 Right, so being 730 in the morning in New York, I would like to welcome everyone to this site event to the high level political forum on. That we have entitled the impact of the pandemic on measuring progress on 16 looking forward tackling obstacles. And we hope that you enjoy the conversation we're having starting now with. Our distinguished panelists that I will be introducing in a little bit. My name is and I'm the strategic partnerships and out which advisor at the international Institute for democracy and electoral assistance international idea. And I'm I will be pleased to moderate today's conversation. And, as you know, this side event is organized by the 16 data initiative. And for those that are not familiar with, with the 16 data initiative, we are a consortium of 17 organizations seeking to support the open tracking of the global commitments made by more than 194 countries on peace. Justice and strong institutions, the initiative aims to complement the current efforts underway to develop an official indicator framework for monitoring the SDGs. The initiative is an attempt to pull together data sets in an open format to track SDG 16 and provide a snapshot of the current situation and eventually progress over time. Okay, we invite you to to review and to visit our website to find more information about the initiative at SDG 16 dot. Okay, so the purpose of this conversation, I'm going to be very brief of taking into account the time that we have. Is to go over findings and propose a forward looking recommendations to recover from the pandemic enhancing methodologies for measuring progress and the availability of data. The conversation will highlight the importance of data collection from official and unofficial sources to achieve SDG 16 plus in the post pandemic world, as well as the need to overcome limitations in the access to information. I would like to welcome again, our distinguished panelists, which have a long standing record working on issues pertaining to SDG 16 and are contributing to the ongoing conversation of measuring progress. Through research and substance analysis on areas such as access to information, accountability, transparency, data collection, democracy, peace and justice and inclusive institutions among others. And we are eager to get started with this conversation and listen to our colleagues. Since we have a very limited time, a lot of for this conversation, we will not do a thorough presentation of each panelist, but we will share the bias in the chat for your reference. You already have the link on the on the chat section. So please direct to to those so that you get appointed with our with our panelists. And I don't want to take much more time. I'm just going to go over the methodology with all of you for our panelists to see if they have any final questions we will have this introduction, very brief, about to end it and then we will have 8 to 10 minutes for each panelist to make the presentations and then we will go forward to the to the Q and a sessions to enable an active conversation with our participants that have already started to join for our attendees. We will encourage you to start participating through the chat function, including your questions, comments or anything you would like to highlight. For our panelists and I will be more than pleased to present it to them and we can discuss it at the time of the Q and a. So, thank you very much for that for being here and I will start giving the floor to our panelists. The 1st one and would be a Dr. Michelangelo, he's our senior democracy assessment specialist at the international idea. Miguel, you have the floor and welcome. Hi, how are you? And hello everyone. Good morning. I hope you have your coffee with you. I know I have mine. So, for today. Well, first of all, I would like to thank you at the international idea and especially you to say and Amanda for organizing this event. It's very kind of you and also to say that it is an honor to share this panel with all of you and I am sure we will learn very much from each other. So, without further ado, I will share. I put together a presentation that I will share with you. Just give me a second. So, I share my PowerPoint. And please do let me know when you see it on screen. We can see it again. Okay. Good. Yeah, it's always good to ask because sometimes it takes, there's a lack there. So, today's presentation, I will focus on two things. First, on using international ideas, global state of democracy indices to track and monitor as the G 16 and to highlight why this is a good high quality complement to official data, especially during a pandemic. And second, I will provide live examples of how these indices can help in measuring for key targets 16.3.5.6 and 0.7 as these are the targets that are most related to the system of government that is needed or that is best for delivering development, which is in this case, democracy. And that is, you know, what we measure at idea through our indices. So, this is, yeah, I already said that. And so, before I move into this into specific details, I wanted to make a quick reflection on the importance of the indices for, for measuring the SDGs. So the global state of democracy indices measure the quality of democracy worldwide. And we do this by measuring 116 indicators for 166 countries for a 45 year time period. So from 1975, which is roughly the start of the third wave of democracy to date. And we measure this through this wheel, you know, we have 116 indicators, but they're condensated into these attributes and sub attributes. So basically, just not to go into detail, we use these by this five big attributes, which are called representative government fundamental rights checks and government impartial administration and participatory engagement. So, as I was saying, the global state of democracy indices measure democracy. And why is this important? Well, this is important as democracy is an enabler of sustainable development. And this is because democracy has both an intrinsic and an instrumental value. Intrinsically, democracy has certain principles and values that matter basically for, for human dignity and so that we can lead whatever lives we want to live. So, you know, fundamental rights, freedom of expression, freedom of association, the right to vote, the right to be voted. These matter for human dignity. And it also has an instrumental value that has an impact on sustainable development. Here, I like to quote, you know, Amartya Sen and reference him in his, you know, 1999 book, Development of Freedom, where he compared China, a country that is not democratic in India, a country that is a democracy. And basically his argument was that there are no famines in democracies. Even that, you know, at the time, I'm still today, China was poor, sorry, India was was poorer than China. And this is because democracies offer a range of mechanisms so that citizens have an influence in the delivery of public goods and in public policy. You know, in a democracy, you can write to your MP, you can go to the streets and protests, you can go to your local radio station. You can, there's a range of things that enable you to push the government to fix things. And at the same time, the government has an intent and incentive to fix them, you know, because they're facing the next election, which is, of course, free and fair. And these things do not exist in non non democratic regimes. So I wanted to mention this because, you know, that that is the bad luck of what we measure an idea, but also it's interesting and important for for measuring development. So now I will focus on the four targets that I mentioned. These four targets point three point five point six point seven that you can see on the screen relates to the to the rules and the institutions needed to achieve sustainable development. We would call it the regime type and they have to do with promoting the rule of law, reducing corruption, developing effective accountable transparent institutions and ensuring responsive, inclusive and participatory decision making at all levels. So I am focusing here on each of these and first of all, as you can see on the screen, I am presenting how these indicators are measured today. So rule of law has three indicators point three point one point three point two and point three point three. And there's measured by the proportion of victims of violence on sentenced detainees as a proportion of overall prison population. And the last one, a proportion of the population who have experienced that dispute in the past two years and who have access to formal or informal dispute measure resolution mechanism. However, the rule of law and equal access to justice goes beyond police reports convictions and the use of dispute resolution mechanisms. The rule of law is more than that it includes it but it's more than that it consists of laws and institutions that are applied equally to all members of society and that guarantee an enjoyment of basic rights. Furthermore, it not only has to do with the existence of the presence of formal or informal dispute resolution mechanisms, but also with the quality of those mechanisms. Let's think about, you know, do process the access to justice, how fast the trial goes, if it's an expensive or not. So for this reason, I'm proposing two of our own local state of democracy sub attributes for measuring or complimenting the measure of 16.3, which is access to justice, which we measure through five indicators, access justice for men, access to justice for women, judicial corruption decision, judicial accountability and fair trial, and judicial independence, which is measured through six indicators. High court independence, low court independence, compliance with high court rulings, compliance with the judiciary, law and order, which is a measure of strength and impartiality of legal system and independent judiciary. And to show you how we use these to measure, I took the liberty to to graph access to justice in these five countries for the period of time that we have 75 to 2000. So, as you can see, I selected a number of, you know, key cases, and you can see their evolution through time. You know, Denmark is consistently high scoring. Cuba is not. But then, for example, you have South Africa, where access to justice changed significantly after 1994, which is of course, when apartheid ended. So this can give you a sense of how these indices can be used to measure a number of things and how can these complement the measures for 16.3. Now, we go to 16.5, which has to do with corruption and bribery. And it's currently measured by two indicators. First, the proportion of persons who have paid a bribe to a public official. And the second is the proportion of businesses that have paid a bribe to a public official were asked for a bribe by a public official. However, corruption, as you know, and well, some of our colleagues here know how better they do it, you know, they study it. Corruption goes beyond bribes and covers also the abuse of public power of untrusted power for private gain. So, you know, this can take many forms from direct payments like, you know, like bribery, money laundering, graft to using your public position to private benefits, you know, and for benefiting your family, you know, patronage, nepotism. Or for exchanging favors. So this is why we propose using our sub attribute absence of corruption, which contains 5 indicators public sector corrupt exchanges public sector theft. Executive embezzlement and theft executive bribery and corrupt exchanges and corruption actual and potential corruption in various forms patronage favors nepotism, etc. This is another graph that I did showing you a number of countries. Here you can see New Zealand is always at the top. I also graph for the OECD. But then you can see, for example, Turkey and Venezuela, who have decreased in their, you know, fight against corruption. Of course, having in Venezuela, Chavez and Maduro and in Turkey having Erdogan. You know, there's also a very strong correlation with having a democracy. As I said, democracy is also good, not only in itself, but also for achieving other goals such as, you know, in this case, fights and corruption. I go to 16.6 effective and transparent institutions. It's currently measured through two indicators. The first one is primary government expenditures as a proportion of the original approved budget and point to proportion of population satisfied with their last public service experience. As you can see, these indicators are intended to capture the extent to which having, you know, the correct budget for, you know, for institutions and the number of people that are satisfied in their interaction with public services, which usually takes the form of, you know, you get you going to an office to get an ID or going to a hospital to get us, you know, healthcare. However, having good institutions is also about having a professional and partial public administration that delivers results that go beyond this budgetary effectiveness or go beyond citizen satisfaction. So this is why we propose using one of our sub attributes so they can help partially at least to understand better 16.6 and this is predictable enforcement and it has six indicators. The executives respect for constitutional provisions, the presence of transparent laws with predictable enforcement, rigorous and impartial public administration, meritocratic criteria for appointment decisions in the state administration and in the armed forces and bureaucratic quality. This is a graph for 16.6. Here I focus on predictable enforcement in selected countries from Germany to south Sudan and you can also see changes over time. Here you can see an increase in Gambia who recently has moved to the Democratic club before it was a hybrid regime. And last but not least, 16.7, which has to do with responsive, inclusive and participatory decision making. It is measured through two indicators. 16.7.1 proportion of positions in national and local institutions compared to national distributions by sex, age, persons with disability and population groups and 16.7.2 proportion of population who believe decision making is inclusive. However, these targets are intended to capture the extent to which key institutions like the legislature, the judiciary and public services reflect the social diversity of a country and how well people believe that decision making is inclusive. However, participation and in fact pluralism go beyond demographic criteria and having representation in public bodies. Sorry, 30 seconds. Okay, I'll wrap it up. It's also about having a voice and an effective voice in society. So I propose using a number of other attributes that we have here social group equality basic welfare and gender equality, which are a deeper measure of this and it's not only about democratic demographic representation. So here I graph gender equality and social group equality and selected countries and you can see there there's strong relations between those countries that guarantee gender equality and social group equality. So I will end it here because I don't have any more time, but for for this reason and more we invite you to use the global state of democracy and this is to track SDG 16 and of course for your own research. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Miguel for highlighting a few relevant ideas around your presentation and I think the fact that you presented those linkages between democracy and development was key to set the tone for this conversation. And of course highlighting your findings on key SDG 16.3.5.7 and 0.6. So thank you very much and we'll see. I'm pretty sure we will gather some questions at some point. So we'll come back to you later. Now we are going to give the floor to Sara Long, who is the director of access to justice research at the world justice project. Sara, you have the floor. Thank you very much. I'm just sharing my presentation now. Yes, we can see it. Perfect. All right. So thank you again Miguel for the introduction and to international idea for organizing today's important discussion. I'll be speaking today about a few different data resources that the world justice project produces that focus specifically on measuring issues pertaining to rule of law and access to justice which is covered under SDG target 16.3. So I'll be first speaking about a few key challenges and those are one rule of law and decline and two very prevalent and highly unmet justice needs. So first before delving into some findings on rule of law and decline. I wanted to talk a little bit about the data tool that we've used to support that that finding that's our rule of law index. We've been producing this now for over a decade and this is a quantitative assessment tool designed to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived by ordinary people. It currently covers 128 countries and is based on two primary sources of data collected by the world justice project every year. The first is a general population poll administered to more than 130,000 households around the world. And the second are surveys to practitioners with expertise in civil and commercial law, criminal law, labor law and public health. So between these surveys we collect data on more than 500 question level variables that are aggregated to produce our rule of law index scores. So what is the result of this exercise? This here is a snapshot of the scores and rankings for the 128 countries covered in our 2020 edition of the rule of law index. Countries are receive a score on a scale of zero to one with one being a perfect score, which by the way, no country has attained. And this is just just a snapshot of country performance. But when we look at, you know, more trends over time, what do we see? So this scatter plot here shows countries that have had a change in their rule of law index score. The bottom X axis shows the percentage change and score in the last year and the left hand Y axis shows the percentage change and score in the last five years. And you'll see that the quadrant with the largest number of countries is that with countries that have seen a decline both in the last year and in the last five years. And conversely, the smallest group of countries are countries that have seen a decline or sorry, an improvement in the last year and in the last five years. So that constitutes only 20 countries have seemed sustained improvements out of the 128 countries covered in our index. So when we take a deeper look at what is driving this trend. We see here the eight primary dimensions or factors of the rule of law captured in our index as Miguel mentioned in his remarks concepts like the rule of law are very multifaceted multi dimensional so we try to capture that in our rule of law index. And if you look at this graph you'll see the number of countries in our index that has seen a decline in each factor in the last year and in the last five years. And you see the sharpest declines in the areas of constraints on government powers and fundamental rights over the last five years so this is a troubling trend. And in our 2020 index this was the third year in a row that we've seen more countries declining than improving in their overall rule of law index score. The next kind of insight that I wanted to discuss relates to prevalent and unmet justice needs and that finding comes from our global insights on access to justice study. So this is a global legal needs survey that was administered in 101 countries between 2017 and 2018. We surveyed 100 over 100,000 households using a module on legal needs and access to justice that was included in our larger general population poll. So the purpose of the survey module was to collect data on the everyday justice problems that people experience and how they go about navigating those problems both within and outside of formal justice institutions. This was the first global effort to measure this issue in a comparable way across a large number of countries and help support the development of the official SDG 16.3.3 indicator that was just endorsed in 2020. So what does the outcome of this exercise look like? This is a snapshot of the proportion of people surveyed who reported experiencing a legal problem in the last two years. So there's a great variance across countries but on average about half of those surveyed or 49% reported experiencing at least one legal problem in the last two years. When we take a closer look at the specific categories of legal problems, we have 12 broad groupings of types of legal problems here and I've just shown a selection of 20 countries from our study. But I've highlighted five types of problems in particular. Those are employment, family, housing, money and debt and public services and these are the types of legal problems that we see are both fairly prevalent but also very severe as reported by respondents. And tend to also bring, you know, serious hardship with them. And anybody who's been following current events is also probably aware that in the context of the pandemic, we've been seeing a really, we've been seeing a rise in these kinds of problems. So many people dealing with unemployment, divorce, domestic violence, eviction, bankruptcy, etc. Largely as a result of the social and economic fallout from the pandemic. So these issues are very relevant in the current context. And this here is a snapshot of kind of the path to justice. So, you know, globally on average, how are people navigating their legal problems. And there's a few troubling data points here. So less than a third of people are getting any form of help to help them understand or resolve their legal problems. About one in six are giving up on any effort to resolve their problem and about the same proportion are reporting that it is difficult or nearly impossible to find the money required to resolve their problems. And about two in five people or 43% experience a hardship with the most common ones relating to health or being economic in nature. And the World Justice Project estimated that as a result of these and other barriers that 1.4 billion people are unable to resolve their everyday justice problems. So these findings that I discussed relate to, you know, what we are learning from the data, but there's another challenge which is the challenge of data collection itself. So why, what are the challenges specifically as they relate to justice and rule of law when it comes to collecting data. So 1 is over reliance on administrative data from institutions. This is a really important data source that can tell us a lot about the functioning of institutions. But oftentimes it's not collected in a consistent and comparable manner. It's not easily accessible. And related to that there's oftentimes a lack of coordination across the many institutions that are delivering justice services. Survey data can help address some of these challenges and can provide a more kind of holistic and complete picture of the justice problems that people face. However, it's not routinely collected in many countries and it can be very expensive to produce. Also another challenge is that in the justice space, there's an underdeveloped culture of monitoring evaluation and learning as compared to other social sectors such as health and education. And lastly, there's COVID, which has really exacerbated already existing data collection challenges. So it's introduced logistical challenges such as face to face surveys being difficult due to social distancing requirements in many countries. And it also means that many data producers are facing resource and capacity constraints as many resources are being directed towards the public health emergency. So that's one of the opportunities for addressing these challenges. I have three recommendations. The first is to use partnerships to test methodologies and increase data availability. There's a number of examples of this, but one that I've highlighted here on was an effort by the OECD and the Open Society Justice Initiative to produce methodological guidance on conducting legal needs surveys. So they convened a group of experts representing statistical agencies, civil society and academia to produce this methodological guidance, which WJP then tested through our global legal needs survey. And as I mentioned earlier, this helped inform the methodology for the official 16.3.3 indicator. My second recommendation is to use existing data, in particular non-official data. So non-official data can of course provide an important and helpful proxy until official data becomes available. But as Miguel mentioned in his remarks, even when official data is available, there might be conceptual gaps in the issues covered. So existing and non-official data is really important. And what I have on the bottom of my screen is a snapshot of the availability of legal needs survey data collected at the global level or national level and also the country coverage for our rule of law index. So there's a lot of available data out there on 16.3 already. My last recommendation is to explore alternative methodologies. At the World Justice Project, we work with several dozen polling partners and we've seen them explore some really interesting methodologies during the pandemic, such as combining random digit dialing with online or expert surveys to help increase their reach when face-to-face surveys were not possible. There's also a discussion around increasing the use of big data in the justice space, which is really under explored in the justice space as compared to other social sectors. And then also governments and statistical agencies can and should partner with non-official data producers to pilot alternative methodologies in a more cost-effective manner. And before I conclude, I just wanted to point to a few key resources with additional recommendations and information. So the first is a guidance note produced by the prior city group in the in late 2020. And the prior city group for those of you who don't know is a partnership between statistical agencies and civil society. And they produced a guidance note on measuring governance or producing governance statistics in the context of COVID and highlights particular methodologies and indicators that are very relevant for several governance areas, including access to and quality of justice. Okay, great. In addition, the World Justice Project and Pathfinders produced a Grasping the Justice Gap Challenge paper that provides priorities and recommendations for improving the production and use of justice data. And then there's three forthcoming resources. One is a SDG-16 survey that is being produced by UNODC, UNDP, and OHCHR later this year that will serve as one comprehensive tool that can be used to produce or collect data on all of these survey-based indicators for SDG-16. And in addition, later this year, the World Justice Project will be producing a guide on using data and evidence to design better justice services. And we'll be releasing an updated edition of our Rule of Law Index that expands country coverage to 139 countries. And it will be the first edition that provides an update on the status of the rule of law a year and a half into the pandemic. So just wanted to invite everyone to explore those resources and to stay tuned. So with that, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sarah. And I think it's very interesting to see the snapshot on the decline on the rule of law. I think it's interesting to see how things are changing, the variation in the last year. You're bringing also a key part of this conversation to the table and it's that connection between the access to justice and the pandemic, which has obviously made a huge impact on how we advance on this issue. And of course, highlighting the biggest issue and I think this is going to be, yeah, and this is me just looking forward to the rest of the conversation, how we see the challenge in data collection and how this is preventing definitely a better idea or having a better idea on progress, right? And then, of course, thank you very much for the concrete recommendations. And I also want to highlight that the SDG 16 data initiative will also be issuing issuing the 2021 report, global report, which will also feature an article of your authorship on this particular topic. So thank you very much for that. And now we will move forward to Hakun Yerlo, I did my best, the executive director for the Center for Law and Democracy. Sorry, sorry for the senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Priya. Hakun, you have the floor. Thank you, Louise. I think you pronounced my name very well, Hakun Yerlo. So yeah, I'm a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo. And thank you very much for the opportunity to present here today. I'm going to talk about the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic and conflict. So this relates to SDG 16.1 on violence and related deaths and especially on 16.1.2 on conflict related deaths. So at the start of the pandemic seems a very long time ago, but at the start of the pandemic, there was this initial hope that the pandemic would unite the world to cooperate against this disease. So the secretary general Antonio Guterres, he had this open call for ceasefire and hope that we will be able to achieve a global ceasefire by the end of 2020. So at Priya, we have some researchers that are mapping ceasefires around the world. So this was an excellent opportunity to see whether the pandemic did anything for conflict and whether it initiated any ceasefires. And there were some countries that responded to this call. 14 countries had this call for ceasefire after the secretary general's public call. For most of the countries that it ended with a call, it didn't really manifest into a real ceasefire. But for some countries, at least a temporary ceasefire was established. And in a couple of countries, there was a ceasefire, but it was quite immediately violated. So it didn't last at all. So the global pandemic didn't seem to have this, didn't seem to give this wave of ceasefires. And we did see the reemergence of some old conflicts. And I'm thinking especially of the Ethiopian conflict and in Tigray, but also of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenians and Sarbajan. So there were some negative events occurring during this pandemic. But let's try to also zoom out and look at the more general overall trends in battle-related deaths. And this is the key indicator we use for 16.1.2. So this is just the global number of battle-related deaths or conflict-related deaths since 1989. So the huge spikes that you see in the mid-90s is the one genocide and it totally outnumbers the other years. But let's try to focus on this period. So in 2011, there was the Arab Spring and as we know that the Syrian conflict escalated in 2001. And in the past decade, the Syrian conflict has been dominating the statistics for battle-related deaths. But as the conflict has started to at least wind down, so has the number of fatalities associated with that conflict. But in 2020, we actually saw a small increase in the number of battle-related deaths compared to 2019. So let's try to zoom in on 2020 and look at the different conflict events that occurred during 2020, the year of the pandemic. So on this map, in the dark, grey countries are countries that experience some kind of a conflict event, as we call it. Every black dot is a geo-located event. So that's where some kind of skirmish happened. And some people lost their lives due to some kind of a conflict. There's a lot of things we can say about this map, but I'm going to highlight one aspect. So across the globe, in all regions, we've seen a decline in the number of conflicts. So that's positive. We've seen a decline in the number of conflicts. With the exception of Africa, in Africa, there has been an increase in the number of conflict events. And this is going to be a challenge that the international community needs to deal with. Some of these conflicts are related to the expansion of the IS and al-Qaeda into African territory, but that's not the only story of what's going on. Okay, so this is the data that we collect in what's called the UCDP pre-owned dataset, which is one of the key indicators for 16.1.2. But let's talk some about how the pandemic affected the monitoring of these statistics and our ability to collect these data. So when we collect conflict data, we depend upon independent news sources. So this is just an example of a headline that would go into this dataset. So there's some kind of unrest in Peru and some people lose their lives. So it becomes a conflict event in the dataset. Naturally, this depends upon independent media and the access of journalists to these areas so that they can record what's going on. During the pandemic, several governments used the pandemic as an excuse to limit the freedom of expression in different ways. And this goes into the same trend that Volsara and Miguel touched upon, that we've seen a negative trend for some of these key indicators for democracy around the world. So this is just another example of the Benjamin Institute, where there's been an increase in the number of countries that threatens the freedom of expression in recent years. And Miguel has added some links in the chat to different sources on how the pandemic has affected these kind of indicators. At the same time, or in addition to this, when conflict occurs, governments often go to quite extensive lengths to try to limit information in the conflict cells. So this is just one example headline from Ethiopia about how the New York Times loses access to the Tigray area. And we generally see this crackdown on journalists prior to conflict. And this is a huge problem for monitoring conflict when governments try to hide what's going on, right? So we are looking for different opportunities for how we can try to collect this data without being dependent too much or trying to diversify our sources so that we can monitor conflict even if independent news media would be neglected access. One of the recent innovations we're trying out at Rio is what's called crowd coding. So currently we've set up an app called the Conflict Cartographer. So in the Conflict Cartographer, you can Google it and you'll find the link. Anyone can create a profile and try to predict where conflict will occur in the next month. So right now I can try to predict where conflict will occur in October and December of this year. Now this system doesn't have to be only, we're not limited to doing predictions in this system. We could make a system where anyone could log on with their smartphones and report any conflict event anywhere, right? We could try to add some, maybe they have to upload a picture of it so that they have some evidence. Or we can try to check the authenticity of the reported conflict after the fact. So there are different ways we can try to check the authenticity of the data. But crowd coding is one other potential way forward for monitoring battle deaths going forward. All right, in light of this, I'm just going to note two key recommendations. So the first relates to monitoring conflict. And here this tags along with what Sara talked about when it comes to non-official data. So the first point is trying to support an independent media, making sure that they have the financial and organizational resources they need to access these conflict areas. And the same goes with civil society organizations. We cannot depend on official data alone because the official or governments will try to suppress information about conflict. We'll often try to do that. So we are dependent on non-official data. The second thing I want to highlight is that peacekeeping operations have an increasingly positive reputation in the academic society, as they seem to be one of the more effective ways to try to stop conflict, both when it comes to violations to cease fires or peace agreements, but also reemerges of conflict. These peacekeeping operations seem to be effective, or at least one of the more effective methods we have to actually try to stop conflicts. And when we're talking about, for example, increasing conflicts in Africa, this is one of the types of interventions we could use to try to stop this from escalating further. I'll stop there with my presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hakan. Definitely very interesting to see the efforts that organizations are making around measuring that kind of trend in terms of conflict and peace. And that's an element that we were missing until now, thinking about how to maintain peace, how can we see those trends. And I think presenting the innovation and data collection is something that is much welcome in this conversation and looking forward. Again, you're also bringing to the conversation a key element that is that complementarity between official and non-official data, which, as you mentioned, provides a lot of value in terms of, again, gathering information in the ground and then putting it next to the official data and see how can we corroborate and improve the measuring and see how progress is really happening. Thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation. Now I'm going to give the floor to Tobi Mandel, executive director at the Center for Law and Democracy. Tobi, you have the floor. Thank you very much and welcome to everyone wherever you may be. I'm going to break the tradition here and not have a presentation. I'll just talk about my notes. I run the Center for Law and Democracy. It's a human rights organization that focuses on foundational rights for democracy. And I'm going to focus on SDG Target 1610, which is access to information and protection of fundamental freedoms. And underneath that, there are two indicators. The first one, Havana, who will follow me, will talk about that. And I'm going to focus on the second one, which is the adoption and implementation of access to information laws. And specifically here, we're looking at laws which give individuals a right to access information held by public authorities. So there's a lot of access to information issues out there. This is a very specific one. That one, right through information laws in some countries, freedom of information laws in other countries. And I would note that these laws are what I would describe as a cross-cutting issue for the SDGs. They're important in their own right, but they also serve as a support mechanism for other SDGs. And Hakon mentioned several times about the role of information. I think he was referring more to journalists than access to information, but the same kind of package of ideas in his area. And I think if you look across the SDGs, practically all of the issues find support from access to information legislation. And the same is also true of COVID. And that means that when things are going well on access to information front that has a positive knock on effect on all of the SDGs and on the measures to address COVID by the same token when things are going poorly for access to information that has a negative knock on effect. Now, this is a complex relationship with many, many different moving parts. And I'll just mention a couple of the key relationship features between access to information and the SDGs and COVID. And I think that access to information is essential for accountability and that's been established by numerous studies. And this is of particular importance during the time of COVID when we see governments taking absolutely unprecedented decisions, far, far more impactful decisions, far more rapidly than would ever happen in a normal, normal time. And yet many of the mechanisms of accountability are not functioning properly or perhaps not functioning at all. Accountability mechanisms, parliaments, even the media is impacted. So in this context, I think access to information is very, very important. And a second issue I will focus on in terms of the relationship with access to information is about trusting government. And I think it's been widely observed that trusting government has taken a body blow. That's a strong term, but I think it's warranted a body blow during the period of COVID. And I think that that is fully understandable. We have a situation now where our governments are asking us to do really dramatic things. They're trying to push us to behave either by moral authority or sometimes by law, trying to push us to do things that are way outside of our comfort zone. Wear masks, take vaccinations, don't visit people, don't go and see your loved ones, stay home. These are not the sorts of things that governments ask us to do in normal times. They've been forced by the pandemic and good governments and bad governments, well communicating and poorly communicating governments. They're all asking us to do things that are far, far more impactful. In normal times, you know, they may push and pull us a little tiny bit. They may put in a seat belt rule and we've got to wear seat belts all of a sudden, but not the kinds of things that are going on now. That puts a huge pressure on the relationship between citizens and governments basically. And again, this is a very complex relationship and I'm not going to go into the details, but it's very well established that transparency tends to increase trust. If government secretive, you have a suspicion about what they're doing. You don't tend to trust them and if they're open, you're much more likely to trust them. Unfortunately, despite that, those two features, so governments need to be transparent for accountability purposes, but also for the trust that they so desire to achieve their objectives. They, and the importance of transparency and supporting that what we've seen over the period of the pandemic actually is a lot of governments taking advantage of, I will call it the strange political environment, different in each country, but all of, you know, in every country, the political situation is being upended one way or another. To resort to greater degrees of secrecy. So we've seen that as an unfortunate tendency and I just give one example from my own country from Canada, not to try to spot like Canada's a pork perform because I don't think they were, but. We are being asked by our government, you know, to trust them to take the vaccines, you know, for everyone and to get out and do it as quickly as possible and take a first one and take a second one. But on the other side of the ledger, the government initially refused to release the contracts for the vaccines when it was finally forced to do that. They're heavily redacted key information that citizens should know is not available. And that's true, even though vast amounts of public money, when it's a support for the development of those vaccines. What the pure tool space by any means. I don't believe in any country in the world, certainly in the Western world. And of course, we are using public money to buy those vaccines. So we have a right to know what our public money has been useful, but we're not seeing that information and that picture similar across the world. Coming now to focus specifically on the 1610 to the adoption and implementation of access to information laws. And of course, we recognize that that's only one part of the transparency picture and Ivana will talk about another one. There's a lot of moving elements there, but it's a very important one in terms of the adoption of access to information laws, the right to information writing, we're rating at www.rti-rating.org, which is run by my organization tracks comprehensively the adoption of these laws and not only the adoption, but how strong the laws are. I won't go into the details of the methodology, but it's very complicated methodology, which looks at how strong the laws are. We saw only one law being adopted in 2020. So far, we've seen two already in 2021. So hopefully that's a bit of a bounce back one is significantly down on historic levels, which are more like four or five per year. The question of implementation of access to information legislation is vastly more complex than the adoption. You can monitor whether a country adopts a law. Of course, you have to have antenna out there to see it and then you need to get the law and assess how strong it is. But implementation essentially takes place at the level of each individual public authority, each ministry, each state owned enterprise is responsible for running its own access to information system as it were. So in any country, there'll be hundreds, possibly thousands of these bodies. So obviously monitoring performance in this area is complex. There are three main methodologies out there for doing this. And I'm not going to unlike other speakers, I probably won't go into much detail about the nature of those methodologies, but UNESCO has the more official side methodology. It basically consists of a survey where they go out and ask official actors and how are you doing in this area? What's your performance? For UNET, the Freedom of Information Advocates Network, which is the leading civil society network of access to information advocates. They have developed a civil society methodology, so a non-official methodology designed for civil society organizations to apply. And my own organization has developed a kind of a hybrid methodology, which looks to involve both official actors and non-official actors. We call it the comprehensive methodology because it is much more detailed and it probes into the issue much more so. In terms of the collection of data, and I think, interestingly, Hakon again mentioned that governments don't normally want to admit when they're in a conflict and how many people have died. Not all of the SDG issues are like that, but ours is also like that. Governments don't really like, and I'm painting a very broad brush picture here, but by and large governments don't like to be open. They prefer to be closed if they could when they're open is because they can't, more or less, and they don't like to be open about how poorly they're doing in terms of openness. So it is a difficult area for data collection. My organization ran the UNESCO methodology in 2019, so the official methodology we went out and did surveys in a lot of different countries. It was a very useful exercise. It generated some very useful information, but we did find, first of all, that a lot of governments don't keep proper information, don't keep proper statistics about this issue, so that the information was just not being collected at the primary source. How many requests did you receive? What happened with those requests? Basic information like that. And we also found that in many cases, governments were not being quite honest with us in the way they responded to surveys. So the data collection was quite impacted significantly by that. So my point here really is that in light of that, I think the non-official data in this space is super important. It's always important. I certainly don't want to suggest that it's not important in other areas, but really, really important in this area. In terms of the trends, in terms of implementation from COVID, it's still early days, just in the second year of COVID, so we don't have a lot of comparative data. But we do know that implementation declined significantly. Many countries, for example, closed the thing down entirely, so they didn't process any requests for information. I have just four quick recommendations. The first is COVID has brought one positive development, and that is an increase in the use of digital tools. Even this conference represents that, and hopefully we will see a knock on effect as those digital tools are employed in the Access to Information field. They can deliver very, very powerful results when they're used well. Secondly, we would like to see the use of the SDG process far more effectively, both to push countries to adopt laws where they haven't done that, but also for the significantly failing implementers to amend their situation. Thirdly, I think we need to see a lot more support going to countries which are struggling to implement these complex laws. What I have seen generally is bits and pieces of development assistance around for that, but not much support. And then fourthly, we'd like to see civil society applying more fully the Fortinet especially methodology, more countries doing that so that we're sort of holding fire to the feet of the officials in terms of the collection of data. Thank you. Thank you very much, Toby. Definitely, in terms of the hit, as you were saying that the trust has taken in terms of, you know, of governments, that's something that we need to highlight in this conversation. That's something that I also read in terms of you highlighting that the Access to Information is a cross-climbing issue and we have all highlighted that those speakers that have had the floor. I think you also brought up something very important that is that this connect between the adoption and implementation of Access to Information laws. And of course, your recommendations are very much welcome and it's good to have so many practical ideas in this discussion, which is in the NDA of having these side events to complement the formal or, let's say, the more specific conversations taking place as the high-level political forum. I'm going to give the floor now to, let's see if I say it right, Ivana Villalic-Buchinec, project manager at the Global Forum for Media Development. Ivana, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Louise. Perfect. So let me just share my presentation. All right. So as Louise said, my name is Ivana Villalic-Buchinec and I am here on behalf of Global Forum for Media Development, which is a non-for-profit international network of around 200 journalism support and media development organizations working across more than 70 countries. Toby's Center for Law and Democracy is one of our members. We are proud to have them as one of our members. And we are very active in the field of STG-16 and because it really correlates with our core values to support the creation and strengthening of journalism and free, independent, sustainable and pluralistic news ecosystem. And as Toby also mentioned, public access to information and the free exchange of ideas are prerequisites for building peaceful, accountable and inclusive societies, which is the overarching aim of the STG-16. I am focusing on the indicator 16-10-1, which is related to journalism safety, threats to journalism and counts the number of verified cases of killing, kidnapping and forced disappearance, arbitrary detention, torture of journalists associated with media personnel, trade unions and human rights advocates in the previous 12 months. There are several sources of information for this indicator. One of them is the UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists, which indicates that a total of 62 journalists were killed in 2020 compared to 57 in 2019, with 65% killed in non-conflict countries and territories, which correlates with what Hakon was saying. And the other source will also confirm that for the CPJs database. And UNESCO also says that the 25 journalists were killed so far in 2021. Now we also refer to Committee to Protect Journalists database, which has a specific methodology where they actually evaluate each case and make sure that the death is related to the occupation, to the journalism occupation. And according to this database, they confirm that 32 cases of journalists being killed on the job, out of which 22 were murdered in 2020. This is an increase compared to 2019, where 26 journalists were killed. And just a snapshot of 2021, 14 journalists so far have been killed and for eight of them the motive has been confirmed as related to their occupation. Now, when we talk about this non-official data and when we talk about this organization preparing reports, we see that there is not only data provided, but there is analysis. They are providing trends, analysis of the situation, what is going on over a certain period of time and give us an idea and a context for the data, which is also very important. So what the CPJ indicates is that, and again, it correlates with what Hakim was saying, the number of combat-related deaths is the lowest level since 2000, which correlates with COVID-19, and the situation where journalists were not able to travel and report from these conflict zones. Also, their report indicates that Mexico has long been the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere for the press and continues to be so. That the year 2020 saw widespread global political upheaval where journalists faced violence covering these events. And that a record number of journalists were jailed because of their work in 2020 as governments cracked down on coverage of COVID-19 or attempted to suppress reporting of political unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic forced journalists to adapt to evolving safety advice and, at least for at least two journalists, they died after contracting the coronavirus in custody. Criminal groups were most frequently suspected killers of journalists in 2020 while politics is also very dangerous for journalists and political groups. Two of the journalists killed were female and one media worker was killed and it was in Afghanistan. What is also highlighted by these reports is the impunity. And this correlates to other SDGs that we were talking about, access to justice and rule of it, etc. So at least eight out of ten cases, the murders of journalists go free. Another non-official data that we are often looking at is the reporter's son from tears, World Press Freedom Index, which also gives some context to the situation when it comes to journalism and how it's been affected in every year. So for 2021 it says that the journalism is blocked and impeded in 73 countries and constrained in 59, which represents 73% of the countries that this index evaluated. There is a dramatic deterioration as people access to information. That's also what Topi was speaking about. And this particular map has different colors. The color white is indicating the favorable environment for journalism. And in this year there are only 12 countries that are assessed as having favorable environment for journalism, which is again decreased from last year. And this last point about this report also shows the importance of looking at the trends. So compared to last year, the global indicator is only 0.3% lower. However, there is a constant deterioration. It fell by 12% since the indicator was created in 2030. There is also something I wanted to point out in terms of when it comes to safety of journalists is that there are new forms of violence against journalists, which is online violence, threats to journalists, specifically to women journalists. And this also relates to what we've been talking about at gender sensitive data, collecting a little more nuanced data and indicators. So this is a report produced by International Center for Journalists in UNESCO and they also produced, so they did a report and they did a discussion paper based on the results of the report. This is the sort of analysis of what they've perceived while doing this research. And they conclude that the online attacks have real life impacts, that they affect mental health and productivity, that misogyny intersects with other forms of discrimination against women. So women journalists are also disadvantaged by racism, homophobia, religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination face additional exposure to online attacks. Gendered online violence intersects with disinformation as well. So often disinformation can be a trigger for heightened attacks. Online attacks against women journalists have also political motives. So political actors, extremist networks and parties and media are identified as instigators of online violence against women. And social media platforms and news organizations are still struggling to respond effectively. So often social media platforms are enablers of violence and women journalists fail to receive support from their employers often. And then looking at all of this and all the previous presentation, I believe, that the non-official data and data analysis provided by international freedom groups and human right organization do report constant decline in deterioration in the environment for independent journalism. Legal, political conditions, safety of journalists and media workers are deteriorating. And they're also registered other forms of threats, online threats, harassment, violence against journalists, especially women journalists. And in that light, some of the recommendations could be that also reliance on civil society organizations because reputable independent information sources such as those mentioned today and those that Toby mentioned and everyone else in today's presentations are best placed to be involved in measuring progress towards achieving SDG-16 because the governments are not to be considered as a definitive source of information on the work of related matters of journalists. In fact, according to CPJ data for 2021, 19 out of 32 journalists that can be associated that the suspected sources are political organizations, governments and military organizations. Some suspected connections with the sources of power in the country. And also, there is a recommendation to include data that reflect, so nuanced data that reflect new forms of suppressing journalism, media endangering the journalist's safety and press freedom. And Lois, to conclude this presentation, I really am glad to see all the correlations between different presentations that we see and that you can see why we're all under this SDG-16 together. Thank you, Ivana, and yes, you stole my thoughts for sure. I was going to highlight again that this is a very interesting panel and not the least a coalition that is connected not only by the AB to monitor and pay progress on SDG-16, but definitely the connections that exist among our work. It's evident. You're highlighting something that it's curious to see and it's the fact that the career, the profession that would enable access to information and at least that availability of facts is not supported. It's not necessarily, and it's an unconstrained threat, and we see that this is a trend that is not only coming from the past year, but it's something that has had more than 10 years of deterioration, as you were saying. That's something that we need to take into account. We had the new forms of violence against women using the new platforms and how these new platforms are providing for new opportunities to access information, but also to provide new ways of threatening the way this information is presented. Thank you very much. I will give the floor to Anne Severine Fabre. She's our data expert of the Small Arms Survey. Anne Severine, you have the floor. Thank you, Louise. Good morning, everyone, or good afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank International Idea as well for hosting and organizing this event and all my co-panelists for this very interesting conversation. So for those who do not know us, in the Small Arms Survey, we provide expertise on small arms and on violence. And in this manner, we relate to SDG 16.1 and 16.4, specifically 16.4.2. And today I will talk more about methodology and access to data. So this is also something that can talk to too many, even people that do not work directly on SDG 16. But so if, and I do not have as well a core point like Toby, so we're just into this, but okay. So if I start with issues, existing issues before COVID-19 when it came to access to data and information, specifically when you talk about SDG 16.1 and 16.4.2. So there were several issues. I can maybe mention here four of them. So there was the problem of, you know, when it came to official data, for example, you had agencies that were working in silos and working in silos is always something that comes back again and again. We often talk about it. So different agencies and even between government and non-government non-government institutions, there are the lack of understanding the complementarity of the work, lack of understanding how they could work together and be able to have, you know, better data quality or even access to the data and better data collection. Then there was also tapestries and resources restrained that we restrained the ability to collect data and especially the ability to go deeper and be able to collect disaggregated data because there's also been a lack of data disaggregations especially when it comes to violent death. For example, we do have a database on global violent death and the 2020 edition was the first one in which we were able to showcase sex disaggregated data when it came to farm scaleings. So you see that this is still a progress but there's a lot of work to do because this was the first edition only when those data are being collected and have been being collected for a long time, a very long time. And then there was also, of course, the lag when it comes to data collection and then when it comes to analysis because we often saw the fact that different agencies or institutions had the data but were not able to work the data or were not able to understand how this data could be useful. So sometimes the data are just there somewhere and they're not being used. So it's also the way of trying to build different methods on existing data. And that's, for example, something also that we did with ammunition profiling and we tried to use ballistic data, ballistic data that their primary aim is to be able to trace the ammunition to the farms and to be able to analyze that side. But what we did is that we analyzed the cartridges and analyzed the ammunition because it gives you a lot of information and information that could be also useful when it comes to illicit arms flows and illicit trafficking, arms trafficking. And these were something that was already existed. The data are there because those are databases but they were not used for this purpose. So this is also something that came is the use of existing data for new purposes. So it's also bidding on this. And this is something also that COVID-19 in a way has a bit of implication and so it showed us with this because it was difficult to do face-to-face survey or to use traditional method, let's say, to be able to collect data. So now let me delve into the general implication of COVID-19 when it comes to access to data and what's over. So like Toby mentioned as well, now there's the use of digital tool and we've had to adapt ourselves to digital interaction like this is happening here and it's true that maybe if we were not in the COVID era, we might not have been all able to go to New York. So this is also the great part is that it gives the possibility to have larger meeting and reaching more people than it could be if it was in person. But at the same time, there's also the problem in some region of the lack of internet connection and then it becomes then difficult to communicate when it came with digital interaction rather than being in person. And another challenge, that's why it's really, it's not black or white, it's really like gray areas and it's really ambivalent. And another challenge is also sharing the sharing of sensitive information over a screen. It is more difficult to also, it's a bit harder to build that trust, especially when it comes to new partnerships, when it's all over a screen and through digital. Sometimes when you are also face-to-face and in person, there's always all that, I don't know, body language that can also work with it, but there's also all that informal chat that can also help building that trust that we kind of losing with the digital interaction. So having video conference rather than face-to-face brings both easier communication in some way but also harder communication in others. There were some work for which we were less affected when it came to the pandemic and for us it was, for example, we have a database on unplanned explosions at munition sites and with this database, we take information from open-source media. So for us the impact was less direct because we were able to collect that information but the impact might be also on the data quality, so the quality of the data and it relates to what my co-panelists, several of them mentioned is, you know, media need to access the field, they need to be accessed to information and, you know, they are, they could be impaired and this is a bit different. Like this is not something where, how can I say, for example, if this explosion applied, arrives in residential areas, this is not something that can be really hidden because now a lot of people got smartphones or a lot of people also take pictures and also it's like, it's a big explosion. It's not something that is small unlike we've seen recently last year with an equatorial guinea with the Batax version that was, you know, in the residential areas. So when I took, when, that's why maybe journalists might get access to it or they might get information also from, from social media or elsewhere but they might not have the details of, you know, the courses, the, you know, they might not be able to go and investigate. This was also the same before COVID but now you also have, you can also give the excuse of social distancing and all that stuff, you have more, you can give, you can add barriers to that access to information. So this was, this was an example to show how we were a bit less directly affected when it came to desk research but when it came to field work because like you see in our name, small lab survey, so we like to do a survey and we could have doing it. Here we had several barriers. The inability of course to travel. Then you had also the brief student changes in major condition linked to COVID-19 because like it was said, they were rapid changes like you could have plane and, you know, plane a team, local worker going and everything is fine and then it could change from one district being closed, the other one being open and, you know, border constraint, travel policy constraint and restriction of movement. So here it was also a bit complicated and you really have to adapt. There was also the monitoring of field data collection that had to be remote and it was also a bit more difficult to detect in time challenges and also to be able to follow the data quality control in that way. And this came also with the remote training of animators because there's always together so we would remote and we would do the training, we would support the training but there's also a local organization that would do the training but still with having digital interaction sometimes, you know, WebEx Zoom would crash or something like this. So it was a bit of a challenge and then we had to have also alternative methods to face to face. So what we did for some of our work is we went back to basics so to look at what works so what we know that works and for example we did for one of the survey we had to do a phone survey so instead of being face to face we tried to go back to cacetype of survey that is also something that is well known and that has already been done in many parts of the world. Then we've done also what was highlighted as well by the prior group methodology kind of handbook is the trying to add modules on small arms but to existing survey. So you know, always building of also things that we already know and just to conclude with COVID-19 the pandemic has also shed light on the importance of data because like you've seen everybody was checking the data for that country and trying to see how many cases and what but it has also shed light on a discussion that is already existing in our area especially when it comes to violent death and 16.1 is trying to trying to collect real time data and it's challenges and avenues because like here we are on that consortium the global registry of violent death that has been existing for a few years now and that is exactly trying to collect real time data but it has also a lot of challenges because like we saw with the pandemic really have to be cautious when we have no backing and we just have those numbers that has like real time so you have no looking back at it no not being able to really also sometimes have a Torah thinking about the data that you're having here and so just last sentence is that we can see that then COVID has taught us to rethink, adapt and react. Thank you. Thank you very much And I think you make the perfect statement to close the discussion to close the presentation definitely you're offering interesting ideas around how the complementarity is again between official data and official data what are the main challenges which again being in your position as the last presenter it's a good a grab up of all the connecting points among our presenters and the work that we're doing and definitely it's good to highlight how we've had opportunities in some aspects in terms of data collection but also challenges as we move forward with the work that we do and of course the quality of the information and the analysis that we present in our day to day around progress and around monitoring SDG 16 and the overall SDG you know work that we do now we only have 10 minutes for the Q&A so I'm going to go over the questions that we have received from our panelists again mostly we received in advance but we do have some questions presented today so the first question is from Adam Karol UN program director for justice so during the pandemic some nations like India and Malaysia have increased xenophobic political messaging and legal restrictions impacting migrants and refugees such restrictions have prevented access to education for hundreds of thousands of children where is the political will to confront this trend so we're talking here about some champion nations of the global compact and refugee versus new restrictions like the internet shutdown and the immigration process so we're talking about those specific actions from governments during the pandemic that have an impact on migrants and refugees so that's the first question I don't know if you would like to take us that one based on the discussion that we had anyone I'm happy to chime in a little bit just from the perspective of measuring justice needs of migrants and refugees just to point to some ongoing efforts in that area so one is that in 2019 we did include the issue of initially stateless people in our global justice gap assessment so I mentioned this 1.4 billion people who are not able to resolve their everyday justice problems but that was in the context of a larger justice gap figure of 5.1 billion people who face at least 1 unmet justice needs and included in that figure were 12 million stateless people and then we estimated that that number could be as large as 70 million people if you're also counting internally displaced people and refugees and I'm also aware of other efforts to collect more data on justice needs of migrants so I know the Hague Institute for innovation of the law Hill is going to be in the coming I believe 2 years producing a series of studies in 12 countries on justice needs of migrants so their first one was on Ethiopia but they'll be rolling out more of those in the coming months as well as some global reports on what are the trends globally and across countries and I believe that as part of the effort to collect data for the 16.3 indicator there's a suggestion to disaggregate based on migration status and citizenship as well as based on gender and disability status and ethnicity so I think that also touches on another question about efforts to produce more gender disaggregated data as well so I don't know personally speak to political will in those contexts but at least to say that you know it's important that the experiences of these populations are captured so that they're visible to policy makers so at least they're in the area of rule of law and access to justice is this push to collect more and better data on the justice needs of migrants specifically so that's a little bit of a silver lining I just wanted to highlight there thank you Sarah and now we go again and then Hakun because thank you I was just unmuting I saw several questions on Somalia India, Myanmar the impact of COVID-19 on democracy how to measure it so I just wanted to make like a quick reflection and tell you about something that we do at international idea we have a global COVID-19 monitor which tracks COVID-19 measures you know implemented by different governments and their impact on democracy and human rights so we started this last year and we have information from February 2020 up to date we update it every two weeks and we cover 165 countries and this monitor what it does it describes the measures so it tells you whether a country has a state of emergency or a lockdown how long the lockdown is if there's contact tracing that sort of stuff but it also marks cases which are important to watch or if they're concerning from a human rights perspective so when measures are undemocratic where they're disproportionate when they're unnecessary or when they're illegal or indefinite we flag that and what we measure is very much in line with the attributes that I was telling you about earlier we have five different attributes representative government, fundamental rights impartial administration participatory engagement and checks on government which in turn are divided into different sub-attributes so you know for example for fundamental rights we would measure things such as freedom of expression, freedom of movement freedom of religion freedom of association and for instance in freedom of association we measure such things such as restriction on gatherings so we would look at if a government is maybe restricting gatherings political rallies if it applies to all political parties or maybe just suspiciously if it only applies to the opposition and if that's the case of course there's an impact on democracy and human rights and we would flag it so some of the questions that I see here in the chat are related to this I've added the link so feel free to check the global COVID monitor thank you Miguel and I have to thank you for making this work easier, I mean I see that you already answered the questions and this is very very useful so that we can give a global and more comprehensive responses to those comments so please Hakun go ahead Yes I just wanted to say to Adam's question about the displaced personnel at PRIO we also have some projects trying to map these displaced people among other things we've done ongoing surveys of the Riga population in Bangladesh during the pandemic and their education attendance and in general the restrictions on many of these displaced people such as the Riga people are already so severe that the pandemic in a sense didn't change or of course it changed much but it didn't change that much for their education attendance because they already had such a low access to quality education but this speaks to another point that Adam asks later in the chat about how these anti-democratic measures have different impacts in different places of the world so for example putting me in a home office isn't that very it's not that bad I can survive in a home office but it's obviously worse for the Riga refugees or other displaced people who depend upon traveling who have less access to internet connection so that if you restrict their freedom of movement it has a very severe impact on their livelihoods and that's how the same policy can have very different outcomes for different types of populations so this is a very important point that he raises in the chat thank you very much Talbi please you have the floor thanks just two quick points and I'm going to the question was cast in the context of refugees but I think the issues raised are broader than that so I'm going to address some of those broader issues firstly there's a little bit of a debate about whether very short term shutdowns of the internet and mobile systems is legitimate under international law but it's absolutely clear that long term shutdowns are not legitimate they are a breach of the right to freedom of expression and probably a breach of other fundamental rights so the example he gave of Bangladesh, Myanmar itself has shut down the internet I think it's the longest single internet shutdown in the world India's got dozens of shutdowns and so on none of these things are legitimate whether you could have a very short focused shutdown and whether that would be legitimate you'd have to look at all the facts but long term shutdowns just aren't so I think we have to be very clear on that in terms of the political will issue and of course that's a huge question I think that we did see during COVID a few things coming together firstly I mean countries were very focused introspectively focused another question asked how's Africa going to deal with the SDGs were slammed by the pandemic everyone was slammed by the pandemic of course some countries that are able to respond and have more resources but it kind of took everyone's eye off the ball of the larger justice and democracy projects globally I think and hopefully we will manage to recover from that and I think that that came at a very bad point because it was exacerbated by a lack of unity among more democratic countries to work together hopefully resolved by some changes which I won't mention in name but I guess everybody can imagine and so hopefully with those two we will see a little bit more pressure but it's always been really difficult to address determined anti-democratic movements or tendencies in whatever country we don't usually expect to see them in a country like Bangladesh and the refugee situation they put a lot of pressure on them but I think in a more normal time we would perhaps have seen more pressure so hopefully we will see a silver lining in that since as we come out of the pandemic as well. Thank you very much Tobi and Yvanna would you like to add something at this point if not we are okay we're good then we will move forward to closing the event I want to thank you to our colleagues our panelists we have been working on this for quite a bit as part of the SDG16 data initiative and it's much more to come we will be issuing as I mentioned at the beginning we will be issuing the SDG16 data initiative 2021 report at the end of the year this is a first kind of look at what some of the findings might be but there's still time for that for sure to add into our research and into the report I'm not going to sum up the conversation because there are so many interesting recommendations findings ideas that we have presented here today but we will definitely have a small report published on our website that we will work together with the panelists on how to best present it and so that everybody can have a reference to what we discussed here today this conversation has already been recorded so it will be available on YouTube for everyone to access it I want to thank you those participants that share with us their questions we had a few here that I just want to mention including them from the UN we have Juliette from Security Women we have Michael Oluder from Global Initiative for Nigeria Development we have Mohammed Bishar Shuri from the Guido Chayo Medical Foundation we have Silvia Tagli from Valerio de Mexico and I think your contributions were very very much appreciated and provided a space for further debate despite the time constructions that we have so once again thank you very much and we look forward to having you in future events like this thank you very much thank you thank you bye