 This is an amazing turnout on a frigid day in Washington, DC, and we're thrilled that you're all here out of respect for the rule of law. It is a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, and we're really glad to see so many of you feel the same way. I'm Rachel Kleinfeld. I'm a senior fellow here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and my ambit is democracy, governance, rule of law, and security. Put those all together, and that's right in the middle is what I focus on. And I'm delighted to welcome the World Justice Project's 9th Rule of Law Index and probably the most bombshell of their indices so far. In addition to this very full room, we welcome our audience abroad. We have live webcasting going on right now, and so we have folks on social media and all over the world, and we welcome all of you too. And with no further ado, we have a pretty packed program, and I would love to welcome Bill Newcomb, the founder and CEO of the World Justice Project, who has just led it from strength to strength. Bill. Thank you, Rachel, and good afternoon and welcome. You're all friends of the rule of law. Doesn't mean you're the choir. It means that you're here to make us all smarter about how we can extend the rule of law into more communities around this disputatious world that we are a part of. On behalf of the board of directors of the World Justice Project and our entire team, especially the staff, thank you for coming, and thank you for following our work and making use of it. May I please impose upon our board and our staff who are present here today to stand for a moment so they can be recognized by the audience? And let me also thank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, what a privilege it is for us to be collaborating with this endowment to be here today for this launch of the 2017-2018 index. And a special thank you to Rachel Kleinfeld, who somehow has made time from her scholarship and writing to be with us today to moderate a panel, which will be the third part of today's program. Rachel is, as you probably all know, one of, if not the leading scholar on rule of law matters. She has a book coming out in November, whose title is? A Savage Order. You can't miss that, so watch for it, please, and enjoy what you will learn from it, which will be a great deal, I'm sure. Let me also say that my remarks, I hope, will be brief. I will then yield to my colleague, Alejandro Ponce, who is our chief research officer, who will present the index to you. And then Rachel will moderate a panel here on the stage to talk about some of the highlights and the warnings of the 2017-2018 rule of law index. The World Justice Project is a multidisciplinary organization devoted to advancing the rule of law around the world. We have offices here in Washington, DC, and in Seattle, Washington, and in Singapore, and in Mexico City. And we hope sooner than later in other important listening posts around the world. We have three primary goals for our work. They are to increase the understanding of the meaning of the rule of law and why it is both fundamentally and, we say, foundationally important to promote the rule of law adherence by governments all around the world and to encourage multidisciplinary homegrown cultures of the rule of law. The rule of law has to be durable, and it's only likely to be effective and durable if it is, in fact, consistent with a homegrown culture in the country in question. We have two premises that guide our work. The first premise, the lead premise, is that the rule of law is, indeed, the foundation of communities, of equity, opportunity, and peace. And the trailing premise is that, assuming there's some validity to the lead premise, what can you do about it? And we believe that the best way to encourage more rule of law in more communities is by means of a multidisciplinary movement in support of it. The myth is that it's the rule of lawyers and judges. The fact is that it matters to everybody in any walk of work anywhere in the world. We insist that the rule of law matters, that it is positively correlated with development, whether it be economic development or socio-political development or human development. And what we've learned is that the more rule of law, the higher the GDP of a country, the more rule of law, the more likely a democracy and a peaceful community. And the more rule of law, the better the public health and public education outcomes. Today, we're here to talk about our index and the measuring of the rule of law. As Bill Gates has said, if you want to improve the rule of law, you need a way to measure it. But what's the it that you're measuring? We have our working definition that we've been working on for 10 years, which is now, we believe, quite broadly accepted around the world. And our definition is just this, four universal principles. Accountability of government and private actors under a set of laws. Those laws have to be just laws. The processes by which those laws are adopted, administered, and enforced, those processes have to be open to the folk. And finally, there have to be accessible, impartial means of resolving disputes. The rule of law is a capacious concept. That's a term from the pen of Tom Carruthers, who was one of the founding scholars here at Carnegie. Tom is going to be in and out of the audience today. If you have a minute to talk with him about the rule of law, don't miss the opportunity. He is, in some ways, the godfather scholar around the rule of law. It is a capacious concept. And our definition is an attempt for a starting point for measuring adherence. So we start with the four principles. From those, we derive eight factors to make up adherence to the rule of law. From those eight factors, we derive 44 subfactors, hundreds of variables, and ultimately questions. You will hear more from Alejandro in that regard. The rule of law index by the World Justice Project involves household surveys. This year, over 110,000 folks, over 113 countries, were surveyed in terms of what the rule of law means to them in a real world context. And we've also sought the perceptions of hundreds of experts in these 113 countries, triangulating that information to come up with the data that you will see today. We believe that our index is now the world's leading source of original data regarding the rule of law and adherence to the rule of law as defined by those universal principles. It's our belief, furthermore, that those findings, the evidence from the rule of law index will serve as a powerful resource for a range of actors and audiences, certainly for governments, certainly for businesses, especially for civil society organizations and for the academy and other people who are interested in some way advancing the rule of law. We strive to be an honest broker of information, but at the same time, we are increasingly analyzing our data and finding better ways to visualize it so that it might have more impact on a range of audiences around the world. With that as context, thank you for listening to me and let me yield now to Alejandro Ponce who will present the 2017-2018 rule of law index. Alex? It's a pleasure for me to present today the results of the 2017-2018 rule of law index report. As Bill mentioned, this report summarizes the experiences, the perceptions of more than 110,000 people and more than 3,000 practicing attorneys and experts in 113 countries on their dealings with the government, with the courts, with the police, the perceptions about the openness or the accountability of their countries, the levels of corruption, perceptions or experiences or the level of crime they are exposed to. So let me just repeat that. It's just the voices of 110,000 people all around the world living in their countries, 3,000 practicing attorneys going to court dealing with cases, experts in public health summarized in this course that I'm going to present today. We have collected that information, cleaned, analyzed the information to present this to you. So before going to the results, I'm going to present very quickly just the framework of how we measure the rule of law. We measure adherence to the rule of law through nine outcomes. These outcomes are constraints on government power, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, absence of crime, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, criminal justice and informal justice. All these nine outcome indicators essentially reflect two basic ideas. So the first one is that the law imposes limits on the exercise of power of the state. The second one is that the state actually limits the actions of the members of society and fulfills its duties towards its citizens so that the common good is preserved, so that people are not exposed to violence, so that people can have access to mechanisms to redress grievances and settle disputes. So all those components are measured in the nine factors that we include in the rule of law index. It's one of these factors is disaggregated into sub-factors. Overall, we have 44 indicators that help us understand the rule of law situation in each one of the countries. If you want to go into detail into the specific indicators that we're measuring in page eight or nine of the report and as well online, you can check each one of the indicators that we're measuring. Again, 113 countries, 110,000 household interviews, 3,000 experts, more than 500 questions that we have asked to all these two different groups of people, not all of them answer 500 questions, but overall the index is composed of 500 questions. So with that, just you can look at the results, you have the report, you have the online tool, you can simply Google what justice project rule of law index that will lead you to the webpage. Essentially the webpage is organized so that you can see the global scores, global rankings, just whether countries move or not in a particular position. The scores are also organized by regions if you're interested in comparing countries in a particular regions, as well as looking at the strength and weaknesses of particular regions. We also organize the scores if you're interested in a particular dimension of the rule of law rather than the overall score, if you're interested in fundamental rights, for example, the results are also displayed by each one of the different dimensions. You can also compare data of the different countries if you're interested in comparing just overall scores of particular dimensions of the countries and most importantly just we have the country profiles which is essentially the summary for each one of the countries that we survey just of the information that we collect. So the country profiles summarize the overall score, the overall ranking, the regional ranking, the ranking and the score as compared, the ranking as compared to incompeers. It also summarizes the scores for each one of the factors and each one of the sub factors so that we can see the strength and weaknesses of each one of the countries and the areas that you need to improve. We also see just how countries improved relative to the previous year, both in the score and in rankings and you also see the results of a statistical analysis in the forms of error next to each one of the factors just to that analyze essentially if the factor improve statistically speaking or not. So let's talk now about the main findings. So first of all, let me just draw your attention to this particular graph that shows what we see at the global scale, the very big picture. What we have in this graph, this is a scatter plot on the X axis. What you have is the change of the score as compared to the score of the country in the previous year. So if it's at the left, that implies that the country declined in the score. If it's in the middle band, it implies that it remain stable. If it is at the right, it signifies that the country improved in the score. And then in the Y axis, what you can see is the current score of the country. So if it's above the axis implies that it's above the median or below the median. So what we can see the first finding that we see is the following. Overall, when we look at the change in the overall rule of law score for the world, more countries declined in the score than improved. So 34% of the countries saw a decline in their score. Many of them actually saw a significant decline in the score. Only 29% of countries improved and 37 remain stable. Now, interestingly, when we think about this concept, the rule of law is composed of all these different dimensions that go from regulatory enforcement to civil justice to fundamental rights. Many of them actually do not change as often over time. So we may want to analyze the particular components of how countries are moving just for each one of the different components. What you see in the chart at the left is essentially just account of the number of countries that improved in each one of the dimensions that we measure, the eight dimensions that I mentioned before. So you say I want to highlight two trends. So the first one is that most countries saw a decline in the dimension of fundamental rights. 71 out of 113 countries saw their score declined in fundamental rights. And interestingly as well, just in factor one which is constraints on government power, we saw also that most countries, more countries declined that improved. We see about 55% of countries declined as relative to an improvement. For the other dimensions, the figures are almost similar between countries that improved and declined. You can look at the specific for each one of the countries that we measure. You can see the decline in each one or the improvement in each one of the factors that we measure as well as the result of a statistical analysis to see how significant the changes are. Now, going to the levels. The top performance and the bottom performance. The top performers are the Nordic countries, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden. The bottom performers are same as last year, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Venezuela. Top performers by region, Latin America, Uruguay, in Europe, Denmark, in Africa, Ghana, in the MENA region, UAE, in Central Asia, Georgia, in South Asia, Nepal, and in Asia Pacific, New Zealand. Think we can also see just how countries have moved as compared to the previous year. We see some countries that saw some improvements as well as some countries that saw some declines. Philippines was the country that experienced the most important decline in ranking. Now it ranks 88, it dropped 18 positions. And in contrast, countries that improved, Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone, I'm sorry, Burkina Faso, and Sri Lanka, these are countries that improved nine positions overall. We can analyze as well just the main drivers of these changes in the case of Burkina Faso, for example, is factor one and factor two, absence of corruption. In the case of Sri Lanka, for example, is related to security. In the case of the Philippines is related to criminal justice, security, fundamental rights, and constraints on sovereign power. We can also see just that the region that improved the most in terms of scores was Africa, in which just more than half of the country saw an improvement in their score. And the region that saw the most decline was Latin America. Finally, given that we're here in Washington DC, I just wanted to share the results of the US with you. The US dropped one position, so now the US dropped from 18 to 19 in the overall score of rule of law. And so a decline, particularly in the dimension of, in the dimension of constraints on sovereign power, mainly driven by the soft factor on transition of power. So the perception of the public is that, I mean, the main driver of this is just the perception of the public about the confidence in the election process and procedures. There is a drop in the confidence of the public in the elections of the election processes and procedures, something interesting that we continue to see over the years is the lowest scores that the US shows in discrimination just in the different dimensions, in the different areas in which we measure discrimination, which is in fundamental rights, in civil justice, in criminal justice. The US underperform the regional peers, the high income group, even many countries that have lower levels of economic development. The US still shows lower scores. And with this I'm going to conclude, you can check more information online in your reports. I'm available if you have questions or my team as well who have worked very hard with the year to collect all this information and to analyze this data. You can talk to them about this. And with that I'm going to pass the floor to my colleague and friend, Richard Timefield. Thank you. That's always a huge pleasure to do work with the World Justice Project and part of the pleasure is just the depth at which you do this analysis and the fine, grained, careful look at these countries. It's pretty devastating this year, if not surprising. And I highly encourage all of you to mob Alex afterward and ask deep questions about it. I'm really thrilled to have this panel here to discuss these findings in part because of what Alex has just said about the role of Venezuela as dead last, the Philippines as the biggest decline and Jodi because anti-corruption is actually one of the bright spots in the index this year, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. And that's interesting and something worth exploring. So with no further ado, from closest to furthest, David Smolansky is an exiled mayor of a portion of Caracas in Venezuela. We are lucky to have him. They are unlucky to have lost him. David, before that, was a journalist and is still deputy secretary general of one of the main opposition parties, the Voluntad Popular. And now we have him here in Washington, D.C. So he's a researcher at Georgetown. To his right is John Neri, who was editor in the Philippines' largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and with editor-in-chief of inquirer.net. He's one of the Philippines' top investigative journalists, not an easy job, not a safe job, if you've looked at the impunity scores for journalist homicides in the Philippines. We are extremely lucky to have him here. And his analysis and reporting focuses on just these issues, rule of law, corruption, politics, and the history of the Philippines. And to his right, Jodi Vitori spent 20 years in the Air Force, ended her time there as a colonel, is now a consultant at Transparency International, also a professor at Georgetown and at National Defense University. And prior to that was a senior policy advisor at Global Witness and really one of the experts on corruption here in America that we have from a very interesting perspective. So welcome, all of you, thrilled to have you. The way that we'll run this panel is it's 3.30 now. We are precisely on time thanks to Nancy's amazing efforts here. We'll have a chat amongst ourselves for about 45 minutes-ish and then we'll start taking questions from the audience. Can the folks with the little cards stand up? Is they in the back? There will be people, thank you very much. Okay, they're at your seats, sorry. So you have cards at your seats and if you want to ask a question just given the size of the room but also given the online audience, we wanna be able to get questions from around the world. If you have a question, write your question on the card and about 4.45, or sorry, 3.45, right? We'll, sorry, a little bit later than that. About 4.15 we'll pick up the questions and bring them all up here and then as fast as we can run through as many as we can. So I've asked the panel here to be tight with their answers but we'd like to get in as many of your questions as we can so please do write them down and we'll take ones from abroad as well. So our focus today is on the rule of law index that you've just been hearing about and also on SDG 16, the Sustainable Development Goal 16 which for many of us was a huge landmark to get the United Nations and the countries of the United Nations to recognize that peace and justice and strong institutions were foundational to development and that these weren't just an adjunct but were absolutely, the development was absolutely dependent on a government having these institutions was a huge win for our community, for those who care about the rule of law and who recognize the role of security and rights and governmental constraints on the development of countries. That's the positive. The negative is that SDG 16 is not doing well when you look at the Millennium Development Goals and how so many countries managed to move forward and up. It's perhaps no surprise that SDG 16 is real, countries are really having trouble and as you can see from the rule of law index, a number of countries are showing significant decline. I don't think and I think some of my panelists don't think that this is entirely happenstance and so I'd like to start with the question, clearly there's been this deliberate move away from peace, justice and strong institutions in a number of your countries and a number of the countries you study, Jodi. And so I'd like to just ask the pointed question, what do governments gain by abandoning these goals that sound a little bit like mom and apple pie to some of us, but can you spell out the governing strategies of the Philippines and of Venezuela, how they're moving away from the rule of law and why particularly they're moving away from the rule of law. And John, perhaps I'll start with you and then move on to David and then Jodi, I'll wrap around to you. Okay, thank you, Rachel. I think that first it's a question of definition. I think that for the Duterte government, in fact it's not a move away from justice peace and strong institutions, it is a move moving closer to stronger institutions. Duterte ran on a campaign of change, change like winter is coming. That was his campaign slogan. And he was campaigning against elitist politics, what he described as the weakness or the effetness of Philippine democratic institutions. So I think it's important to understand that their denials, and I'm sure they will issue some denials after this report becomes widely known, is based on that self-image. But secondly, there's also a question of strategy. I think President Duterte's entire political career is based on what we can call the politics of dominance. He's been very, very candid about this. Even when he was running, he says that the Philippine presidency is not strong enough. And that in fact, there might be a need to establish a revolutionary government or a constitutional dictatorship. He says, don't mind me, I will leave at the end of my six-year term, but I think I need to concentrate all the power that I need in order to fix things done. So that's where he's coming from. So there is this just overarching strategy to concentrate as much power as he can in his hands, which means undermining constitutional agencies, even the Supreme Court. Thank you, and David in Venezuela. Thank you, Rachel, and thank you, Carnegie, for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. I think what the government regimes go with this, on game with this, is that it's maintained power. In the case of Venezuela, if you go to page 151 on the index, you are going to understand why I am here. We're almost last in every aspect. And I always said in my country that as the medicine or technology innovates, well, authoritarian regimes innovates, too. So there are many regimes in the world that use democratic institutions, they use elections to conquer power and from power become an authoritarian regime. And in the case of Venezuela, the authoritarian regime is almost a totalitarian regime where society is completely controlled. So their obsession is to maintain power and to maintain power you have to censor media, persecute opposition, and obviously be really corrupt. Jodi, you've written about the counterinsurgency manual and how it has this core belief that governments themselves want to legitimize and that it's when the U.S. goes in to work with other governments, we're helping them, pushing on an open door. Can you talk a little bit about the circumstances in which that's not the case and what that means for U.S. strategy when there are countries that are governing as the Philippines is actively centralizing power, actively not trying to legitimize themselves in the way that we think of legitimization. Clearly it's working in the Philippines to legitimize amongst certain constituencies and the Venezuelan case and more broadly. No, I think I'd really like to build off what John said in particular because when we talk about these countries, we assume that as this particular points out when it comes to security, that the security services, whether the police, the military, the intelligence forces, are there essentially to defend the country from external attack and protect individuals and property. And I think when we look at the worst of the worst on the chart here, we don't find that, that the security forces, whether police or military, are there not for the public good, but to protect that particular regime. And it takes a great deal of coercion, including violent coercion, to maintain that sort of regime. These are highly predatory regimes and to do that requires a level of violating human rights to stuffing ballot boxes and so forth in these particular cases. And I think often we fail to understand the role that security forces play in these particular environments and that's why I've written on, for example, the counterinsurgency manual that came out 3-22, which was widely acclaimed as this great forward-looking document on how to do a conspiracy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan really came up with a problem because it assumed governments wanted to be legitimate. And for those who found a situation where the government didn't want to be legitimate and that government could be your local village mayor all the way up to the presidency itself, it didn't acknowledge that that was a situation. It acknowledged that you might have some bad apples, some corruption issues, some criminality issues, but it didn't acknowledge that you actually have governments where legitimacy is not the priority, it's maintaining regime power. Nor did it provide whether you are a soldier in the field or whether you're another group looking at that counterinsurgency manual, what do you do about that particular environment? And I think until we start changing the narrative on how we look at security forces and the role that security forces play in maintaining that regime in those particular environments with poor governments and poor rule of law, we're going to find ourselves in significant difficulties in trying to improve these particular scores. And I want to pick up on that with David because you were a mayor against a regime or in opposition to a regime in exactly the kind of situation sort of the opposite of what Jodi's talking about, you were trying to make the situation better and working very closely with your security services to make that happen. Can you tell a little bit about the innovations that you tried to do in Elatio, how they worked, so on? Well, I do all the opposite that the regime does and that's why I'm here. First of all, the problem in Venezuela is that security forces and army are a political party with weapons. I mean, we're talking a regime that is a narco-petro state run by military. Venezuela has more than 2,000 generals, that's more than the whole NATO. So when it was in Elatio as a mayor before it was removed, my priority was to reduce crime, specifically kidnapping because Elatio had the highest kidnapping rate in Venezuela, one of the highest in America, when I started in office in 2014. Fortunately, we were able to reduce that more than 80%. We started with 94 kidnappings in 2013 and went down to 20, sorry, in 2016. But the effort that we made in that moment is to invest in technology on the police. Could sound very basic in a country like the US, or for example, GPS on the patrols, on the motorcycles, some cameras on the streets. And if we didn't have the money to invest in cameras, we did some alliance with the private sector. And also the most important thing is that there were many policemen, cops that were involved in corruption. We were able to get rid of almost 30% of all the police. But at the end of the day, what is frustrating is that you have a regime that one of the main pillars, apart from the army, is the impunity. So for example, in 2016, 126 gangs were detained by our local police. But 104 out of 126 were completely free after 24, 48 hours and we're talking about they were detained because of kidnapping, they were detained because of robbery, they were detained because of even homicide. So we have to understand that one of the main pillars of this regime, apart from security forces, is impunity. I mean, they're not interested to have rule of law because if you have rule of law, they have their days counted in power. Sorry if I took a bit long. No, no, actually want to, David's horn because he's not doing it himself because one other thing that you did as I understand it was you really worked with the security regime. So after getting rid of the bad apples or as you were getting rid of the bad apples, you also recognized that these folks needed status, they needed to be understood, they needed to be built up. And it's my understanding that that's also part of the innovative work that World Justice Project has been looking at in Mexico is how you respect the good folks and really try to give them some of what they need to do their job while getting rid of the problematic ones. And I think it's an important balance, easier to villainize than to work that balance. I want to get back at some more of the heroes locally. I tend to be an optimistic person in this field you need to be. So in the Philippines, can you talk a little bit about who's pushing back against the movement toward centralization, toward impunity, toward violence in the Philippines? And also, and I'm sorry, I'm tagging two questions onto one here, but I'm interested in this thought that Jodi had on legitimacy. In the Philippines, is it true that the regime is less legitimate and just trying to hold on to power or is it legitimate amongst certain parts of the population and how does that affect the pushback or the folks who are standing up for human rights and so on? Thank you. Let me start with the second question. Rodrigo Duterte is an open admirer of Ferdinand Marcos, who was a dictator about 30 years ago. But there's a difference between Marcos and Duterte. Marcos cared very deeply about how his regime looked like. He was the last Philippine president who was a lawyer before Duterte. He cared very deeply about how it looked to the outside world. Duterte doesn't care all that much. However, that doesn't mean that the government is illegitimate. In fact, I think its source of legitimacy is its popularity. It's important to note two things. One, Duterte was elected with the second smallest mandate in our history. That's because of our, well, defective electoral system. It's first passed the post, so he had 38% of the vote, which was enough to make impressionant. There was no run of election. But since then, there has been some sort of rally around the flag effect. And his trust rating, which was about 25% on the eve of the elections, is now, has been for the last year and a half, at around 60%. So, his main source of legitimacy is popularity. To the first question, there has been some, first of all, there has been some holding fast. I have to say that there is a difference between the two main security services in the Philippines. The police, which Duterte himself characterized as 40% corrupt, is the one waging the very deadly war on drugs. But the Philippine military has been amazingly professional enough. It has refused, it has only sent a token delegation or contingent for the war on drugs. It has refused to take part in that campaign, which is really targeted against the poor. It has stood its ground as far as, for instance, continuing with military exercises with the United States, which at a certain point in his visit to China, Duterte said, I am declaring separation from the United States, from now on, among other things, we won't do military exercises. And the Philippine military said, but that's how we learn and so on. So there has been some holding fast. I think the Catholic Church, also one of the major institutions in the Philippines, has tried to undermine the president's war on drugs by conducting drug rehabilitation efforts. But there has been some pushback and I have to stress this. The Duterte government is actually very sensitive to public opinion. There has been some pushback, but these are mainly based on issues. For instance, a few months ago, the Commission on Human Rights, a constitutional agency, was given a budget of 1,000 pesos. What is that? $20. Overnight, there was this massive blowback on social media and about 50% of the Philippine population is on Facebook. The very next day, the House of Representatives tried to make amends and in a few days later, they restored the budget and so on. So I think that on certain issues, there has been some blowback. Unfortunately, all these different issue-based groups still have to come together and have a concerted effort to push back against the rest of what Duterte is doing. I'm not gonna get into pushback in Venezuela quite yet because we could have an entire conversation about what's going on there. But I do wanna get into the international dimension a little bit because particularly in the Philippines, United States has a very deep relationship and I'd like to know whether Duterte, you think that's a positive, is that helping the situation hurting it or is it a mixed bag given what John has just said about the military versus the police? Can you just explicate a little bit how the US is playing a role in the Philippines' rule of law? I think overall and when we look globally, I think one of the issues the United States has is that we don't discriminate enough against who are positive actors in the security sector and who are not so positive actors in the security sector and the United States' experience of significant blowback and not understanding who it is they're dealing with and under what circumstances. We tend to mirror image ourselves where the Ministry of Defense must be out for protecting the nation's borders and many ministries of defense also do internal security unlike in the United States at a slightly different role or with intelligence services which again have a different role than in the United States or the police. And in some cases, in many cases, that is the truth but that should not be an assumption going in. That one must really understand what are the dynamics in the country whether it be Philippines and the difference between the police and the military in those environments and even specific units in which units might be more robust when it comes to human rights to strong command and control of those particular units versus others in other geographic areas or in other units that may not be. And I think this is where we really see issues in many cases where we just tend to provide training and equipment programs without really understanding the dynamics of where we're working. And we've seen this worldwide in other places. Some places it can work very well with the Philippine military for example and other places that can have disastrous effects for the countries themselves and for U.S. foreign policy interests. Take Mali for example where we had a highly criminalized state. The United States and France were doing a number of training and equipment programs. The United States put about a billion dollars in and it was those that the training equipment occurring with who actually did the coup in Mali and that is a large reason why it's believed AQIM was able to gain a foothold in Mali because of that power vacuum in there which of course is the exact opposite that we wanted out of the training and equipment. So we've really got to have a better understanding of the dynamics of how these countries work and where the security forces fit in and not just where at large but really look closely at different forces, different types of forces in each country and picking the strong reformers to work with and how do we marginalize the more negative actors? I was just looking at these figures this morning and we're now giving security aid to more than two-thirds of the countries on the globe. If you took out the Vatican and a handful of others it would be more than that. So it's hard to get that fine grained when you're doing it that broadly. I don't think it's an important thing to think about. David, I'd also like to know a little bit about the international situation in Venezuela and the rule of law. It's easy just to say narco state, internally problematic but obviously there's some external actors like China and Cuba and Russia that are playing a role there. Can you talk a little bit about how this rule of law situation we're seeing around the globe and particularly in Venezuela is being influenced by that global push against the rule of law? Well, first of all, the main interest in Venezuela comes from Cuba. When the regime started 19 years ago there was a huge relation between Huachavez and Fidel Castro. Both are now dead but the regimes still have a relationship between each other and it is calculated that more than 40,000 Cubans are in Venezuela on the strategic areas such as army, security forces and the other Cuban doctors or Cuban teachers that have been used for intelligence. That has been linked to paramilitary groups. It's in Spanish, the same is collectivos and those are linked to the army. Then Russia and China, that's what I have been told right now in this moment, both countries see Venezuela's regime as dysfunctional and that is why that's why because it is estimated that more than $300 billion have been just robbed in our country. Something that is no precedent in Venezuela and in no precedent in Latin America at least in the last decades. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So it's an interesting toy to play in Latin America for those countries. It was something really scary last year that when the national constituency that was promoted by Maduro and was rejected for more than 50 nations in the whole world including the United States and the 28 nations of European Union, Russia and China recognize that national constituency. So what I see now is that what is going on in Venezuela is not only a threat to 30 million Venezuelans but in my opinion the regime of Venezuela is a threat to hundreds of millions of Latin Americans because it has become a paradise for criminals. It has become a paradise for corruption and is in a very geopolitically, very aesthetically geopolitical location. John in the Philippines, obviously there's the China card that has been playing. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship whether that's grown or once Trump got elected it sure seemed like he stepped away from that relationship a little bit but just how is this global force against the rule of law, the sort of zeitgeist against the rule of law playing out in the Philippines and what role are the international countries playing? First about the United States, I think the US has a tricky job navigating Philippine waters right now. In 2016 Duterte had choice words for Barack Obama and the American ambassador at the time. It's part of his language of intimidation but he talks a very different tune when it comes to Donald Trump. In fact of the many lies that he has said I think one of the biggest is when he said I think Donald Trump is misunderstood, he's actually a deep thinker. I think we're all drowning in those depths. So on a personal relationship level I think they've hit it off. The current ambassador doing a very good job of navigating which brings me to the second part of the question about China. China when the Philippines won this landmark decision from the arbitral tribunal on the law of the sea Duterte was two weeks in power and his marching instructions were give China a soft landing. At first many people thought that was a very Asian way of making China save face. But unfortunately the soft landing has turned into what we can call a major beach head. China is all over the Philippines. For instance we have in the telecoms industry we have only two players and the president has said I want the third player and I want that third player to be from China. I mean it's just a staggering thing to say. I mean I insist it has to be from China. Duterte was elected in middle of May. I think one or two days after the election his first important meeting was an elaborate lunch with a Chinese ambassador right in his hometown of Davao city. So China is a key source of influence in the Philippines. You can see the president Duterte is trying to make sure that they are always on good terms. When the siege of Marawi ended the president even went out of his way to say that the main leaders were killed using quote unquote Chinese rifles. The Chinese did belatedly offer equipment and ammunition but it was not in fact the Chinese rifles that killed the last of the Mauti brothers. But you see him actively currying favor with China and it's actually a major source of concern. If you read through the surveys he's very popular but a lot of people feel that China continues to be a bully in the South China Sea and they're not comfortable with this. Interesting. Jodi to get toward solution sets. Again pushing on the positive here a little bit. How have you seen the international, so it's two part question. How have you seen the international reaction to the decline in the rule of law? I mean Britain is saying now that they're open for business. David Cameron had an amazing anti-corruption summit last year. It really looked like the UK was taking some very strong action. They put forward various criminal laws about corruption and so on. And now that momentum appears from my perspective to be slowing down a little bit. The US is also sending somewhat mixed signals. So can you talk a little bit about the international reaction to this situation and also what they're doing that's possible? It seems to be a very, very ambivalent environment right now as we look at where the Western nations and anti-corruption come in and its relationship to more of the developing nations those with more rule of law and governance issues. In some ways we've moved ahead in a great deal. We tend to focus on the United States and that has in some ways been problematic. The US has withdrawn for example from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, parts of conflict minerals, legislation is being pulled back. It hasn't, it's still on the law books but it's not being implemented right now. So those issues are very difficult but on the other hand issues like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at least for now are still moving forward which even though that's the US law has tremendous international ramifications. We've also seen things like Global Magnitsky Act go through which covers both gross human rights violations and gross corruption violations throughout the world. The very first designations came out, we were very concerned that that was not going to occur but it did, of course there's some controversy on who was cited, who was not cited and so forth but the fact that the designations came out was a good start. Now Canada has a Global Magnitsky Act as well that sort of standard is starting to move worldwide. OECD is strengthening its rules on things like beneficial ownership which is knowing who the actual human owner is of a company if it's a non-publicly listed company. There's even a chance that the United States might put in some beneficial ownership legislation which is something that has been really been advocated for for 15, 20 years. We've actually got the banks and the major bank interest groups pushing for that to go forward as well as law enforcement which has always been asking for this and of course human rights and anti-corruption groups for a very, very long time. So I think it's a very ambivalent environment. There's some two steps forward, maybe 1.8 steps back. Also just because for example with Britain, they're just busy with Brexit. It's just sucked all the oxygen out of the room. There's something like I think 30,000 regulations or something that will have to, everything in the law books that has to do with the European Union has to be rewritten. If you're a civil servant, it's just overwhelming. There's just no time left in your day to move forward. So in some ways just staying in that holding pattern might be the best we can ask for right now but that holding pattern lately has gotten better as far as having beneficial ownership rules in the OECD in the UK, having open companies registry. It's one of the first countries to do that. I use it all the time to look at companies and who owes them. Looking more and more at real estate in those places and the UK in some ways, even though it's kind of frozen now, did set some new standards that are slowly being adopted. So it's problematic but not completely fatalistic. So there are some very bright spots there. Now another semi-brite spot was the EU sanctions on Venezuela. The US has strong sanctions on Venezuela. Can you talk a little bit about how those are working, both the more blanket but also the smart sanctions? Are any of these things likely to be tools that can foster the rule of law in these countries? And are there other tools you think international actors should be looking at? Well, there are almost 100 high officials from the regime that have been sanctioned from the United States, Canada. And last week, the European Union, there is something with no as far as some concern with no president in Latin America, including Cuba. What I think that these sanctions have been good is because they are not sanctioning the country. We're not talking about, for example, oil embargo. We're talking that there have been sanctions individually, I mean, people who are responsible for human rights violation, for corruption, or linked to drug trafficking as the vice president. I think that's a good way to pressure. There is a very good initiative in Latin America, Grupo de Lima, Spanish Lima Group, to start the last year, they've been really firm, really strong on the positions about Venezuela. And one of the things that we have been saying that probably this group that reunites more than 10 countries of the region, including leading countries like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and others probably they could think on sanction also those high officials that have property and bank accounts and travel freely through the region. And that will help to have more pressure on the regime. But at the end of the day, what it needs in Venezuela and it is in other countries with these strong regimes is that forces, these security forces, and the army as you were saying, they have to become institutional. I mean, the ones that have the weapons, the ones that have the arms, they need to have an institutional role to guarantee democracy and guarantee democratic institution. It's very, very dangerous when a regime is protected by security forces and by army because you can be in power for decades or you can have a civil war. On that note, I'm going to plug a book to the whole audience here on defense institution building. It just came out from Jodi's other institution, NDU. And it's a terrific primer on defense institution building, how we should be going around professionalizing these institutions. I think it's the first book that really covers that ground. There's a lot on police institution building that this is really getting into the nitty gritty. So highly recommend it if you're interested. John, and actually let me just take a minute as long as I'm doing a parentheses here. In about 10 minutes, we'll start collecting those cards. If you haven't had time to scribble down questions, take a minute and scribble them down while we're talking because we really do want to give a lot of time for questions from the audience. John, on this issue of military and security and playing a positive and negative role, the US has this very deep, old relationship with the Philippines from colonizing force to I was looking at the numbers the other day and the Philippines is the most pro-US country in the entire world right now by the population at least, long history of basing rights and refueling and help with Mindano and so on. Can you talk about whether you see the US as having played a helpful or hurtful role in the Philippines or a little bit of both and just explicate somewhat what's going on? You can talk about the Fat Leonard scandal, you know, just kind of get into the nitty gritty of what the US has done, is doing and could be doing better. So let me just confine my remarks to the last few years because if I bring in... You can stay away from colonization. Colonization, we're going to spend the entire afternoon talking about US influence in the Philippines. As I've said, the US has a tricky role for it to navigate Philippine waters right now but I think that it is in fact been a source of help to many of those who wish to push back. I don't know what's going on in DC as far as the China policy is concerned for instance but I think that the US military has been very consistent about conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea for instance. Unfortunately, the Philippines has not followed that lead. So for instance, there was a phone up operation near Scarborough Shoal and China protested, made a big deal out of it and the presidential spokesman of the Philippines said that's a matter between the US and China and it was a missed opportunity for us to have asserted the rights that we had won in the arbitral tribunal ruling. So regardless of the direction from DC, I think that as far as South China Sea is concerned the US military has been consistent about ensuring freedom of navigation and so on. So that has actually been a good thing for us. We haven't followed up on that. Also, as you all know, very close links between the Philippine military and the US military for an ambitious Philippine officer in the military. Officer school in the US is like part of the career path and so on and of course every year we have one, at least one major military exercise. Again, that's part of your training of your career pathing to be able to lead a unit during a Balikatan exercise that's a major opportunity, career opportunity for Philippine military officers. And because both the professional Philippine military and the US have made sure that these exercises continue I think that has been a positive force in the Philippines in the last few years. Just to follow up and Jodi, please jump on this if you'd like, it sounds like the US has not been as engaged with the police forces there and that that's really where some of the problematic violence is lying. Do you think that would be a useful thing to be doing? To be more involved with the police? Is it better to stay away given that the president himself was saying 40% of the force is corrupt? How would you navigate that water? I'm not sure if, I guess I know for instance that the Australian federal police is strengthening its linkages with the Philippine national police. That's a good thing. If the US wants to expand its participation I think that will also be a good thing. But there is no, even after the president said a year ago that he thinks that as much as 40% of the Philippine national police is corrupt there is no massive overhaul of the police force. I mean, he just said those things. A few people were disciplined and that was it. The Philippine government has to come to terms with something that the president himself said and actually instituted a program to clean up their police ranks. Jodi, did you wanna jump in? Yeah, I think this highlights two key issues. One is for all the problems we have with the DOD training and equip programs and who's in charge and how you decide what you do with those. How we train police forces and partner with police forces around the world is even more problematic. And this has been recognized for 20 or more years. We don't have the defined agencies and who deals with them. We don't have a national police force that makes a logical linkage in the way say the French with the gendarmerie or somebody would be an automatic linkage when you wanna talk about law enforcement capabilities. Is it gonna be DEA who partners on drugs? Are we gonna do counter-terrorism? Who's in charge of that? It's been really very problematic and one of the recommendations for a long time has been how do we more effectively deal with partnering with police forces? It's much easier when you're with DOD and you know who to talk to and you can partner in the way you have with the military. But I think also this goes back to some of the weaknesses we've seen in training and equipping. If you're dealing with a force that is highly corrupt and highly predatory, being very careful to who you partner with, how you partner with them and how you maintain accountability over time. Because if you have a highly corrupt or predatory force in any country and you train them and you equip them to make them a more effective predatory force, you're not moving forward in foreign policy and national security of the United States nor of the country itself. And this can really backfire and it has backfired with us in a number of cases. And so I think we have to be careful in the case where even if the president's saying, well, 40% of our police force is highly corrupt, first we'd like to see where is the evidence and how is that based. But then who do you partner with? Where do you find those bright spots, those reformers where that training and equipping program is going to yield benefit because if you're taking that 40%, assuming that's an accurate number and you put your training and equipment into there, you're probably coming out with worse outcomes than no engagement at all. I'm gonna ask the panel one more question and I'd like to turn to audience questions. If you have a card and it hasn't been collected, can you hold it up and can we get folks to come collect these manifold cards? So I just wanna bring it back to the human level and David, I'll start with you and run past but we've been talking in very abstract terms, geopolitics and this group and that group but from a human level, can you talk a little bit about how the rule of law of failures and declines are affecting real people and how they're feeling it in their day-to-day life? Well, I think the worst thing that you can have is that you feel unprotected. I could just assume about my story. I mean, when I started in office, I was the youngest mayor in Venezuela. I'm not saying that as a show in office. It's a part of a new generation that wanted to be involved in politics and just because I didn't repress and I denied to kill anyone who was protesting because it's his right to protest. I were nonviolent protest against the regime. I was removed, I had a warrant of arrest. I was disqualified for public servant and I was told just 40 hours before the audience that I had that audience and I didn't have the right to appeal. The audience being a court case. The court case, sorry. The court case. I was just told 40 hours before that. I was removed. I didn't have the right to appeal and then I went to clandestinity and I had to flee my country. But not only my story, there are 12 mayors that have been removed. There are almost 300 political prisoners in Venezuela. But the worst when there's no rule of law, when there's no institutional at all, when there's no democracy. Something that I hear at the beginning, we're quoting Bill Gates if I'm not wrong, say where the more rule of law, the more healthcare, the more better services for education. Well, right now in Venezuela because we don't have rule of law, people are literally starving. We're talking about a country that two out of three eat less three times a day. We're talking a country that almost 300,000 children suffer from malnutrition and the transfer of knowledge that we are lacking is just something that it's almost impossible to measure. So as one I heard Felipe Gonzalez, former president of Spain, he said that Venezuela in the contemporary times is the country that has been destroyed with the highest level of destruction that has not been formally in a war. So that's what the lack of rule of law does. In the Philippines, there is a parallel reality. So surveys show that Duterte has retained his popularity. He's very popular, but the same surveys show that over 90% of Filipinos think that suspects in the war on drugs must be arrested alive. Only 6% of Filipinos, according to the same surveys, believe the police when the police say we killed those suspects because they were fighting back. Only 6%. And for me, the most amazing statistic, three-fourths of Filipinos, even in the age of a popular president, three-fourths of Filipinos say that they fear that they or someone they know might be the next victim in the war on drugs. So there is this underlying anxiety in the Philippines, and it's amazing. The results are not unexpected, but they are still shocking to me. But one of the factors where we dropped was in criminal justice, which is supposed to be Duterte's, the horse that he rode on in to the presidential palace. And that is because many of the people, thousands of people have died, and three-fourths of Filipinos think they or someone they know will be the next body on the street. Thank you. We have a fabulous group of questions here. I'm gonna try to get through all the ones I can where I can read your handwriting. But Alex, some of these are for the World Justice Project. Would you like to come stand maybe and join us here? So let me start with one to Jodi, and then I'm gonna, we're gonna do lightning rounds here eventually, but for now we can broaden. So someone writes, and does this include the folks online? Are we getting theirs as well? The social media and so on? In my country Tunisia, the army is neutral and respected by the people. However, the police today violate individual rights because of an old mentality. What would be the best way to deal with that? How would you work with the Tunisian police? I think, again, going back to the Filipino statement is understanding who you're working with and under what dynamics those particular police are. This has been one of the case studies people have tried to understand and how do you clean out a police force very quickly? A lot of countries have tried to look at the example of Jordan from 2006 through eight, which is not a perfect example, but a relatively successful one in being able to clean out a police force very quickly in a country associated with massive level of criminality and warlordism and so forth, but Georgia is also a very unique situation because they literally had to go arrest about 14,000 people over the course of two weeks to do it. And that is not something that's viable in every location, but I think starting, one of the things that's really under studies is understanding what has worked in certain environments to be able to have successful security sector reform, particularly with the police. You would think as much as we understand the importance of police and the rule of law in securing the populace for everything from just property rights to economic development to just the access to education in human rights, that this is something we would have studied more and yet it's vastly, vastly understudied. And so rightfully individuals from Tunisia or any other country look and say, well, what's worked before? What are the overall trends? And there's a few key case studies, but there's not as much out there as should be, unfortunately. Although on November 6th when my book on a savage order comes out, there will be a little bit more, but not until I apologize for that. So I'm gonna put these two together because they kind of go together, but it's a bit of a two part. So the first one is, can a positive rule of law exist in a global economic system, which is increasing its inequality? Globally we're seeing inequality shift. There's some really interesting moves as global inequality shrinks, inequality within the countries is growing in many, many countries. So can you have the rule of law in that global economic situation? And I will open that up to Alex as well. And then the second one is, what role do private enterprise and multinational corporations play in advancing a positive rule of law? And clearly there's a lot they can do. So Alex, do you wanna start with that one? And then I'll move to the panel or would you like to take a second now? Probably give the rule of law, that would be bad. Or tomorrow's seminar. Hello? Okay. So no, that is a very interesting question. I think there has been some links. Just, I mean, what I can speak about is just the research that has been done in academia. And there is, I think there are pre-consistent links just on between inequality and a different set of outcomes, just not only rule of law, but democracy and so on. And usually they are negatively correlated. And I think we usually, I think recently we have seen a lot of debate on that. I think there was, I mean, I think you, if I remember correctly, you held an event last week, a book about how democracies died. And I think, and they talk about, I mean, the authors talked a little bit about that link as well, just between inequality and actually just how inequality and polarization of society just can drive some of the outcomes that we're seeing, just in elections and eventually in institutions. I don't know if someone else wants to comment on those. Would anyone else like to take the role of multinationals and corporations in improving or harming, I suppose the rule of law? Jodi? Sure. Not to over militarize the conversation, but I would just point out that, one of the justifications for the Marshall Plan after World War II is this recognition that a population that's in massive levels of poverty, that this was conducive to more populous, extreme populous movements coming in, whether it was in that case the Cold War and communism, or not allowing a rise of fascism to come back again as a lesson from World War II. And so, I mean, we've recognized for a long time that too much disparity in wealth can be highly problematic overall. Different countries have different tolerance for that disparity of wealth. The US has been an outlier generally allows a higher tolerance in differences than others, but everyone's got sort of their tolerance. So we've historically understood this. This is not new politics or Thomas Piketty or anything. We've understood this for a very, very long time, how these dynamics work. And I think in that private enterprise actually does have a big role because in the end, governments need money coming in, whether it's tax revenue or whether it's meeting the needs of those who fund campaigns and electoral campaigns and so on, that private enterprise needs good rule of law. I mean, nobody's investing lots of money in Venezuela right now because you have no safety in contracts. You have no likelihood that you're not going to be expropriated or kidnapped. We see the linkages between a lack of rule of law and a lack of economic development. And so those businesses that are in for the long term that aren't more of a hot money sort of situation, I worked at Global Witness, we deal with mining issues. If you're gonna put in a 30 year multi-billion dollar mining project, you can do a certain amount with kind of carving out your own little corridor, but at some point, you're gonna have to deal with rule of law issues to ensure you aren't expropriated or you can do contract enforcement and so forth. So I think the two go very, very closely together. And we've seen examples particularly in the Depression-era United States and in post-World War II United States, for example, where business understood in the United States that you need to make a deal with labor even if you don't agree with the overall outcomes for some level of social stability. And so hopefully we'd see those sorts of responses around the world again, but also within the United States as well. Terrific. This one is mostly for you, Alex, but I'd actually like to broaden it to the panel. It's the rule of law index includes a measure of citizen voice. To what extent is citizen influence in shaping laws important and how is this measured? But I also wanna prep the panel. How do you see citizen voice and influence working in your countries? Do you think it's having an influence and in what way? So we include that, the way that we measure that is in a particular dimension, we measure it in various indicators. The first indicator is in the dimension of open government in which we have explicitly measures, very comprehensive measures on participation. And that include just a range of possibilities just on how the citizens can just from raise their voice to associate, to indeed collaborate in the government, with the government at various different stages. Now, we try to measure the different stages in which the citizen and the governments can work together to resolve social problems. The other way in which we measure it is obviously just in the part of fundamental rights. When we measure freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech, we include indicators just on just whether people can indeed just raise concerns about particular parts of the government, whether the media can indeed just talk about against the government without fear of retaliation, whether political parties can do that without fear of retaliation, whether civil society can do that or civil society organization. So the different mechanisms that exist to participate, raise their voice and collaborate just are included in the different dimensions of the world. And to go to both of you. Well, I think it's really important to have citizens involved in what is going on in local, regional, or national level. My experience as a major, even though in an dictatorship, something that we recovered is the participatory budget that could be something basic in all the parts, but was difficult in a place where you were persecuted. And one of the greater things about that is that you engage people. You build an institution and also you are accountable. I mean, when you have people participating, well, that's that works together with transparency. And as I was saying at the beginning, I mean, one of the common things that all of the regimes has in the world at different levels is corruption. Everything goes to the black market as it's going on right now in Venezuela to find a one dollar or a one, or a kilo or a pound of beans is you have to go to the black market. So you build a rule of law and an institution as soon as you are accountable, you are open as a government. And to achieve that, you need to have the citizens involved. And in my opinion, one of the best experiences to have it is locally. And you managed to bring back participatory budgeting for a short period of time. In the Philippines, land of people power, it seems that citizen voice might cut multiple ways. Can you talk to that? That's right, two quick points. First, the 2016 elections were the first elections where social media played a major role. Duterte has what his digital campaign strategist called a network of networks. But that has had the effect of stifling citizen voices in the social media space. So one of the things we need to do is to reclaim the social media space. Secondly, we labor under a history where we've ousted two presidents through people power in 1986 and 2001. I don't think ouster is the solution. And certainly to think that we can gather a million people out in the streets again is to fight the old war, to fight the current war using lessons from the old war. We just need to be out in the streets. I think that will be, whatever the number is. I like it, I think Timothy Snyder put it best in his, on tyranny, yeah. Practice corporeal politics, bring your body out of the room and into the streets. To move to a much more academic, so there's three questions here that are very quick. When was the data for the index collected? Why 113 countries when there's around 192, depending on what you count in the world, and why some European countries and not other European countries? Yeah, they sir, thank you for the question. So the index, so for the first question, so when was the data collected? So the index has two different sources of data. So one is the expert surveys, so that this year we collected 3,000 surveys for those, and those were collected during the summer and the fall of 2017. We also have the general population polls, so which are the service to the general population. So those for half of the countries for about 55 countries were collected this year during the summer of this year, the summer and the fall, sorry, of 2017. And for the other half, for the most part, were collected in the fall of 2016. So we try to anchor the index just on the service of the general population, but we just don't survey all of them at the same year. I think that actually helps to answer the second question, why 113 countries, when there are more than 200 countries in the world. So as the project has evolved, we have to make some decisions about just whether to include which countries to include first. So we have been trying to expand, just including first countries by population, just taking into consideration level of socioeconomic development, regions and so on. However, as you can imagine, given the amount of effort that it takes and funding actually that it takes to conduct surveys every two year in 113 countries, it's quite expensive actually when we increase the number of countries. So thus far of course, we would like to include all the countries in the world. The main constraint that we have had is funding to expand to more countries. We would love to do that and we are planning on actually just probably next year, including more countries. But that has been the main consideration. And the last one was on Europe. So I think the previous question actually answers just the role of, I mean the reason why some European countries have not been included is just nothing in particular. It's simply just that we haven't had the funding to include all the European countries. So just we would like to do that. We have started by including the countries with the most population. But the ones that there are some that are missing and I mean we're aware of the ones that are missing. That's a point, it's 113 countries, but in reality, I mean those countries cover 90%, more than 90% of the world's population. So really the ones that are missing are smaller countries. Just the one continent in which we would like to expand in which we don't have as much presence is Africa. Thank you and I think that's a really important point about population versus numbers. We're so used to seeing the map, but not really thinking about it in terms of population. Jodi, this one's for you. It seems autocrats around the world are getting better and better at curbing fundamental rights. In light of this, should we be documenting stories of success or particularly success in expanding rights and are you aware of it that you would like to highlight? There is an effort to do some of that documentation. One of the ones that comes to mind immediately is the Princeton University's Successful Societies Project, where in that particular case, they take a look at not just anti-corruption, but just good governance projects in general. In their criteria, they are local projects and they are relatively inexpensive, so we're not talking World Bank, multi-billion dollar trust fund, whatever, but actual locally done projects, whether it be ports in Nigeria or the education system in Nepal or whatever, because I think these are incredibly important because it's one thing to do what one boss of mine used to call admiring the problem, but then you need, as a good military officer, the first thing you learn as a lieutenant is don't go to the boss of the problem unless you've got a solution. And I think one of the keys is how are we gonna do much more documentation of what seems to work, what doesn't work under what environments to give real tools out there for people to be able to use, because as someone who's coming from civil society, having worked for Global Witness and Trans Trans International, it does feel like that civil society space is closing to a great deal. We've been through periods where that has happened before and it's kind of this constant tussle back and forth, this constant learning kind of between the more authoritarian governments and civil society groups and media groups and so on. How do we as civil society learn from each other with best practices of what we can do and creative thinking and creative use of technology and so forth to push back? Yeah, and I'm sure most of you have probably seen Tom Carruthers and Saskia's paper on closing space and civil society, the numbers are pretty shocking. And David and John, in the Philippines and Venezuela, how important are the rule of law index scores? Are these widely known? Will they be widely known? Is this gonna show up in the press of your countries? It will be widely known because of the top line outcome, which is the Philippines fared the worst in terms of declines of falling 18 positions. I think that the main audience for the rule of law index in the Philippines would actually be some of the institutions that need some encouragement, some strengthening. So for instance, the business community, there's actually a lot of discontent, but they are not moving because economic conditions remain good. And the president actually made an example of one company. Said, I'm not interested in online gaming and that particular company's shares tanked, I think lost something like 75% of the value. And then a son-in-law, Ferdinand Marcos came in and bought the shares. And then the next week, president Duterte says, well, I'm okay with online gaming. So that was the name of the company's fill web. And I asked the CEO at the time, what does the president have against you or your owner? And he says, we don't know, we don't know. But the point is when that happened, business community took notice. So I think something like the rule of law index with findings like this, I think would reinforce the reservations that members of that particular community are already feeling. Venezuela is not widely known, but as soon as it finishes this conference, I'll do my best with social media because it's a very important, to be honest for us in Venezuela, as a Democrats, as people who want to be living freedom and democracy, it's very important with this publication that's disabled from today. So I'll do my, I'll do, yeah. How free is the press in Venezuela right now? Oh, it's very limited. I mean, I started in politics 10 years ago. I was a student of journalism and the oldest TV station with the highest rating was shut down by the regime. That had a very high cost to Chavez because in that same year, the student movement led a campaign against constitutional reform and he lost that election. And many have said that he lost that election because he shut down that TV station. So after that, what he has done or what Chavez did and now Maduro has done is that they have found businessmen that support the regime, the role of the private companies, support the regime to buy those TV stations and basically they don't have an independent media. So it's very limited, it has been censorship and there are many journalists who have been threatened when they do a research and when they publish something that is against the regime. But there's part of the learning curve of how to go about cracking down. The next question is tied to that question. It's given the situation in Venezuela and the Philippines. Which institutions do you think could actually be holding the governments accountable? What still exists that could be standing up? That's a very, I mean, in Venezuela, that's a very difficult question to answer, I mean, in my opinion. One of the most difficult things for any NGO or think tank or university is to do a research in Venezuela because there's no official source, starting from inflation. That inflation is not published. It's not public in Venezuela and that it is estimated that this year could go to 15,000% inflation, 15,000%. Last year was 2,635%. Food, the price of food doubles every month. So it's- Salaries don't double it. No, salaries don't double at all. I mean, the minimum salary is just $3. So it's very difficult to answer that and one of the things that I could do in exile as many other leaders are in exile and almost 3 million Venezuelans who are abroad is work on this type of project or be linked to this type of project or help to get known this type of project. So that's another way to pressure that regime. Alex and Jodi, this next one is for you all. Critics of the rule of law discourse call it a Western Eurocentric term and so on. Does the rule of law look the same everywhere? How do you address fundamental cultural differences in the field? No, that is a very good question. That's a question that we faced at the very beginning when we were developing the rule of law index. The approach that we followed just on the rule of law index was to look at these from the perspective of the public. So from the perspective of the people. So regardless of the institutional arrangement just that countries may have to achieve a particular outcome. At the end of the day, what we want to know is whether you have to pay a bribe, for example, to the police officer or whether you can indeed just publish an article in the press about a corrupt politician without having a fear of being detained. So regardless of how countries, just the laws of the countries, institutions in the countries, the politics of the countries, just there are certain outcomes that are central to all societies. And that is what we try to summarize and conceptualize when we were thinking about the rule of law. I mean, certainly that's been one of the conundrums in the study of corruption and rule of law overall is there are different expectations. What is a acceptable gift versus what is a bribe in any population is always difficult. Federal government says $25 is an acceptable gift. Anything above is a bribe or at least questionable and you need to report it and all this other stuff. Other places, something much larger, something much smaller. What's acceptable for hiring relatives versus what's not acceptable for hiring relatives? When is it nepotism versus when is it good business? All of these are issues in what faces societies. I think one of the, a couple of the issues we face, one of them is that a lot of times those who most push for, hey, we have a different set of rule of law or values are those that are privileged by those values that come in. And so that can be, you always have to question, who's really saying that these are the values or not? Is this a free voice of people having a true discussion of what's acceptable versus what's not? Or somebody who's in charge saying, well, I've decided that this keeps me in charge by this being my value. So I've decided that that's my rule of law and that stuff is Western and doesn't apply to me. The other one I find and working in Afghanistan was a common one is, well, everybody pays these bribes and stuff, so it must be acceptable. And I always find that highly problematic. I mean, I've lived in Washington, DC, off and on over the years. I've lived in some pretty bad neighborhoods back in the 90s when certain parts of DC weren't as nice as they were today. Everybody had bars on their windows and so forth because of the fear that there would be robbery and so forth because of the much more unsafe city. That's not the same as saying, I'm okay with crime because I put bars on my windows. And I think we have to be careful of, just because a practice happens because you need to do that to get by and to survive. And if that means paying a bribe to get a driver's license because you need a driver's license or paying a bribe to get a visa to get out of the country or go to school or whatever you have to do, we have to be careful that just because people do it and they're not protesting the streets every day because there's so many things in our life that we have to deal with that we're not confusing what people do with, people are happy with doing it. And I see that, that went a lot. And I especially see it here in the United States when we deal with highly corrupt countries at least having worked in DOD for a long time is, well, it must be okay because everybody does it. Yeah, this is an addendum to that when I was in Georgia doing interviews on life under Chevronadzah when there was really quite endemic corruption. People talk about just how dirty it made them feel. They did it, everybody did it, you had to do it, but just to pay a bribe to get your kid through school or what have you just made everyone feel dirty and complicit in a way that was very upsetting universally even if you didn't necessarily go into the streets. So on the other hand, standing strongly for a Eurocentric stance on women's rights and minority rights, how does weakness in the rule of law affect women's rights and minorities' rights in your countries and then more generally, Jodi? Well, it affects, I mean, completely. I mean, if you don't have rule of law, it affects all the population, all the people that I have to explain in Venezuela. So definitely minorities when you don't have rule of law are even more isolated in society. Well, speaking as a journalist, I can say that the online abuse that female journalists receive is just of a completely different order from what we get as male journalists. Duterte is a paradox in the sense that, or contradiction in the sense that while he was mayor of Davao City and had some very pro-women initiatives, his language, his general approach to women has been very sexist. He makes rape jokes a lot and thinks that he finds them funny and so on. And I think this just perpetuates a culture where people look down on women and I think that's really terrible. I think it pervades everything that goes on in rule of law and we in the United States sometimes take it for granted but working in places like Afghanistan. Even if you want to send your daughters to school in many places, there is such a lack of rule of law and lack of security that you would never let your daughter outside the door alone because it's just too dangerous and the levels of impunity are incredibly high for even the most horrific crimes. That it's a rational response for any caring parent to limit who goes out of the house and under what situations. Not because you don't want girls to have an education but because it's incredibly dangerous in a lack of a whole environment to do that. The ability of women to receive to have secure property rights to open a business if you can't appeal to the court or if the court's going to discriminate against you. I mean, it just trickles down through everything in society from can you walk the streets at night? Can you get together for entertainment? Can you open a business? Can you be sure if you go in front of that judge that you're going to get a fair shot and it's not going to be privileged even if you have the better case to another guy because he's a guy. It just pervades every single thing that goes along for anybody in that environment and I think also for minorities we forget. I mean, the whole point of exclusive economies that limit who the winners are to a very small group is that anybody outside that group is denied that rule of law, that access to justice and everything that goes with it. Yeah, in the book I'm working on right now we did a two by two graph where we looked at countries that scored really high on the world, World Bank scores, they could deliver their projects, they were doing well and we looked at countries that were good at delivering sanitation and public services and these were not weak countries. If you scored well in both of those you were doing pretty well and we graphed on top of that journalist homicides and the repression of peaceful minority groups and you would see these big clusters in that strong state category which just to us proved that there's something about rule of law quite different than weak states that these states when you don't prize the rule of law it's your minorities, it's the people who speak out as activists who are getting targeted. But one of the thinking of last year the protests in Venezuela were for 120 consecutive days is at the beginning all of the first people that were in the front from security forces were women, very young, we're talking about 23 years old, 20 years old with the big guns and the vest and everything and we were able to talk to them and it was really interesting at the beginning we talked to them how some of them they just broke down, start crying, start recognizing that they are with us and that they were in a very uncomfortable situation that some of them are very young but they have two or three children that they were doing that because they were threatened because the Cubans for example are on those security forces giving orders. The regime saw that at the second or third week of the protests and changed all the strategy put men and didn't give any opportunity to talk to them anymore so when we were like 500 meters from them they just started to repress and kill. So it was a very perverse way to use the woman. Well I just want to end, not on that note. I just want to end with one of the last questions is what country is the most inimical to the rule of law and what country is the best? I'm going to leave the most inimical to Alex, is there any country that's really causing problems in the rule of law? And if you don't want to answer that question let's just go to what country is doing the most internationally for the rule of law? Oh. What countries are doing the most internationally? How can we answer that question? I don't know, it came to me on a scrap of paper here. So. You mean, I mean I'm trying to understand the question so just within each one of the countries or just? I think it was two questions. It was what major power is causing the most harm and what country is doing the most, what major country is causing the most harm? What country in the world is doing the most to promote the international rule of law? Who's helping the most? That's probably a question more for the panel, I think because you said it. That's a nice comment. Let's say, no, because something that we measure is just how it is experienced just at the domestic level. I mean, just not so much on the role that countries actually play in promote or harm just globally, just in the global context. I think that's more a question. Probably for you. But yeah, that's something that I don't think we can answer just with the current data, just I would say. If you give it to me, I would also say there's no data, there's no way to really answer that question. But I would say that rather than look at country this and country that, I would look at people. There are people within each of these countries that are doing amazing things for the rule of law. There are people within each of these countries that are not doing such amazing things for the rule of law. And so I think it really might be better rather than saying Sweden is really stepping up, although Sweden is stepping up, they're doing quite a lot of good things. But rather than looking at it that way, to start looking at this Princeton project, kind of successful societies level, or the young mayors and investigative journalists and so on who are really within their countries these beacons of light pushing for a better situation around the world. In our neck of the woods, I think China is a real problem. They've been militarizing their eyelets in the Spratlys. They have let go of their previous policy of the harmonious rise. And now I think it's very much an imperial China. So Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong and we can all feel that. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations used to be a countervailing force in the region, but now China's made inroads into Laos, Cambodia, and now the Philippines. And it's basically, we're looking at the irrelevance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. To be completely fair, I think this would be the 21st century equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. This is China saying this is our hemisphere. But I think just disregarding the arbitral tribunal ruling, for instance, send signals already that we won't follow the rule of law if it's not to our best interests. That's a problem. Either if you wanna weigh in or if you have a last remark. I will take a slightly different approach on countries and stuff. I am highly worried about Russia and China and the economist and sharp power and all of that stuff that we talk about. But a lot of these are doctrines and concepts and activities have been there for a long time. I mean, I remember learning about what was left of the Soviet Union and their doctrine of mass growth and all that as a dumb lieutenant. What I do worry about is that we could, for the last 20, 30 years, rely on the UK to be the first mover on kind of setting new norms and standards, whether it be transparency and oil, gas and mining or in beneficial ownership and company registries and so on. And then kind of the paraphrase from Winston Churchill, the United States would jump in after all other options had been exhausted. They'd finally make the right decision and jump in. And I'm concerned with Brexit stuff sucking kind of all the oxygen out of the room and them being the first mover to go forward. And then the United States has really stepped back from its role as that huge 10,000 pound of grill that kind of pushed countries, whether it be FCPA that led to the OECD principles or pushing things like EITI and making countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth really at least do the minimums. That that combination of the two, that kind of mom and dad approach that both of those are breaking down and that in a large rule of law sense has me most worried. The activities of groups like China and stuff, they may have stepped up but they've always been involved in some of that. It's that countervailing force and that push back against it. That concerns me more. Well, it's a part of a family that has not enjoyed so much rule of law because my grandparents left the Soviet Union in 1927. My father left Cuba in 1970 and I left Venezuela last year. I'm gonna leave the USA tomorrow, so. Getting a little nervous. And I am part of a generation in Venezuela that actually we don't know what freedom in your country is and what is rule of law in countries. I think it is important for everyone, especially for new generations, something that we say in Spanish all the time, I don't know if it's any English, that people go institution state and they have to become bad on obsession, build institutions all the time, understand that people could go but at the end of the day, you have laws, you have the constitution, you have the state, you have to think as George said, Winston George said, not on the next election, on the next generation and always try to be engaged with people and with citizens and demand. People need to demand open governments and governments that have to be accountable when we're going to start losing that rule of you're going to start losing a rule of law. Well, thank you. Oh, sorry, Bill. Yeah, I just wanted to see your point about the organization who initiated the project which is called the Resource Hub. And then our website are now 1,500 around the world who we manage and are devoted to advancing the... Oh, it's terrific for Princeton the collection of organizations of 1,500, 5,000, we hope it will make you over and know who you are. Good work around the rule of law. Come to our website and take a look at the public view to help us add to it credible organizations that are doing the project. But it's not going to be, most likely won't be governments that turn the point on their own. It's going to be individuals and organizations that carry that forward. Before you know about that network and when that network talks to each other and shares that tactical experience, we're likely going to be reformed to believe where it was tested. Have a look at the Resource Hub, brand new. For those in the back who might not have heard that, that was a shameless plug for the Resource Hub at the World Justice Project, which I'm happy to say we're one of the research organizations that made the cut. And most of the groups I believe are activist organizations doing work on the ground to really improve their country. So with that, please join me in thanking our panel and also thanking the World Justice Project for this amazing honor. Thank you.