85% of the countries that submitted written commitments are either high performing democracies or mid-range performing democracies. Many of the weaker democracies did not submit commitments, only three out of the 18 countries attending the summit did so. In terms of regional representation, Europe was very much overrepresented. More than half of the countries submitted written commitments were from Europe. There were also countries that were underrepresented very clearly. There were no commitments from the Middle East. Very few from Africa, only six countries from Africa, but also relatively few from Asia and Latin America. If we look at the small island nations that participated, there were many, there were 21 that participated in the first summit. Almost none of them presented written commitments apart from Trinidad and Tobago. Okay, some final figures before we move on to the assessment. So here we use some other proxy measures to look at the quality of the commitments that were made. One was the specificity of the measures, and there the good news was that more than half of the commitments included at least one specific measure. So this was more than what was actually said in the verbal commitments. In terms of time frames for commitments, 85% of commitments focused on ongoing or upcoming reforms. Only 15% focused on past achievements, but well less than half actually specified time frames for the commitments. In terms of the most common types of measures proposed in the commitments, national action plans and strategies came up on top of the list, followed by revisions to existing legislation or new legislation. Then in terms of costing of the commitments, 26 countries specified costing for domestic commitments, more did so for international commitments, 12 countries did so, often referring to global initiatives with the most cited ones being the Freedom Online Coalition, OGP, Media Freedom Coalition and the International Fund for Public Interest Media. But there were many different global initiatives that were mentioned, which may point to the need, especially on media freedom, for example. I think there were six different global initiatives focusing on very similar issues like protection of journalists, may need some prioritizing that in terms of media freedom support internationally. So in terms of some positives to start with, some positive takeaways. I think even though the majority of countries that made commitments in writing are sort of the healthier democracies, I think it's an important signalling effect. They are signalling that even their own democracies, many of the older well-performing democracies, even their democracies are working progress. And it sends a signal to weaker democracies that democracy needs constant work by all and hopefully can encourage other countries to follow suit in terms of making their commitments publicly available. I think also written commitments are really central to the accountability of the summit. Written commitments can more easily be monitored and governments can be held to account on them much more easily than verbal commitments. I think the other positive takeaway for me is that we have really seen in the commitments at least, of course we need to see this translated into action, but concerted action in two critical areas, corruption and media freedom. Corruption, if we look at the data, it's the aspect of democracy that has seen the least progress in the last 40 years. So having concerted commitment in the way that we have seen in the commitments on corruption, on fighting corruption, I think is a really important step. And I think the summit helped to provide visibility for how, you know, more broadly beyond the democracy community, how corruption is a direct enabler of authoritarian regimes often facilitated by financial systems and democratic regimes. So the summit I think has helped to provide visibility for these interconnections and the war in Ukraine I think will create the political will and public opinion pressure for those commitments to really materialize as we have already seen happening in practice in the last couple of weeks. So media freedom I think is another key area that was in dire need of support is one of the dimensions, a critical dimension of democracy that has seen the most declines in recent years. So and many of the international commitments focus on this, but as I said, I think that many of the global initiatives that were mentioned, there were many and we see different countries supporting different global initiatives, maybe some more coordinated action and prioritizing on those global initiatives and media freedom may be needed. I think ultimately making international commitments public in this way can also provide a better basis for democracy assistance coordination to help avoid duplication. And we're seeing this on media freedom, for example, but we can think about it for other areas too. And then finally, as Laura said, I think that the commitments also provide an opportunity to identify democratic innovations and to share democratic good practices across countries. We've seen some interesting commitments on youth parliaments, media literacy programs and democracy education that are really worth duplicating or learning from at least for other countries. Now in terms of food for thought going forward and some of the weaknesses that we see, maybe the first one that I wanted to point out is the advocacy of the approach on commitments as an accountability mechanism. So the most ailing democracies didn't submit commitments. And I think this will force us to rethink the monitoring system for the summit, this monitoring system cannot just focus on monitoring the commitments that have been submitted because that would skew the scrutiny towards the countries that may need less watching. So the monitoring system really needs to take into account the countries as well that did not submit any commitments and identify indicators for assessing their progress on democratic reforms or setbacks that do not focus on commitments. And maybe also focusing on holding them accountable for the verbal commitments that they made at the summit. I think that would be an important aspect of that. So expanding the monitoring system for the summit I think would be important. The second dimension is the accountability channels. And the focus and the approach of the commitments poses some complex questions on who is accountability exercised to? Is it to the US government or is it to the own citizens? And it should really be the latter, not the first. More citizen engagement and civil society engagement is needed in formulating and monitoring country commitments. There's need for more transparency around that. But this also, the unclarity about the accountability channels may also be a reason why many countries did not submit commitments because there may be reticence to submitting commitments and to providing reports to the US government. So I think this needs to be clarified. I think in terms of the third issue that I wanted to point out is learning. I think we need to learn from similar processes, both when it comes to democracy but also maybe other processes such as climate change, learning from those processes and learning from the first summit so that we can build a more effective process going forward. And two summits in one year may not be enough for that. Democracy takes time and learning also takes time. Finally, my final point is that the commitments were drafted before the war in Ukraine. And only four countries mentioned security dimension. I think if the commitments had been written now they would look very, very different. And so I think taking stock in reassessing levels and forms of democracy assistance and its linkage to the security dimension may be needed given this fundamental shift that we're seeing to the global international order that the Ukraine war has brought about. I'll stop there and over to you, Laura. Thank you so much, Annika. That was extremely helpful and provides a broad overview of where we stand. Next, I'd like to turn to Renzo to discuss the overlap specifically between the Summit for Democracy Commitments and open government approaches, where are the gaps or strengths, some particular policy areas, and, you know, how can OGP, which sort of has a structure in place, help advance the implementation of the Summit goals? So over to you. Thanks, Laura. And thanks, Annika. Thanks to the organizers for putting this together for having me, and I'm going to share my screen. If I could get a thumbs up that you can see it. Great. Thanks. So, yeah, thanks for having me really excited to tell you about our latest analysis of Summit for Democracy Commitments that we are launching today specifically to see the overlaps with open government. So for those who may not be familiar, a little bit about the Open Government Partnership, OGP. So we are a multilateral initiative of 77 countries, 76 local governments, thousands of civil society organizations looking to promote government openness, and how do members do this? They co-create concrete commitments in usually two-year action plans that advance open government. So our goals in looking at these Summit for Democracy Commitments, first, we wanted to know if the commitments actually utilized open government approaches. If so, we wanted to see which policy areas in particular, the commitments advanced, where were the strengths, where were the weaknesses. And of course, what are the implications of this for actually implementing these commitments during the year of action? And how did we do this? We looked at every single Summit for Democracy Commitment that has been posted, all 800-plus, and we reviewed, first, whether it's relevant to open government, so specifically to any of the three pillars of access to information, civic participation, or public accountability. We also used a mix of human tagging and a machine learning model to categorize each commitment according to a series of policy areas and sectors to figure out what kinds of topics they addressed. And finally, we also looked at the quality of design. So similar to what Anika mentioned, seeing if commitments were actually verifiable if they had concrete deliverables and if they were future-facing. So what did we find? What did this show us? Sub-top-line numbers. First, 39 OGP countries have made more than 600 commitments through Summit for Democracy Process. So, as Anika mentioned, 55 governments submitted commitments, written commitments, so this means that a majority of those countries are also OGP countries. In addition, about a third of those commitments, so over 200 are specifically relevant to open government, so they mention a clear link to access to information, participation, or accountability. So that's the good news. The bad news is we did see more than 100 commitments that are not future-facing, so only mentioning activities that they've already completed but included under the guise of commitments in their submissions. We also found 100 commitments that are not verifiable, so many commitments that are vague, specifically they did not include a concrete activity or deliverable that could be measured or monitored. So I think there are three things that we take away from this analysis that I wanted to mention. The first is that open government is key to advancing these commitments. So I mentioned a third of them, a third of the commitments have a clear link to open government. If we dig a little deeper, I mentioned the three pillars of open government. We see that nearly 200 Summit for Democracy commitments are relevant to civic participation. Most of these have to do with enabling a strong environment for civil society to operate, to participate in their democracy. A smaller number are related to consultations, working with citizens to develop policies, plans, strategies. We see some commitments around access to information, transparency, although we did only see a handful that specifically cited disclosure of information in open data formats. And finally, a smaller subset still of commitments that aim to create concrete channels for citizens to hold officials accountable. So taken as a whole, it's clear that getting open government right in these commitments will be critical to having a successful year of action. The second takeaway is that these commitments present opportunities, but they also show a series of gaps. Similar to what Anika was saying, I mentioned that many of them are vague and don't include clear activities, or many of them are looking only into the past. If we look also by areas of focus, we see the same, we get the same sort of message. So here are just a few policy areas of the more than 50 that we used for categorization. So we did see a lot of commitments around involving marginalized communities. We saw the commitments around civic space, but on the flip side, we did not see many commitments in areas of anti-corruption that we know work. So few commitments around opening contracts, few commitments around officials disclosing their assets, or around making beneficial ownership information transparent. So several gaps, and this brings me to the third takeaway, which is that OGPA action plans are important vehicles for advancing these commitments. Why? Well, some of the things that we've been discussing that are missing from the Summit for Democracy process, like civil society participation and monitoring and learning, are baked into the OGP process. So governments and civil society design, implement commitments together, and monitoring happens not only from civil society, but from an independent reporting mechanism that reports on the status of commitments, the quality, the results, and provides recommendations for learning and iteration in the future. So this means that OGP processes can strengthen and reinforce Summit for Democracy commitments, where they exist, where they're strong, they can be monitored, and civil society can be engaged, and where there are key gaps, those can be filled through the co-creation process of OGP. And it is good news to see that 10 governments specifically mentioned leveraging OGP to advance protection and strengthening of democracy in their commitments. So the full analysis we have just launched today, so you can find it, it'll also be shared in the chat. And I really encourage you to look at the database, so we have published the full database of Summit for Democracy commitments, so you can filter not only by OGP members, but you can filter by type of commitments, whether you're interested in commitments around anti-corruption, around access to justice, marginalized groups, you can get specific subsets of commitments and investigate further. And if you have any questions about the data, how to use it, or what OGP is doing during the year of action involved, don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks, back over to you, Laura. Thank you so much. And the more I'm listening to you and having worked with OGP before as well, it is providing a lot of lessons learned that I hope we can, instead of reinventing the wheel here, we can tap into. Just housekeeping, it seems a Q&A function isn't working, apologies for that. Just put it into the chat to the host and then they can relay your questions to me following Mark's presentation. I see some are coming in, which is great. Okay, Mark, over to you to discuss a little bit how these Summit commitments are relating to LGBTQ human rights and citizenship agenda. And I understand that your organization is already in scoring countries and giving a report card of how they measure up on different criteria related to LGBTQ issues. And perhaps you can reflect a little bit on that and how you plan to measure this in the year of action. Over to you. Great, thank you, Laura, and good morning, good afternoon to everyone. I'm Mark Bromley with the Council for Global Quality. We are a Washington Advocacy Coalition of 32 human rights groups that really work with the U.S. government and lobby the U.S. government, cajole the U.S. government to ensure that our human rights policies and our development support policies and investments respond to the challenges facing LGBTQI citizens around the world. And so I just put in the chat, we did a kind of an interesting project where we scored all 110 countries that signed up for the Summit for Democracy process and we scored them on LGBTQI citizenship, right? So the rights of their LGBTQI citizens within each country. I put the link to the scorecards. The scores are based on 2020 data, right? So we needed sort of baseline data. So there have thankfully been some improvements in the scores already. Angola, one country has decriminalized consensual same-sex relationships in that period. A number of countries have taken significant steps to recognize transgender rights and the gender identity of their transgender citizens. The U.S. just this week announced that we are going to start issuing non-binary passports. So passports where Americans can choose an X marker instead of choosing male or female, they can identify as non-binary and we will recognize that for our non-binary citizens. So there have been a number of improvements in the scorecards since the 2020 data. And in fact, we plan to re-score all 110 countries at the end of this year of action. So at the end of this year, we will produce another set of report cards which we will release before the next Summit for Democracy, which we anticipate sometime early next year. So in this year of action, we are really hoping to use the scorecards and the Summit for Democracy process to work with LGBTQI groups in the 110 countries to really see if there are opportunities for dialogue, for engagement with their governments and with our government. We are doing the same thing with the United States to encourage improved scores and improved citizenship opportunities for LGBTQI individuals in this year. So we took the scorecards and we looked at the written commitments and have come up with a bit of an analysis. Echoing what everyone has already heard, it's clear that the commitments are unfortunately quite vague, rather weak, and many of them simply restate programs or initiatives that governments had already launched and they just sort of catalog them as fitting into this democracy process. So I do think having now looked in detail at all the commitments, we have to recognize that there just is not a lot of substance there and I think we need to grapple with that, what that means and what we do with that moving forward into the next Summit next year. Nonetheless, of the commitments that are posted, first of all, I'd note that of the 110 countries invited, 26 countries still criminalized consensual same-sex relationships. So obviously, full citizenship is a rather distant dream for individuals who are still criminalized for who they are and whom they love. So those 26 countries obviously are countries where we see the greatest challenges for LGBTQI individuals and their ability to participate in democracy. Of the 26 countries that criminalized consensual relationships, only five submitted written commitments and those were quite vague, although Samoa actually talks about protecting vulnerable groups. So that is potentially a hook for dialogue. And again, what we're looking for in these commitments from our advocacy human rights perspective are hooks where we can approach governments and say you have made this commitment around LGBTQI equality or around protecting vulnerable groups or full participation in democracy. And we would like to have a dialogue about how that relates to LGBTQI citizens. So again, 26 countries criminalized. Only five had commitments. Really only one seems to have any space for dialogue. There were nine countries that had some substantial LGBTQI content in their commitments. I really do have to give a shout out to Canada and Chile. Really strong LGBTQI commitments and messaging in both of those, both domestically and looking internationally in terms of their commitments. And I should say in that context the U.S. commitments also have been strong and inclusive in terms of LGBTQI content. So I would say Canada, Chile and the U.S. get a shout out in that respect. Four countries talked about national action plans to support LGBTQI individuals and citizens. I do think that is a really strong message and something that we would hold up as a best practice in that context. There were eight countries that made commitments around protecting vulnerable groups. And in those eight countries as well we see some real opportunity for dialogue with LGBTQI citizens and groups in those countries. And a number of countries also made I think some important commitments around establishing or reinvigorating their national human rights commissions or national human rights instruments. And we've seen in many contexts that national human rights commissions particularly those that adhere to the Paris principles the UN guidelines for independent human rights commissions that those have been really important vehicles and voices for the rights of LGBTQI citizens around the world. So we appreciate those commitments around national human rights actions and national human rights institutions. So where are we now? We were pleased to see that the United States as part of its commitments announced the Glide Fund which stands for Global LGBTQI Inclusive Democracy and Empowerment. It's a bit of a mouthful, but U.S. government funding mechanisms are often a bit of a mouthful. But it's a really interesting concept, right? There's about $5 million initially and we hope that this will increase substantially to invest in democracy and citizenship for LGBTQI individuals. So what does that mean? That can mean something as simple as making sure that LGBTQI people are safe when they go to vote. That means that they are not criminalized so that by simply presenting themselves as an LGBT person, they're not subjecting themselves to scrutiny and potential arrest for simply being gay or lesbian or transgender. Full democracy means having a national identity card where you need, if you need an identity card to vote in order to prove your identity, it's really important that that identity card reflects your gender identity as you present. So if you are a transgender person who has not legally been allowed to affirm your chosen identity on your gender identity card, when you present your identity card to vote, there's a mismatch of how you look and present and identify and what your identity document says, and that again exposes you to potential danger, arrest, harassment and violence, right? So simply being able to vote for LGBTQI individuals can be a significant challenge, particularly in the 26 countries that came to the summit where criminal penalties are still in place, but in the many more countries that don't allow their citizens to confirm their gender identity on their national identity documents. The Glide Fund we hope will also provide funding to really encourage LGBTQI individuals to step up and run for government, to get elected to parliament, to represent. We know that standing up, coming out, demanding rights, identifying yourself as an openly LGBTQI person who demands full citizenship in a country is the ultimate human rights action that leads to the recognition of rights. So we hope the Glide Fund will provide funds for leadership development, for candidate development to really encourage and support individuals to come out and run for office, and we've seen a really important explosion of LGBTQI candidates running for office around the world, but particularly in Latin America in recent years, and that really is changing the dynamic of the conversation around equality in those countries. Finally, I would just say, I think from our perspective, looking at the 2020 LGBTQI scorecards that I put in the chat, and the rather vague commitments for most countries, I think we really need to think about our approach to the next summit, and whether all of the countries should actually be invited back if they are not taking this process seriously, or what we should ask of them in terms of actual actionable commitments if they are invited back to the next summit. And certainly for the 26 countries that continue to criminalize same-sex relationships, we really would hope to see some commitments to protecting vulnerable citizens as part of the dialogue that they will agree to if they do come back for the next summit. So anyway, that's how we're looking at the commitments, how we're scoring the countries. For those watching, we are really keen to build relationships with LGBTQI advocates and human rights organizations in all the 110 countries that participated in this process. So please reach out to us, and we'd love to support you as you engage with your governments and as we continue to engage with the United States government to improve all of the scores on the report cards in 2022, because there was only one country that got a perfect score, and that was Malta. So all of the other countries have some room to improve their scores and really demonstrate commitments to their vulnerable citizens in the run-up to the next summit. And with that, I'll turn it back for some questions and answers. Thank you so much, Mark. And I think brainstorming a little bit about how the second summit could be comprised differently is a worthwhile discussion, but also thanks for sharing your breakdown of these commitments. Okay, so I have a few questions. I'm going to bucket them because we don't have too much time, but I have one question here for Anika. Anika, thank you for the great synthesis. My question is based on the data and the trends she mentioned. What three concrete changes would she, Anika, suggest to address these issues in the next nine to 12 months? How could the process be adapted in real time to improve it before or during summit two? And then there's another question here for Renzo. I think Brookings was conducting similar research for non-OGP summit for democracy countries. Yeah, I think they did. Do you know what that shows? Does it tend to indicate similar patterns? And then finally, I think this is just addressed to anyone. As you know, Bangladesh is a fragile country since 2009. Bangladesh present autocratic illegitimate regime to keep power without public mandate and has been violating human rights constitution, corruption, money laundering to suppress critics and opposition, misusing state. How does transatlantic mechanism or your organizations assist to restore democracy and social rights in Bangladesh? That is a tough question indeed. So why don't I start with Anika and Renzo and then whoever wants to discuss Bangladesh? Sure. No, thanks for a good question. The $1 million question, right? I don't know if I have all the answers, but just some quick thoughts, maybe three points. I think one way to improve the process going forward is to build more country ownership. And they're having countries that have submitted commitments, engage on those commitments with their constituencies, both civil society, the media, but also other government agencies. I think in many cases the commitments are drafted by the MFA's. I think that process in many cases needs to be broadened. So I think that is one aspect. That also includes providing more access to information on the commitments and the process around it. I think that the transparency aspect is also important at the country level. Second, I would say, given that there were so many countries that have not submitted written commitments, the monitoring system for the summit needs to be rethought. I think a lot of the focus has been on creating these multi-stakeholder cohorts, and I think they will play an important role in terms of a space for discussion and sharing of good practices and so on. But the monitoring of the commitments cannot happen in the cohorts because they involve the countries that have made commitments and exclude those that haven't made commitments. So I think that puts more on us on the working groups, the civil society working groups that are meant to be created, whether they get operationalized or whether civil society in countries engaged in monitoring the summit commitments. I think the monitoring system needs to focus beyond the commitments and also on the countries that didn't make commitments and how they are progressing or not. So that would be the second point. No, I think I mixed the second and third, so maybe I'll leave it at that. Thanks, Annika. Renzo, did you want to respond to the question for you about OGP and the Brookings study? Yeah, I can try to address both. So first on Brookings, yeah, they're looking specifically at anti-corruption commitments through their leveraging transparency to reduce corruption initiative. As far as I know, that analysis is not out yet, but if there's somebody from Brookings here that wants to correct me, that'd be great. But yeah, so our analysis naturally focuses on OGP countries and specifically open government commitments. That is where we're going to do a bit more analysis at the country level to see who has made commitments in which areas, how it links to other OGP commitments that they've made that they could learn from and adapt, as well as those from their regional neighbors. And so it would be... Yeah, it'll be great to see other analysis that complements that by looking at some of the countries that are not part of OGP. And as it relates to Bangladesh, I think for OGP, at least our model, countries have to meet certain criteria before they can be part of the process. And so I think for example, for OGP, it's having a few clear markers of openness, passing an access to information law, publishing the annual budget, having basic civil liberties in place in terms of civil society operations. And so I think that's the approach I think that we take, and we encourage non-OGP members to advocate. We support them in advocating to their governments on meeting these basic criteria, but we do believe that at least meeting these minimum thresholds are critical before joining the full partnership and being able to engage in, and also reap the benefits of being part of a partnership and an initiative kind of like the Summit for Democracy. So that's our approach. I think the speaker raises, or the questioner raises a really good point. And I think that there should be a discussion about how the summit can include Democrats fighting in undemocratic places. And that was something, they didn't really have a place at the first summit, but I think that's a mistake. And so what can we do through the sort of summit framework to support those activists and Democrats, lower case D that are struggling at home in places like Bangladesh? I don't know, Mark, if you had something to add to this discussion. I'm not sure if you work in Bangladesh. We have supported some LGBT groups in Bangladesh and certainly full citizenship participation has been an issue in Bangladesh. But I think the bigger question there is, it interests me as advocates, what do we advocate for, for countries that cared enough to show up for the process, but didn't care enough to actually take it very seriously, right? But it says something, right? They care enough about the relationship with the US government to show up. They're not willing to turn their back on the process. And they certainly anticipate being invited back again in 2023. So what do we do with that? There is some fundamental opening there for dialogue, I hope, for pressure, I hope. And I hope that both those of us in civil society will explore those opportunities and those pressure points. But I really hope the US government will also explore those pressure points, right? I don't think we can just invite all 110 countries back again if they haven't shown any commitment or enthusiasm for this conversation. So we have another question. This is from the Uncap Coalition. Bearing in mind the fatigue that NGOs might feel in relation to holding governments accountable on commitments in different international fora, how would you advise us to sell the importance of this process to our network of hundreds of anti-corruption NGOs? In other words, how could we motivate NGOs to monitor national implementation of commitments? That's a great question. Anyone want to take a stab at that? I was hoping that Renzo would... Show you a stochastic method, Anika. Open. Or Renzo. Yeah, so I think for us we recognize that the Summit for Democracy process is one tool in the tool set. It's, as we've discussed in this conversation, there are clear gaps. At the same time, there are opportunities and that's why we believe in layering these approaches to make sure that... or these mechanisms in a way that they build on each other and operate independently. So I think for us, we're always looking to see how we can... how we can link together commitments made through OGP as well as through, for example, G20 or Summit for the Americas, recognizing that there is this political momentum and even if the commitments aren't what we want them to be, these processes can build on each other to produce results. And I think that's kind of the pitch we've been using for civil society to be engaged and hopefully to push for these commitments to actually enter these other processes where there are monitoring mechanisms built in. So there is another question here on elections. And I have noticed the same thing as this participant. We've noted that elections are not strongly featured in the focus of the Summit for Democracy or in the commitments. We can advocate for stronger commitments related to electoral processes and institutions, domestic assistance, based on your analysis, what are the characteristics of good commitments that we could advocate for 2023 in relation to electoral processes? I definitely agree with that, particularly the issue of trust in elections, which is plaguing a lot of us. Anika, maybe I can put you on the spot since you, that's a big component of the global state of democracy report. Yeah, sure. So there were, I think we've been mapping, there were 29 countries, I think, that made commitments on elections. So that's a bit more than half of countries. So I thought actually that that was not so bad. And what I thought was interesting is that we've seen electoral commitments both by really high performing, older, well established democracies, as well as newer, weaker democracies. And what we saw when we went through the electoral commitments, it was a wide range of commitments ranging from, as I said before, Congo DRC just committing to holding elections on schedule according to what the constitution establishes, to strengthening the capacity for electoral processes and the capacity of electoral commissions. And that, those kind of commitments were not just made by, for example, Zambia, so it's classified as a hybrid regime maybe going towards a weaker democracy, but also older democracies such as Italy, Japan and Switzerland made those kind of commitments. Ireland committed to creating an electoral commission, which I thought was really interesting. Most of the electoral commitments focused on protecting electoral integrity from disinformation and electoral interference. And there what I thought was really interesting is that it's a mixture both sort of weaker newer democracy that made those commitments, but also again many older consolidated democracies including Australia, the UK, the US and so on. So then also range of commitments on voting, lowering the voting age, improving the voter registry and so on. So I actually think that there were already quite a few electoral commitments that were made and that were quite interesting. Of course they can be improved and I think hopefully that that is one of the aspects that can be discussed in the cohort and also in the newly formed coalition for security and electoral integrity. I think what was missing from the electoral commitments was a discussion on standards and norms for holding elections with integrity. Maybe that's something that can be worked on also through that coalition. I don't know if that helps to answer that question. That's super helpful. I have noticed that we are I could keep going. We have run out of time. I did want to throw a mark one question of my own if I can take advantage of my privilege here. I'm really intrigued by the vulnerable countries that classified as participants for the summit and I've lived in one of them called the Country Georgia where LGBT community is very vulnerable and are there ways or mechanisms to move beyond this country based approach and given particularly your organization how do you leverage the broader global support and how do you think the summit can help to support those communities in countries where it's more complicated? Thanks for that question. I think what Renzo was talking about earlier that we need to look at opportunities to merge the conversations around the Summit for Democracy with other broader coalitions and institutions and in our particular space is something called the Equal Rights Coalition which is a multilateral coalition of democracies there are 42 countries that have come together and agree to work together to promote LGBTQI equality globally and I think what's really important is that the 42 countries in the Equal Rights Coalition are not just the established European and North American and Australian New Zealand democracies but also a really vibrant collection of Latin American democracies and in fact Argentina is one of the co-chairs of the coalition right now and I think it's really important to see countries not just in the global North leading on LGBTQI rights and rights for vulnerable populations but really to see vibrant and even emerging democracies in the global south and east who are recognizing the rights of their LGBTQI citizens and I think that provides that opens the conversation, it provides some really useful examples so that we get out of what Putin is really trying to make he's trying to create this clash of cultures and civilizations where we support LGBTQI equality in the west and the east defends family values and we want to break through that culture clash and see that all groups all vulnerable groups Thank you for that and indeed the strong man and the anti-woke so-called movement is strong not just in non-democracies but in very old established democracies so this is something where we benefit from learning from one another so I have taken two minutes over, apologies to everyone for that but this conversation is extremely interesting and I would love to continue it I really want to thank first of all international idea and the global democracy coalition for putting this together and I look forward to future webinars under this format and of course our great speakers here today, Mark, Renzo and Annika thank you so much this was extremely useful and I believe Annika that we're going to be posting things in the global democracy coalition website so if people want to access information about the commitments or these presentations they can be found there so thanks to everyone and thanks to all you who participated today Have a great day Thank you Mark Bye