 Good morning and welcome. My name is Kathleen Coogan and I am the Senior Gender Advisor at the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, INL. We are delighted to have attracted a full house to discuss empowering women in countries with mixed legal systems. Today we will explore the challenges and opportunities that women face in countries with mixed legal systems. The conversations that we will have today offer a rare but much needed opportunity for policy makers, academics and practitioners to come together and talk about the nuances of our work. Collaboration is critical to better promote the safeguarding of women's rights. I would like to thank INL Partner, the Rule of Law Collaborative, at the University of South Carolina, which has made today's event possible. With support from INL, the Rule of Law Collaborative implements the Justice Sector Training, Research and Coordination Program. JustTrack. JustTrack is a five-year multifaceted program that aims to increase the expertise and coordination of individuals designing, managing and implementing justice sector programs. Today is the first symposium of many to come under JustTrack. The importance of the issue of empowering women in countries with mixed legal systems. Is highlighted by the fact that it is being addressed at this first symposium. An inter-agency steering committee, including representatives from the Department of State, USAID, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and Treasury provides guidance and feedback on JustTrack's activities and functions as a mechanism for improved coordination and collaboration. Before I introduce our keynote speaker, I would like to thank our host today, the United States Institute of Peace, and in particular the Center for Gender and Peace Building. It was here just over a year ago that INL released its first two programmatic guides, the INL programmatic guides to justice sector assistance and to gender in the criminal justice system. Since the release of the gender guide, which highlights ways INL has been integrating gender into its programming and its other initiatives, INL has hired a dedicated senior gender advisor, incorporated a gender assessment into its bureau strategy, and embedded an updated module on promoting gender perspectives into its pre-deployment training. In expanding our attention to weaving gender into the work of our bureau, INL works closely with the Office of the Ambassador at Large for Global Women's Issues, Kathy Russell. Ambassador Russell's key priorities are ending gender-based violence, promoting women's full participation in society, including peace and security sectors, and advancing the status of adolescent girls. As a lawyer by training, Ambassador Russell is acutely aware of the importance of women's meaningful participation in justice systems. Prior to her appointment by President Obama in 2013, she served as Chief of Staff to Dr. Jill Biden for four years. She helped draft the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 as a staff director to then-Senator Joe Biden. Without further ado, let's welcome Ambassador Russell. Thanks, Kathleen. I really appreciate it. It's so nice to see you over here. It's so nice to be back at USIP. I feel like I'm almost living here. I'm here so often. I really appreciate that great collaboration. So to the rule of law collaborative at the University of South Carolina, I really want to thank you also for bringing together so many different groups to discuss this important issue. My colleagues at INL are just invaluable, and as you can see from what Kathleen said, they've truly integrated gender into their work, and they're great, great colleagues and partners to us, and I really appreciate that, so thank you so much. In my position, every day, I get to see the range of challenges facing women around the world, and there are many, as you can imagine. And what's very clear to me is that we can't make much progress in addressing these challenges if we do it in a piecemeal fashion. So I think our goal is to try to have, obviously, lasting and real peace, and the way to do that is to try to address the issues in a comprehensive way. That means that girls and women need access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunities. We need to challenge cultural values around women. We need police officers, doctors, and lawyers to be properly trained to respond to issues like gender-based violence, and we need laws and systems supporting those laws that give women and girls equal access to justice. These are key pieces of the puzzle. So today, as we talk about mixed legal systems and what they mean for women, I'd like to keep in mind that this is one of several components in an effort to achieve gender equality. So let's start by taking a look at what happens when women do have access to justice and when a system can and really does work for them. As Kathleen mentioned, in 1994, I worked on the Violence Against Women Act. At that point, there were an estimated 2.1 million incidences of intimate partner violence here in the United States every year. That year, Senator Biden, who I worked for, we worked on an omnibus crime bill, and the Violence Against Women Act was a key part of that. That landmark piece of legislation dramatically improved federal, state, and local responses to domestic violence. And it established that violence against women never should be, wasn't a private family matter, but a crime. And that was really a watershed in our criminal justice system. By 2010, 16 years after the law passed, intimate partner violence dropped by more than 1 million incidences a year. Clearly, it's still a problem here. I say that every time I talk about this issue in another country. It's not that we've solved the problem. We have a lot of work to do. But I think we've shown that if you address it in a comprehensive way, you really can have an impact on the issue. We made clear that laws can be powerful tools to protect and empower women. But as we all know, it takes a lot more than just having a law in place. And this, again, is something I see when I travel. Sometimes people, you know, they'll say, well, Trump, Trump had a big law that they have. And I'm like, okay, you actually have to enforce it, implement it. That's kind of the next step. So women's leadership and participation are also obviously critically important to achieving gender equality. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is one of my personal heroes. And she said that diversity and experience can really help inform sound legal judgments. I think there's a lot of truth in that. So when a judiciary represents diverse perspectives, that diversity will make for stronger decisions. Ones that are reflective not just of some people, but of all people in the society. So for example, we've seen women in the United States enter the legal profession in much greater numbers. As their numbers have grown, so has understanding of issues like harassment and discrimination. These are some bright spots as we look at the law and women's empowerment. But there are many cases that offer different stories, stories that make it clear that women don't enjoy and practice what they have on paper. So let's take one global example. It's illegal in India right now to sell acid without a license. And the reason for that is that there's a young woman Lakshmi who we honored at the State Department last year that she got and received the Secretary's International Women of Courage Award. She is one of the most inspiring people I've ever met. And she's a tiny slip of a woman, really but incredibly powerful in her demeanor and in what she did. When she was 16, a friend's brother wanted to date her. She rejected him and he approached her at a bus stop and threw acid in her face as a form of revenge. And she was permanently disfigured. She also has really very difficult health consequences as a result of the acid. So in addition to the disfigurement, she really has a lot of challenges that she has to face. She is so amazing and inspiring to me. And once this happened to her, I think my instinct would have been to hide someplace, but she doesn't do that. She lives her life in the most powerful way and she pursued her path to justice by advocating to restrict the sale of acid. And she was successful in that. But the new regulation she fought for should have been as valuable to her and to other women living the threat of that acid violence as the Violence Against Women Act was to activists and women here in the United States. But as of late last year, very few states in India had implemented the restrictions on acid sales and they weren't providing the mandatory compensation to the survivors either. So today you can still walk into a store and buy a liter of acid, which can just be a horrific weapon. And you can do that for less than a few pennies. So India is just one example. The rest of the world, including the United States, has a long way to go. High levels of impunity for gender-based violence can be found around the world, reinforcing cycles of violence, discrimination, and instability. And gender-based violence is just one issue, one example of the many ways the justice system can let women down. From property and inheritance laws to biased judges and prosecutors, often the system doesn't protect women and it doesn't empower them either. So we're here today because we know that legal systems, customary mixed or exclusively formal, often don't work for women. But we also know that justice, when it does work, lays the foundation for women to fully participate in their societies, which brings me to a really important point. We need to empower women in whatever way we can today. But we also need to work for change as we envision for tomorrow. And there are three things that I think we can do to help do this more effectively. First, we need to be persistent. And we see this, I mean women inspire me constantly in this regard because they never give up. And I meet women all the time who've been working for five, 10, 15, 20 years to affect change in their countries. It won't happen overnight. It takes time. And we just have to continue to push really hard for change. We've seen this in Afghanistan where women and their allies worked really hard to advocate for the law and the elimination of violence against women. After that law by presidential decree in 2009 was a huge victory and a much needed legal protection for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan. But while the law offers a legal framework, implementation has moved slowly. Women still face endemic violence and barriers to pursuing full justice in their cases. The good news is that the government of Afghanistan has publicly committed to ensuring the law is implemented as envisioned. That's a critical step. But there's more to be done to bring awareness among men and women to strengthening implementation around law. And it will take everyone to make it happen. The international community, civil society, the justice sector, and the security sectors all working at the local, provincial, and national levels together. So reforming justice and legal systems is an important tool to empower women, one we can't ignore in this conversation, but it won't be easy and it will take a long-term commitment. Second, and this is really critical, is to focus on local solutions. The problems facing women around the world are complex and deeply rooted in cultural norms. Women's participation in any and every part of society is far from equal to that of their status as 50% of the population. Often this is because of entrenched issues like discrimination, gender-based violence, and lack of education for girls and particularly adolescent girls. There's no easier, quick solution to these problems. If we're going to make real lasting progress, we have to be smart and creative as we approach solutions on the ground. The good news is this is already happening in some places and we have a few great examples. In the DRC, the State Department funds mobile courts that work to bring justice to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, and I'm sure you've read how horrific that problem is there, even in the most rural parts of the country. By increasing the reach of the criminal justice system, these efforts are eroding impunity and encouraging confidence in the law is absolutely critical. I've met so many women in the DRC who talk about almost accepting that they will never have any justice for the horrible things that have happened to them, and that acceptance is really corrosive to a society and something that we have to fight very hard to combat. But we're not only working in the formal system, we're also supporting creative solutions to expand access to the traditional justice system. My colleague Susan Markin is here from USAID, so she may talk about this in a little bit more depth later, but USAID is working at the grassroots level to empower women in local courts in Eastern DRC. These councils are a critical force for stability and justice. They settle border disputes and establish water sanitation and hygiene programs. They mediate cases of gender-based violence and encourage birth and marriage registrations, which, as you all know, is really important and something that is, again, a consistent issue when I travel about girls and women who don't have documents and the impact of that issue on them in the legal system, where they're almost not recognized as participants in the society and as a real challenge. The impact of gender equality is clear. Today, there is more shared household management, more equality of gender roles, and a noticeable reduction in physical violence. All of which are incredibly important. This is true in other parts of the world as well. Empowering women to promote progressive change from within traditional justice systems has improved Pashtun Jurgas and similar local councils from Bangladesh to Burundi. They're really critically important and they're an opportunity, a lot of times because they're local and smaller for women to play a bigger role. We're seeing change within both the formal and traditional judicial systems, and I think it's clear how powerful this innovative two-track approach really is because it's not only enabling access to justice for women. It's also helping to build infrastructure needed so that both sectors coexist in harmony. The third and final point I want to make is that we really need to trust women. Around the world, we've seen that women are very justice-saddy. They know which systems will better address their needs. We need to be sensitive to their perceptions of justice and their preferences for seeking it through customary means. If allowed, women will choose a system that suits them best, and if they're confident in that system, we'll see a stronger foundation for stability, rule of law, and representative governance. Just as we should trust women to choose the systems that work for them, we should also trust women to be more powerful players in those systems. Earlier this year, I met another woman, another one of our women of courage awardees. Those women, I hope all of you come to that ceremony at the State Department, although the last two years, we've been snowed out, but next year, I'm optimistic that that'll not be the case. But this year, we had a woman, her name was Tabasim Adnan, and she received the award in part of the Women Only Jurga in the Swat Valley. And for those of you who know about the Swat Valley, that is truly an impressive accomplishment. Her council meets every week to address issues that matter to women in the community. And Tabasim is very well respected in this traditional forum, so much so that she was invited to join the Grand Male Jurga to prosecute some suspects in a child rape case. And that was unprecedented to have a woman join that. She's one of countless women who are powerful leaders in the change and the various legal systems in the world. And she reminds us that there's nothing wrong with the mixed legal system, so long as it respects and makes room for women like Tabasim to be a part of it. So no matter what kind of forum it is, any system that values women's leadership, their participation, and their perspectives is going to bring the world closer to full gender equality. So I'm really glad to be at a room with so many people who are dedicated to not just understanding this, but trying to fix these issues. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be here. And I encourage you to have a great day. I'm sure you will. And thanks so much for your work. Thank you, Ambassador Russell. And we want to thank you for all of your support over the years and the work that you've been doing. And in particular, with the Violence Against Women Act, when that came out, or VAWA, I was a federal prosecutor at the time. And so I had the honor of prosecuting the first case in Nevada. So thank you. I didn't make that connection until we were sitting here. And also, I'd like to thank Kathleen Coogan and the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau for all of their work, their tireless work in integrating women's issues and issues of gender in all of their activities. It's been an honor to work with INL over the years and we look forward to that partnership. My name is Colette Roush, and I am the Acting Vice President for Governance Law and Society at USIP. And I'd like to welcome everybody here to our home. And it's your home. And it's our US government home and the people of America's home for peace building and for the ideal of a world without violent conflict. So thank you. Also, while I'm thanking people, I would like to thank Hamid Khan and the University of South Carolina, Rule of Law Collaborative, for organizing this and working with INL and giving us the honor of being able to host this very important series of discussions this afternoon. And thank you to Kathleen Kienast, our very own champion of gender and women's issues. She works very tirelessly to make sure that gender is a very important priority and that it's reflected in all the work that we do here at USIP and is through her efforts over the many, many years that that has even been possible. And it's reflected in all of our programming and will continue to be. So thank you, Kathleen, to her team with the Gender and Peace Building Program here at USIP. You know, as we all know, when I talked about the Institute's mission being to work with others and partners around the world in our own country for a country and a world without violent conflict, we know that the most important thing is establishing the rule of law. And a critical component of establishing the rule of law is the role of women. And we know that when women are empowered, when women are engaged, when women are given that platform and opportunity, then the ability to build rule of law and peace can build in a way that's not possible without women being available and at the table. And not only being at the table, but being active participants. And we know from experience that nations are more successful when women are successful and when women are empowered, when families are therefore healthier and communities are better off, then the entire countries are more prosperous. And we know that a prosperous country can often help to prevent violent conflict. And it's through conversations such as these that you're going to be having throughout the day that we can gain a better understanding of not just what we do, but specifically how we do it. We know that process is very important. So that when we approach our work in the field of women's empowerment and seeking women's empowerment when we're working on rule of law in mixed systems or in any scope of rule of law work, we need to do that with versatility. And it's very critical that we look at versatility in our approach, how we conceive it, how we implement it. And then of course after implementation, how we evaluate that work. What lessons do we learn? How can we look at this critically at what we're doing and say, what can we do better? What do we need to change? And not just check the box of evaluation, but use it as a tool for exploring how we can make things better. And also when we look at that, we realize that each of us, when we're devising programs, whether it's here or we're assisting in a program overseas, it's critical. We know that we ask those, as Ambassador Russell said, who are there every day and who work at this and who know the situation. It's not a situation where we can come with preconceived ideas or prepackaged solutions or something that we think works in one place that can be done there. We need to ask the women in that country, whether it's DRC or wherever we are, how can we help what is useful? And also how can we not do harm? What will work here? And then above all, we have to remember that at the end of the day, the end game for all of the work is to help women realize their full potential in all areas of their lives and in all ways that that potential can be realized to help build rule of law, justice, security and peace in their own communities. So with that, I would like to get it started by turning it over to Hamid Khan who is now with the rule of law collaborative at University of South Carolina, but I just want to put in a little plug. He used to be a USIPer and so it is an honor to have him come up here from South Carolina and at least for the day, be an honorary USIPer, which all of you are. Thank you. Now, if I could only convince the security staff that I was formerly a USIPer. That would be good. First of all, welcome. Thank you all for joining us on a Friday. I know we're a little bit formal for Friday in Washington and we're a bit early, but the topic is worth our attention. First of all, I'd like to show my gratitude to now acting Vice President Roush at the United States Institute of Peace, formerly my boss and mentor here at the United States Institute of Peace and of course to Ambassador Russell who took her time out of her busy schedule to join us in this very important discussion about women's empowerment. This is the first and the inaugural symposium of JustTrack, a collaboration between the INL and the University of South Carolina, the rule of law collaborative, which I am the Deputy Director. This promises to be the first of many different discussions and symposia that will involve very important areas of discussion, policy, academia and study. We hope that this endeavor, a multi-year endeavor, will be a fruitful one for all those involved. And so what would be more fitting than a symposium that would bring together academics, policymakers and practitioners, those from the academy, those who articulate policy and those who are in the field. With all of them together and with all the discussion that will take place, we hope that the best discussion will not be had by those up here on the dais, but rather from the discussion in intercourse of those who are here before us and we are all grateful for your involvement. Just a few scheduling issues. We hope to limit the panels and the remarks so that everyone will have a chance not only to offer their remarks but so that we can solicit questions and learn from audience members about their perspectives. We promise that the discussion will be fruitful, that the events that will take place will be highlighted and recorded as we have this now live web streaming courtesy of USIP. There's also a bit of a regret that Dr. Shaw will not be joining us today for the case study. Unfortunately or fortunately in the life of women's empowerment she just gave birth to a child and motherly duties take precedence than being here in Washington. In addition, I'd like to articulate some of the objectives of the symposium. The purpose of the symposium and the objective is to discuss both the challenges that women face in what we call mixed legal systems. Those systems are considered where at a formal level the application of common civil customary religious or tribal law predominates. The reason why we take this endeavor on is because we understand fully and foremost that no legal system is pure. No legal system comes disaggregated from its tradition and no system is without its multiplicity. That however does not mean that there aren't pathways for empowerment and that we combine from our different perspectives can offer those pathways. I would encourage all of those here to take place in the discussion and that we will continue the discussion as part of the University of South Carolina in this important area. I want to note that as a crew cut man saying in front of you that the issue of women's empowerment is not an issue just for women alone. While we're all very interested in telling stories one story that comes to mind is of a little girl who lived in a village in northern Pakistan who at five years old lost her father. At the right age of seven decided that because she had three brothers she was looking for her to stay at home and do the household duties with her widowed mother. And then at the right age of 14 just have to be forced or engaged into a arranged marriage and then at 16 have her first child. By 17 years of age she would actually be a business owner. Now the reason why that's relevant is because now she has one for sons, one daughter and one of them stands in front of you today. So the issues about women's empowerment are more than just the issues that affect women and affect society. It also affects young boys. It affects the men in those societies and to the extent that we can bring to bear the discussion and that we can create fruitful pathways for women know that all of the generations both men and women will benefit from it. So with that let's turn over to the first panel and I thank you for joining us here today. Thank you. I think we just made a group decision to sit here and speak from the panel rather than speaking from the podium. Well first of all, thanks very much to USIP and the INL Bureau and to Hamid for including me in this important conversation. I could not be more thrilled to be here today because of the subject we're going to discuss but also because of the remarkable people including this panel that you've managed to attract to this conversation. My name is Angelique Young and I work for an organization called the Institute for Inclusive Security and two years ago we launched an initiative to address the gap between the promise of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and waning global commitment to its implementation. Through our work we aimed to increase the number of national action plans which are high impact strategies that facilitate the extraordinary ability of women to present, resolve and stabilize after deadly conflicts. When most people think of Resolution 1325 they focus on participation more women at the peace table more women in government more women in the security sector and so forth and that is very important but it is equally important if not foundational to address the need to improve society's perception of women and to engage more champions in advancing women's inclusion even more critical we must work to remove social, economic and legal barriers to women's empowerment and ensure that women have the knowledge the skills, the ability and the space to actually exercise their rights. In this session we'll identify and prioritize the challenges of women's legal systems. We'll impact the language a little bit hopefully some of the assumptions that we all worked with and we'll aim to pave the way for the rest of the day to have an honest discussion about practical actionable ideas that generate action on this very important topic. There are so many challenges dysfunctional legal structures that fail to harmonize or link formal and customary systems both women and practitioners of knowledge or awareness of laws and procedures particularly new laws even when those new laws are meant to benefit women. There may be no strategy for addressing war or related violence. Police interventions are often ineffective at best and disruptive sometimes at their worst. The cost for women to engage in the legal system may be burdensome the distance for them to travel to access those resources too far and the process may be too convoluted for them to think it is worthwhile. The list of challenges is endless. It should be clear which cases for women are tracked to formal or customary systems and how they will interact those systems but it is usually not. Communities should be engaged as partners to spread knowledge and build support for women but they usually aren't. Strategies for tackling this issue should be comprehensive addressing all of the barriers including social and economic barriers the ability to access the legal sphere impacts literally every aspect of women and men's lives and that's why this conversation is so important to have and I'm excited to share with you the enormous expertise of the panelists that we have here. So I'm going to introduce each of them first and then I'll turn it over to them. Each panelist has 15 minutes after that we'll go to questions. So first of all I'm assuming that you have some of the bios with you so I'm just going to share my favorite highlights of each of these individuals which could get a little long because their experience is so extraordinary. Susan Markham is the USA Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment. She works to improve the lives of citizens around the world by advancing equality and empowering women and girls to participate fully and benefit from the development of their societies. She served as the Director of Political Participation at NDI. She previously directed the Emily's List Campaign Corps program and later the Political Opportunity Program to recruit, train and support women candidates running for statewide legislative and local offices in 35 U.S. states. She served as the Director of Senate Services at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and her work has taken her to over 35 countries around the world where she's conducted trainings, facilitated working groups, political parties and civil society organizations, and in her free time addressed numerous conferences on the importance and best practices of increasing women's involvement in the political process. We're very pleased to have her here. Paola Shakakar is the Senior Program Officer for Religion and Peace Building at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She also served four years at the Asia Foundation where she was the Afghanistan Director for Women's Empowerment and Development. She led the Gender Mainstreaming Society Unit in the United Nations Development Program's Afghanistan Sub-National Governance Program managing a small grants program for Afghanistan's Civil Society initiatives. She's also served as the Program Manager for Gender Studies at Kabul University. An Afghan American, she has enormous experience teaching and researching religion, gender, security, local governance and all the easy subjects. She has published Research Regarding Women's Participation Governance, Pashtun Wali, Afghan Customary Law, Afghan Women's Identity and Social Spaces in Afghanistan and her research has also taken her to numerous countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Syria. Danielle Angel works for my favorite organization at the Department of State the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan U.S. Department of State where she oversees INL's Gender Justice Program in Afghanistan. She previously worked on INL's legal education access to justice and justice sector development programs. Before joining INL in 2012 she worked at Al Arabiya News and several law firms in New York. She also brings remarkable experience and all three of these panelists I think are going to tell us a lot about the challenges. So with that Susan, I turn it over to you. Thank you so much and thank you to USAIP and the University of South Carolina for putting this event together today. I'm just going to have a few remarks. I think as indicated earlier that I think a lot of the vibrant discussion that goes on is after we give our remarks and we really get to interact and share stories that everyone in this room and lessons learned that we can all benefit from. So I'm going to give a brief overview of mixed systems and some of the work that USAID citizens learned there. So mixed systems, you know, particularly those with formal and customary law present both opportunities and challenges to citizens seeking justice. So I think sometimes we look so much on the challenges and don't look at the opportunities so I'm going to address both today. On the one hand they offer additional venues for women and girls to pursue their rights, but on the other hand, and they might be the most accessible for women in a lot of instances, but on the other hand they might not be the most egalitarian. And a lot of the work that we do, whether it's on land issues or on family issues such as marriage, divorce and custody, it's really an uneven system. But these informal systems are significant. For example, in the area of land customary tenure is thought to cover as much as 90% of the land in most sub-Saharan African countries. So we cannot ignore them. Similarly, although extremely diverse, informal justice systems are commonly distinguished from state justice systems, and then they frequently aim to resolve disputes through local mediation or arbitration. And so that is very powerful in a lot of the communities where we work. So depending on existing social, cultural and religious norms this most often emphasizes the communities' existing ideas on justice and holding community harmony over individual rights, which can obviously be very uneven. So when we look at the barriers to accessing the formal justice system, I actually think of it in a way that I think a lot of the work that we do with regard to women's rights and equality is that we need to look at three levels and we need to look at the individual level. So individual women and their capacity and skills and confidence to take part in these systems. At the second level, we need to look at the institutional level. You know, what institutions exist, both formal and informal, and how can women access them? And then finally looking at the environmental level, what are the attitudes, what are the cultural norms that support these systems or act as barriers to women having access to the system. So in the individual level, even in places where women have rights according to the legal system, they may not know those rights themselves, or they might not have access to power to enforce those rights. As previously said, they often lack the resources or the time to participate in justice process. The education, there might be a social stigma to going to the formal legal sector. And we can't forget the fear of violence or family pressure to not take these private issues into the formal sector. And as I previously said, a lack of confidence in these institutions themselves. Because at the institutional level, we know there are lots of barriers. If you look at the staffing, who works in these institutions? Just over a quarter of judges and prosecutors are only one out of every eight police officers in Sub-Saharan Africa is female. In some instances, the laws providing rights for women are contradictory, even within the legal, in the formal legal sector. So on the one hand, you might have an equality clause in the Constitution, the laws for women's equal rights to land, marriage and inheritance laws might provide for equality. But while at the same time, their marriage laws or other laws might contradict these. Also at the institution level, there is a gap between law and practice has been said before. Just having a law on the books does not mean equal implementation. And so it's a risk to go into the formal sector because you're not really sure how that law is going to be implemented. And then at the environmental level, at the attitude level, both in the formal and informal justice systems, some gender specific crimes or crimes that we think more likely to affect women such as rape, domestic violence and other things might not be considered major offenses and they might be downplayed. And so changing attitudes, men and women's attitudes about what's appropriate for women's roles in public life need to be addressed in these legal ways. So looking at some of the best practices and opportunities, over the last 30 years, the international donor community has invested heavily and implemented programs to improve the rule of law globally. On average, USAID conducts approximately $200 million in rule of law projects, many of which include components designed to enhance access to justice. So while we have best practices, women's experiences in the justice system are more important than women's experiences in the justice system. What we want is that it's complex and there's no one answer to how we empower women to better access and more fairly access formal justice systems. One important point that I want to reiterate that Ambassador Russell made is that we need to trust women and we need to ask them, what does justice mean for you? We can't come in with our questions on the programs that we have. Also, when designing programs, we shouldn't look at the formal and informal justice systems as distinct and separate. They often work off one another and it's difficult to separate one from another completely. For example, USAID is working to strengthen the capacity of customary justice systems in Ethiopia and Zambia to ensure that women and men have equal access to justice, meet the standards and reflect that in the informal justice systems that's there. We also need to think broadly, outside so that we work with non-legal organizations that can help empower women, especially those with regard to economic empowerment, income generation, land rights, protection from violence, even food security and resilience issues. These all interact with the way women encounter the legal and structural change. For example, at USAID, we had a program on radio journalism in Senegal. And through this program, we were obviously focused on a much different issue in empowering women to use public media to engage other women in a wide range of issues. But some of the beneficiaries of that program decided to request additional community lands for their homesteads and went the legal path through a broader process. And this is the most often effective when there are two conditions are met. One when these programs are supported and owned by the women and men in the target communities, not imposed from outside. And when women and men in the communities work together, make the change that they want to see, it both has the short-term impact of changing the legal systems, but also men and women get used to working together and they have to be part of that program. The USAID land project in Rwanda is working with civil society organizations to encourage men and boys to be part of these changes and become proud champions of fairness and equal rights. The other aspect is we work both from the top and the bottom levels of legal change. So we want to make sure that national top-down reforms to ensure domestic laws and regulations promote gender equality and gender equality led efforts to reform discriminatory practices. So when men and women are working both at the higher level and the lower, they put the pressure on the customary justice systems to better protect basic rights and they are very much founded in the community, but they also know that there's an international framework that supports this work and that the government is going to keep an eye out on those things. A couple of other things. We have the rule of law and stability program which works to strengthen Afghanistan's traditional justice sector and align it with the Afghan constitution. So instead of going and said we want to try to figure out a way to get rid of this, we are actually trying to understand it but help those who are involved in the traditional justice sector understand what the new constitution is safeguarding with regard to the traditional justice system. We have the rule of law and stability program working with elders and specifically a group of wise women, older women who play, they might not be standing at the front when you talk about what negotiations or other discussions are going on between communities but they are respected and can often lay the groundwork for far reaching change in their communities. And then we also do more formal discussions that specifically focused on justice for victims of gender based violence and helping them access the courts and get those cases all the way through trial. So it's a variety of programs but I think overall like a lot of the work that we do, the more we do these programs, the more we understand the complexity of them and the importance of local ownership. Thank you. Thank you very much for those questions. Thank you very much. I'd like to first thank the University of South Carolina and INL for this really important initiative on empowering women in mixed legal systems. I think this is often overlooked and I'm really glad that there's a whole symposium dedicated to this very important issue. I'd also like to thank my former colleague Hamid Khan as we are cohorts in this issue, particularly as it relates to empowering women in mixed legal systems and something that we've been working on for many years together even though I wasn't here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And in fact, what I'd like to start with is a program that Hamid Khan took a very big initiative in starting along with my colleague Kathleen Kinast and Manal Omar. And it was back in 2013 that we had this very amazing working group at the U.S. Islamic World Forum in Doha where we're talking about the very issue of how to protect women's rights and empower women when you have constitutions that have a very strong Islamic identity. And so it's working between both the formal legal system and the Sharia law or the Islamic law system in different countries. And I think this is a very pertinent issue. My work relates, and my experience comes from Afghanistan since that's where I've spent the last 10 years before joining U.S. Institute of Peace where in the Constitution it specifically states in Article 3 that no law can go against the tenants of Islam. And this came to a head when the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law came to Parliament in May 2013, so exactly this month. And basically the parliamentarians said, well, this law is un-Islamic and gave many reasons for being un-Islamic and luckily instead of it being voted on it was taken off the agenda and so ever since then it's been under review and reform. But I'd like to take us down a notch even though this is a national debate that's happening in Afghanistan and people are working on this. And it's very important that the different sectors are included and we're trying to work with both the religious leaders and scholars, the women's rights activists and the legal advocates the three pillar approach. The same time what it actually comes down to is how people are on the user and actually interacting with it. How are people on the ground, how are women on the ground really accessing these laws. And I think it's very interesting to note that we talk a lot about getting it right on paper and then thinking about implementation rather than thinking about it as a process of trying to build the community support to get it right on paper and it seems sort of backwards and I think in Afghanistan this is something that we've learned has been a challenge that actually there wasn't enough ground support for this law and it happened to get it on paper right without this so that there wasn't this enabling environment. And so if we look on the ground I'd like to bring in some statistics from the Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan people the latest one. I think it's very interesting to note that when women were asked if they had household family problems who would they ask to resolve it, who would they seek to resolve it. It was 29% of women said that they would seek help from family and friends followed by elders and the local Jirga so they would go to the informal justice sector first. This is women would go to the informal justice sector first and then after that the Malik Khan who is the village head or the local tribal leader again informal sector so it seems like it's a very high amount of women would choose the informal sector over the formal justice sector and then it's only 16% out of those who said they had a case a dispute or a case within the past two years that they actually went to a court to resolve it and for women those cases were family or divorce issues. Now my experience in the field I've seen that when it comes to inheritance for women or land rights for women the first place they will go is the Mullah the religious leader because that's actually the place where they feel that they can get the most traction for their case because according to Islamic Sharia law and it's in the Quran women have inheritance rights and rights to land and as Ambassador Russell mentioned women are very justice savvy they can choose between the best justice systems to meet their needs so we do see that they go to the religious leaders for leverage versus the Jirga and Shura where in the informal justice sector that is related to tribal or traditional justice it's actually a bad thing for women to seek their inheritance rights it's condemned it's looked down upon but let me get back to this national process so in the national level we're looking at how can we pass a law in parliament and support the implementation of the law on the ground that's related to the elimination of violence against women and in doing this not only do we have to integrate and we're working with the ministry of justice and the legal scholars there but we're also working with political activists, women's rights activists and the legal scholars and I think what's really important at that level is that to get when we get those people on board who have that grassroots support whether it's the civil society activists or whether it's the religious leaders that's really where we're able to bring in a lot of ownership of the local level into the law and support for sustainability and the long term implementation but one of the assumptions that often a lot of people come to in Afghanistan particularly related to this law is that the initial assumption is that Islam doesn't support women's rights and often times that is the assumption that religious leaders are so conservative and Islam doesn't support women's rights but what we've found is that in fact at the grassroots level there are many religious leaders who are advocating for the implementation of the elimination of violence against women law and it is through their lobbying and working with women's rights activists at the national level that there's really been some movement on the explanation of this law and light of Islamic Sharia law and really building support for this at the national level to get passed one other thing I'd just like to discuss is the issue of divorce as I mentioned family problems or divorce they're often more often likely to take them to the formal justice sector and at the same time I'd like to tell you a story about a woman who I met in Nangahar and this is in the eastern province in the Pashtun area she was seeking divorce because of domestic abuse and violence and her mother was very supportive of her and her father's family and first they worked with the elders in their family so it started with the family it says here as well supported by Asia Foundation's survey that it actually starts in the family and the discussion was between the heads of the different households and then when that didn't work they went to the religious leader and the jerga and when that wasn't working they threatened to go to the formal courts and it was that threat of taking this case to the formal courts that actually made them work out this case within the village because they didn't want that stigma attached to taking this case to the formal courts that actually proved helpful that being said there are places in Afghanistan I think this translates to other countries as well where there is this intersection of formal and informal that come together and particularly related to these cases very difficult cases of violence against women we've seen that it's been very helpful to have the tribal elders the jerga members come together with the judges and sit to discuss the cases and in that case it seems that the community members these tribal elders are then held accountable to the formal justice sector by coming up with a joint decision where the judges often will put their sample of approval but then it will be implemented by the community by the elders of the community so that it will be upheld both in the court of law and by the informal justice sector and we're seeing this as a way that this accountability and sustainability can actually happen both by acknowledging the informal justice sector and working with them and also holding them accountable to the laws of the land and with that I would like to end Thank you, the stories that you share I think really illuminate this important issue in a very helpful way Danielle, over to you Sure, I'm also going to talk about Afghanistan as that's my area of expertise but I think my remarks really complement what Paul Washa mentioned and what Ambassador Russell briefly mentioned earlier so I hope that you guys don't get sick of Afghanistan and before I dive into that first of course I'd like to add my thanks to the University of South Carolina USIP, INL Cap, Hamid and everyone involved in organizing this event it's really a pleasure and an honor for me not just to participate but to listen and learn from these critical discussions so most people have heard about the atrocities affecting the rights and rules of women in Afghanistan and when I talk to my family and my friends about my job and what I do, quite frankly most of them think it's pretty hopeless and I won't deny that Afghan women face huge hurdles but what's interesting to note and what you can tell the importance of because Paul Washa and Ambassador Russell and I have all brought this up is that Afghanistan has surprisingly progressive protections against gender-based violence and so this elimination of violence against women law which I'll refer to as the Ival Law because it's kind of a mouthful this Ival Law that we've all mentioned criminalizes a variety of acts of violence against women ranging from battery to sexual assault to forced suicide and even publication of the identity of a gender-based violence survivor so with this Ival Law on the books and these really strong legal protections why do we still hear these horror stories well Ambassador Russell and Paul Washa both talked to this but I'll add my perspective and as with everything in Afghanistan the answer is pretty complicated there are cultural obstacles Afghanistan is a patriarchal society and women are generally speaking reliant on male family members for financial support there's also a focus on family and community over the individual so if you think practically about what that means if you're a woman with an abusive husband and you're considering filing criminal charges you face public censure for airing your problems probable backlash from your in-laws who may even be in the same home as you plus the obstacle of surviving while your financial support system is imprisoned and when he's released there's no guarantee that his behavior will have been reformed so then there's the issue of civil charges and if you put yourself back in that same scenario but you decide to file for divorce rather than filing a criminal complaint you still face the possibility of losing your home as you've probably moved in with your husband's family you could lose custody of your children you'll often lose standing in your community and again opportunities for financial security for single women in Afghanistan are quite rare to the extent that they exist at all so with these social, cultural and financial considerations it's not really surprising that survivors of gender-based violence tend to prefer mediation which emphasizes reconciliation among the family the UN released a report last week which stated that 65% of women's cases sampled went through mediation rather than formal court proceedings and of those cases that went through mediation about half went to formal eval law institutions about 20% went to traditional dispute resolution bodies and the unit that I found the most interesting is about 15% went to joint mediation so mediation sessions that were conducted by both Afghan government authorities and traditional dispute resolution actors so this could mean that you have a lawyer and a mullah sitting at the same table helping you resolve your case many of you have probably heard a story that my former boss Karen Hall likes to tell about two Afghan men from the same small village during the civil war and who were as close as brothers so when one man had a baby girl and the other had a baby boy it seemed only natural to arrange a marriage to seal the family's affection but as time went on the two families fate diverged so the young girls family moved to the city where they were economically successful the young girl had access to education and the boys family did not fare as well with poor access to services and education and less financial luck but despite that the boys family continued to send bride gifts to the girls family over the years so when the two came to marriage age the girls family wanted to break the engagement but the boys family was pretty heavily invested so the two families called in a village elder who also happened to be a lawyer in the formal justice system and that elder sat down with the boys family and he offered up three options to adjudicate the case. Pashtunwali which as has been mentioned already today is the traditional honor code that governs cultural norms in much of Afghanistan Afghan law or Sharia the boys family initially chose Pashtunwali so the lawyer said the village elder said aren't you good Muslims why wouldn't you want to go under why wouldn't you want to proceed under Sharia to which the boys family acquiesced so the lawyer said well under Sharia under Sharia law a woman has the right to choose her own husband so the girls family has no obligation to you so unsurprisingly the boys family asked about other options and the lawyer told them that in Afghanistan no law can contravene Islamic law so the girls family still has no obligation to you and she can still choose her own husband ultimately they went forward under a mixed agreement which was based heavily in Pashtunwali wherein the boys family agreed to break the engagement in return for repayment of the value of all of the brides gifts they had sent over the years now there's a few things that I want to highlight from that story there are three sources for resolving conflict in Afghanistan Pashtunwali, the formal legal system and Sharia and as several others on the panel have mentioned the boundaries between these systems are really fluid and the choice of which system or systems to use to adjudicate your case is really a rational decision so I should note this trend of blending of the formal and informal justice systems or what is effectively hedging one's bets is not unique to women's issues in Afghanistan my teammates and I have also been tracking the Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan people for several years and there's one statistic that we always follow which is the use of formal and informal justice mechanisms over time in the first few years that the study was released use of the informal justice system was more common than use of the formal system and we saw that flip in 2011 but in 2013 for the first time there was a major spike in use of both informal and formal systems on each case on an individual case unfortunately I couldn't find that data point in the 2014 survey but I'd be really interested to see it particularly as we're talking about mixed legal systems through a gender lens because 2014 was a really significant year for women's rights and access to justice in Afghanistan for example, Afghanistan has specialized prosecution units dedicated to trying cases of violence against women these elimination of violence against women units or EVA units expanded their presence from 8 provinces at the end of 2013 to 19 provinces today and that UN report that I mentioned earlier highlights these EVA units as quote, a contributing factor towards encouraging women survivors of violence to register their cases here's another example this fall the Kabul primary court convicted a religious figure sexually assaulting a young girl and the court imposed one of the most severe sentences handed down since the EVA law went into effect in 2009 now the prosecutor who tried the case is a member of the Kabul EVA unit which I mentioned earlier and which I should note receives training and mentoring through INL programming and both he and one of the judges who ruled on the case have completed INL funded continuing legal education training and INL funded civil society and INL supported civil society organization provided the victim temporary shelter, access to medical services and legal representation and when the ruling was upheld on appeal two of the appellate judges had benefited from INL training improving women's access to and quality of justice in the afghan legal system requires a cultural change and that's going to take generations but I think that case really demonstrates that we're starting to see sustained efforts pay off as another example of that pay off I'll leave you with one last story earlier this year a 27 year old woman in Kabul named Farkunda was attacked and slain I'll spare you through gruesome details because they're pretty horrific but in short Farkunda was falsely accused of burning pages of the Quran and she was subsequently beaten and burned by a mob the attack sparked huge protests across Afghanistan and women in an unprecedented moved served as pallbearers at her funeral Farkunda's brother changed his name to his second name to memorialize his slain sister and the New York Times reported just earlier this week that the afghan government had arrested had charged 49 suspects in connection with the murder including police who had been at the scene and merely looked on men have joined women across the country to demand women's rights in the wake of this case I could not have imagined that reaction a year ago so in closing I'll say legal protections for afghan women are growing and with sustained programs the social and cultural shifts are increasing advancing the ways when social when laws reflect societal norms Thanks very much for those remarks and those stories I love stories the best I think they help to illustrate these issues in a way that's easier to understand and connect to now we're going to turn it over to the audience for questions in a second but I'm going to go ahead and abuse my position here and pose my own questions first and Paul Walsh I know you have some time limitations I think so I'm going to ask you first because your experience working at multiple levels within Afghanistan I think is particularly unique and you mentioned several times throughout your remarks the importance of grassroots organizations and I'm wondering if you can share I think we all recognize that it is important to work with grassroots organizations but for practitioners I think it can be difficult both to identify the right organization but also understand how to work with them in a way that actually empowers the organization rather than overshadows them so I wonder if you could offer any suggestions on how to do that effectively. Thank you so yeah I think on the one hand it's very important that we find the right organizations to work with at the grassroots level as you were saying and so how do I identify the right organizations to work with often times what I talk about doing and what I've done in the past is some sort of a mapping of the community or the area, the local area to really get a sense of who are the players there who are the organizations and the individuals that support the agenda particularly if we're dealing with the protection of women's rights and then those who are spoilers, who are often who often come out as speaking against women's rights issues and then in that mix trying to understand who are the people on the ground who are already advocating for this who are already doing this work protecting women's rights providing perhaps legal aid working with the various levels of community members whether it be the religious leaders or creating those informal groups of women to support as a place where they can actually come out of concerns that can then be taken up to higher levels so it's really understanding who on the ground is doing that work and then working through them and some of it may be more far fetched like well there's nobody actually working on legal services and there's nobody actually working particularly in this area but there is a group that is has stated maybe in their charter that this is something that they want to do and that they have the right connections around so basically they are part they have the key stakeholders in their network and those are places that I think are good places to start and working with communities but in terms of overshadowing I totally agree I mean I think oftentimes donors come in with a certain agenda and a certain strategy and they want to implement that and it can overshadow the agency and the ownership that the local partners have and I think it's really important that even when we do come in with a strategy and an idea that we really bring them into the process and for them to be able to describe their concerns listen to their concerns and build programs that would reach the same goals that we have but that they have ownership and local agency in actually implementing on the ground Thanks very much for that Susan if I might ask you maybe a challenging question one of the tools that we often work with and some of you in the audience know I'm obsessed with national action plans and other national strategies but as government donors we tend to work at the national level and sometimes it seems that the frameworks we work with are a little bit challenging when you're dealing with local issues in the intersections and I'm wondering if you could maybe talk about how national policies or national instruments can be used to empower women at a local level Thanks so much I think it is a challenge whether it's the U.S. National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security or those that we support other countries as they create them in their countries it is a challenge but it's often what we use all international protocols for so whether it's a national action plan or CDaw or 1325 finding the parts of that that are relevant for that specific community and really working with those who work with it every day I mean for instance I was in Côte d'Ivoire a few years ago and we were talking about the presidential elections and some of the violence that occurred there and we were talking about how the peace process and there was still a lot of questions about how the peace process would go forward and they said well you need to go in on 1325 so the first day we go in we met with the group that had been put together by the government to kind of create a formal dialogue and there were many steps over months and they had never heard of 1325 and I was slightly frightened but it was good material and we looked at their plan and helped integrate gender across all their plan and then the next day we were set to meet with civil society and of course they knew all about 1325 they've been working for years on implementing it but no one had connected the groups and these they had been to international conferences they had been following what had been going on but they didn't have the entry point and so often times that's what we find I've never been in a country without a shortage of strong, smart ready to go activists, men and women who want to fight for gender equality empowerment but often they work in a system that is very separate from the formal political system and even when women choose to leave that and run for office then they are then cut off from the women and the men that they used to work with all the time so connecting those not just using the international frameworks to encourage the government because they've often times signed on and made statements on these but also connecting them with the folks in those communities and countries that know these issues and know the context and can quickly if connected in the right way move the agenda forward Thank you. I think continuing with that theme because it seems like there is something to the power of individuals you've all shared stories of individual persons who've done remarkable things and Danielle I wonder if maybe I could ask you to think about how we can amplify the effect of you know those champions, those individuals that you meet on the ground who who are doing good things to to carry that to other individuals to spread that well I think it's important of course to recognize the importance of the individual but I think it's also important to I think that the importance of the individual is that it can be a watershed to change the larger environment and so the individual Farkunda which I mentioned in my remarks earlier was a regular regular woman who was studying Islamic studies and she became this lightning rod for women's rights because unfortunately something atrocious happened to her and she was so relatable that it was infuriating the fact that this could happen to a regular intelligent educated woman so I think that amplifying the stories of individuals can really be useful in changing larger attitudes I think that on a lighter note there are plenty of individuals who become well known and renowned for advocacy and great things that they're doing and so I think that giving a platform to women who are advocating for rights in their own communities is it certainly means more than if I were to go to Afghanistan or to any other country and say you're women this way it's more effective for it to be an internal or indigenous or native idea and I think that individual advocates can couch it in terms that are more meaningful for their own society and they understand the constraints and the appropriate ways to engage I don't know if that that's a great answer the stories are important okay so questions from the audience do we have great I saw your hand up first the lady in red oh thank you usually I don't need this okay good morning I'm Suzanne and thank you all very much for being here so I'll stick on the topic of individuals as champions and I'll stick with Afghanistan for a moment since we've headed down that road already we all know well at least you three do share who's the prosecutor in the west in the Harat province and she's had tremendous success bringing to bear prosecution for divorce law, property law violence against women she has the highest prosecution rate in the country so my question is scale how do we move that up through other provinces even to other countries thank you let's take a couple of questions and then the panelists yes I am Wade Channel with USAID and thanks to the panel not only for what you said but what you do we appreciate it and I have to do what everyone else is doing and go back to Afghanistan for my question I was interviewing a group of business women in Afghanistan a year or so ago and had this wonderful comment where one of the women said we really want to thank you for teaching us about our rights it's really been very important to us would you please talk to our husbands I would like for the panel to address how do we more effectively engage men to ensure that it's conversation that can move forward not just with men's acquiescence but perhaps with men's support thank you okay who would like to start and you can choose your question or answer them both I'll go first just because I was thinking about this issue of the reality of women's and men's lives with regard to these issues and definitely the definitions of masculinity and how men are perceived both in the informal and formal lives that they lead specifically in the if there's going to be a judgment against them with regard to marriage or divorce or custody of their children in the DRC one of the programs that we do with regard to justice is a support group for men that talks about what is the definition of a good man starting from does a good man hit his wife does a good man have sex with her against her wishes does he take her paycheck when she walks in the door and he makes all the decisions and within this group of men they decide well what's an example of a good man and so it's very much driven privately within them but in talking with one of the men I asked him I said but what made you go to your first meeting because that is a huge step forward and so he was talking about the circumstances there but I said what's the hardest thing on a daily basis and he said my mother I want to work with my wife I want to be a good man I want to be a good partner she sees me discussing these issues she says you're the man you decide why are you talking to your wife about these issues so it's the realities and how we engage men and women to see that it's not just a women's issue that it makes their partnerships and their lives and their families stronger and that folds over to their communities and hopefully their country is in the long run and so going to what the realities of their lives are that then you get to these bigger legal issues and we move from the everyday lives to the theoretical I loved your comment about the paper to reality and we should go the other way around I think that's a great point and I would add to that very much from the developing programs perspective that gender issues and women's issues in particular should not solely be addressed through gender specific programs I and L we look at gender as a cross cutting issue and so when we are developing programs that don't seem at all related to the gender sphere we try to address well how is gender and gender norms how do they play into this and how can we counter that so even when we're building for example legal education programs or justice sector development programs which don't inherently have a gender angle to them we think about well what will this do for gender politics and how can we try to incorporate women and make men in these programs aware of women's issues without making it a gender program I will go to the program level because that's where I have the experience and when I was working with the Asia foundation we worked very much with men tribal leaders and elders what we called the gatekeepers of women rights at the local level because those are the decision makers at the local level who often would resolve cases locally and in the north we found and somewhat in the west we found that it was effective to work with religious leaders so by having religious leaders develop a curriculum that really states the responsibilities and moral obligations of men to protect and uphold women's rights in their communities according to Sharia law and according to the Afghan laws seemed to work very effectively but in areas that were predominantly Pashtun Wali tribal systems that didn't work very well because there was the Pashtun Wali was so entrenched and often times the religious leaders were answerable to the Pashtun tribal elders and so in that sense the approach had to be very different and we found it difficult to work with the Islamic law framework but definitely that opening up of spaces I mean we've seen in Afghanistan that when women are told of their rights and understand their rights and there is no outlet for them to actually achieve their rights we've seen a spike in suicide rates and so it's very important it's imperative that men in the communities that the society that there is public space to talk about women's rights and places to access women's rights and not just pushing on women to understand women's rights but really men in society to understand women's rights and another piece to that is to have places like the pulpit be used as not used I say to be engaged as a space to talk about this and so we've also worked with religious leaders who give the sermons the Khatibs to not be shy they originally say it's you know we're shameful it's shy to talk about some of these things but really not be shy and to take a stand on domestic violence issues and really talk about it from the place of the khutbah the sermons and be open and create that public debate in that public space for this conversation to be had on the issue of scaling up I really want to point to the support that INL has given to the elimination of violence against women committees and units in Afghanistan I think that's really been imperative in scaling up very well so it's not just an individual judge or a particular prosecutor or a court but it's actually a system and scaling up a system at a larger level in the country has been very successful and it has been these eval units and the eval committees where the informal and the formal justice sector has been able to work together very sustainably and effectively at the grassroots to implement and protect women's rights I'm sorry just a quick thing to add first of all thank you for the shout out secondly also to add to Pawash's answer to the question on scaling up I think this gets back to the earlier discussion of individual versus larger systemic change or support and I think that Pawash a very well addressed sort of the larger systemic but to get at sort of the individual component I think that as we continue to see women appointed to high level posts and to meaningful posts not just symbolic posts but to posts where they can actually make changes in culture at different organizations we'll really see this expand exponentially I agree okay I think I saw your hand and then I saw actually I saw you first and then you and then you okay one two three okay I thought it was someone behind me I was sincere and I have a question sort of cutting across if you could give me more context about the stigma or shaming associated with trying to access state based rule of law systems where does that come from and how is that implemented my project but I want to ask one question about sort of the elephant in the room issue one of the common assumptions that we talk about when we talk about programs that are cross cutting or that focus directly on gender is resources because one of the constants is a debate about a scramble for a scarcity of resources and one question then remains will these empowerment endeavors or the empowerment of women continue without adequate resources and if not what then let's go ahead and take one more question and then I'll come back to you and to you and sorry for saying you I can't read your name thanks from here my name is Irfan Hussein and I would like to introduce myself we here are on the GBV leadership program in US we are a team of 8% 4 from India and 4 from Pakistan actually I belong to the hometown of Malala Yusufzai Swat Valley and also the honorable ambassador mentioned the name of Tabasumad Naan she's my sister and we together formed that women Jirga in Swat actually my question is more related to Pakistan that things are going on in Afghanistan we do have similar system of alternate dispute resolution and Jirga system and Prashtunwali in Pakistan also to all the panelists is that do you have any plans or programs that are facing similar issues in Pakistan also okay who would like to start first to address the question about programs in Pakistan I have to confess that that is not my area of expertise but there are some really smart people in my office who are working on who work on INL issues in Pakistan so if you don't mind just coming to chat with me afterwards I'd be happy to give you a little bit more information and hopefully put you in touch I think Hamid asked the question that we are always pondering and which is as he mentioned always the elephant in the room and that's the question of sustainability and I think it's I mean it's tough it's definitely tough because of the civil society organizations that we're working with as much as they may have plans for sustainability it's a really difficult issue particularly when we're looking at legal aid programs and protective shelter programs but I think that there are some things that we're doing to try and get at this question and a lot of this is about developing local ownership and local capacity so for example this is a sort of related but not exactly answering the question but issue about capacity we as the federal government have some pretty intense reporting requirements and they're not always easy for someone who looks at them fairly often let alone for someone who is working for a small NGO in another country and isn't as familiar with them and so the ability to one, help our partners understand some of the paperwork and administrative issues about running a program not just with our budget requirements but you know what else is what your own government's issues are and what you have to do to get funding from your own government or where how you can do outreach and get support in your own community and get support from your own community is a big piece of how we talk about it to add on to that I also think with the sustainability is what you referenced before is that we don't build a lot of stand-alone programs focused on gender empowerment more and more we are going towards if you do have a stand-alone program with only women beneficiaries are just focused on gender equality why everything from energy to Ebola to resilience and infrastructure work especially with regard to legal issues that men and women have to deal with these issues just in the course of evaluating their legal system and how it works and that leads to the long term I think sustainability of these programs just a quick reference on the stigma issue it wasn't that long ago in the US that when a woman was being having physical violence in her home and she went to a religious leader or a police officer they quietly escorted her back to her home and said you guys take care of this just you know do you as the woman do more of this do less of this make sure he's happy and then maybe it will calm down it wasn't that long ago and so having those situations where people have not been talking about intimate violence or partner with violence in their homes you know that's a huge cultural shift for a lot of countries the other aspect of it is this family versus individual rights is the value of the family within your community more powerful than your life and in places where that the family and also not just the family but the community the coexistence of these families within a community overpowers the right of the individual that's where we have the clashes because we in the US often come in with this individual rights is the most important thing and that is a direct culture clash in a lot of the places that we work so it's just an added stigma to you know once again going back to the issues of defining masculinity as the head of household and all these issues but also more culturally and that not only he would be embarrassed but his parents and his brothers and her brothers would be really having to deal with these issues so I think that you know it's good to be reminded but social stigma particularly in the context of Afghanistan is very high in fact families when often times divorce happens particularly the man and the family but also the family feels that they don't have face in the community and will move to another community because of it because they feel that they've been so dishonored by it and that they're they're seen as lower their honor is seen as being blemished and people don't trust them in the community as much both on the woman's side probably more so on the woman's side than the man's side so she's taking a bigger risk to actually have a divorce but it's on both sides of the family and we've seen that happen to me to your question about resources and sustainability I think it's imperative that that's something that is talked about from the beginning of programs and you know how I feel about this issue and that sustainability is built in as a core component of the programs and that it's something like I said something that's indigenous that's seen as people are already doing this to scale it up but to scale it up to a point where it is already part of a process already part of a program whether it's state whether it's community and that that be integrated into existing structures and not something that stand alone brought in from the outside dropped in and then and then pulled away so that those systems don't don't exist and we've seen that unfortunately happened too many times to my brother Hussein said right now the programs that I'm working on don't work in Pakistan but in the past when I was working with the Asia Foundation we had a program that was I believe it was supported by DRL by State Department and it was on women's rights in Islamic in Islamic Sharia law and it was across three different countries so Afghanistan Pakistan and Bangladesh actually and in Bangladesh we work with the Imam Training Academy and in Pakistan we work with the International Islamic University and the Dean of the Sharia department Professor Zia was working with us on this and training people particularly teachers in the madrasas both male madrasas and female madrasas and they did get as far as SWAT Valley but it was particularly focused on working with the madrasa systems and training teachers in the madrasas to make sure that the students in the madrasas both girls and boys were trained on women's rights in Islamic Sharia law I'm going to offer my own comment on sustainability and resources before I move to two more questions I've refrained from mentioning Afghanistan but I have to do it now because I was actually the police program manager in INL for the Afghanistan program from 2001 to 2006 and when I look back during that period of time and I look back at the sustained programs the programs that INL was running at the time that have had the most impact and the longest running capacity they are actually I think personally in my opinion the justice sector programs and I think in part that is actually because they were smaller and they were more targeted and I think when you look at programs we are constantly looking for ways to scale up and scaling up is good to a point but if you want to be able to effectively work with local organization and grassroots you don't want to scale to the point that they can no longer reasonably absorb the resistance that you are giving them and use it effectively so I just offer that cautionary note on sustainability that sometimes smaller and slower is better in the long run so now there are two questions that were outstanding the gentleman in the tan suit with the red tie and then the woman I can't see her name in the red shirt with the black jacket so that gentlemen you are right next to him there you go good morning and I want to thank everybody wonderful forum I'm Lazarus from Cameroon and I'm a member of a non-governmental organization tan global foundation here in high real Maryland we are an organization fighting for humanitarian activities peace and human rights we focus in Africa Latin America Asia and America itself I'm very impressed with the panelist observations and I want to draw my observation back home from Cameroon where I come from I thought women's right in Cameroon was very advanced but from the discussions I've got here I discover that we are very far behind when it comes to gender equality because back home in my country we still have certain positions in government that from independence up to now no woman has ever been appointed to and we have I thought we are advanced because we have created a ministry for women and the family but then I have discovered that we still have much to do when it comes to gender equality because we most of our women still refer back to the customs when there are disputes and they always feel that the man has is the head has a hopper and that is always right and that stems from the culture but in recent times because of that culture I believe their rights are being encouraged and there's much violation and we now have women women are more in population than we the men and I think that if the women are empowered they will be able to do more contributions and I think that we will be able to have an enabling environment for peace and development so what I want to find out is what contributions can the institutions that we have in place and the international community do to make this meaningful change to some of our third world countries like Cameroon and others where gender equality is still very far behind especially appointment of women to certain positions of power where they can make and implement the meaningful change that is required thank you hi I'm Nazi I work for PAE Incorporated I'm here with my colleague Lynn Holland as well we are currently implementing a justice sector support program it's actually from INL which Danielle is very much well aware of it's the largest justice program actually in Afghanistan so I wanted to just ask a couple of questions Danielle you mentioned earlier that legal protections for women there is growth in that and I guess my question is what are some indicators of that just because of the fact that we've seen the incident with Farkunda and as Paul Washa mentioned there is a spike in suicide rates so what are the can you elaborate on what indicators there are that show that it is actually improving and possibly in terms of monitoring and evaluation do we see any new ways of measuring thanks so much since we're almost out of time I'm going to ask as you respond to get some closing remarks and I'm sure you'll all have a great opportunity to discuss to the rest of the day any questions you didn't get to ask right we're just laying the groundwork so I am not particularly familiar with Cameroon but just with regard to appointing ministry of women's empowerment or what the specific that it's called I would say two things first of all having that ministry can be very important for the rest of the government if it gets funded and has quality staff and has a system to reach into all the other ministries often times we find that they are under staffed underfunded and completely segregated from the way that a whole rest of the government works so making that it's a great first step but making sure that that within the system representatives from the ministry have impact on the other ministries and then the second part is appointing of women in non-traditional positions so the head of the ministry of domestic affairs or defense or finance and or natural resources all of these that we aren't just having women as the charge of health, education and women's issues my favorite sports my favorite for South Africa was women, youth and sports but really engaging women across the whole government and then with regard to customs and what form of law you choose to engage in sometimes the known is more comforting than the unknown and often times with formal legal systems as they are new or very formal or outside even your geographic region so you just don't know the people that you would be going to speak to it is very intimidating and so for both men and women they might want to engage and the great example of you know the outcome you might not be so assured that it's going to be positive in your way but at least you know the people or who are deciding it so you have some relationship with them and so it's all I think in both men and women sometimes although you might not think the customary law might be the best theoretically but in your everyday life it might be the most accessible and the most understandable and the most thing that you think will both be both fair but also accepted by your communities so kind of takes us back around to where we started so well first I just want to backtrack to the sustainability question because hearing what others on the panel were saying sort of jogged a few things in my mind first I'd like to really reiterate the point that Angelique made which is throwing more money at something doesn't necessarily mean that you're effectively scaling up so I think that when designing programs and when looking at expanding programs you have to be really responsible and we have to be really responsible about doing so in a way that will be more effective as opposed to that will just be bigger and I think this is something that we think about from the outset at least from the IELL perspective we build sustainability into our programs we have sustainability plans for our programs and we've seen a move towards capacity building programs so rather than giving for you know rather than figuratively giving people a fish we teach people how to fish so I just wanted to make sure I added that piece Netsi you've raised some really interesting questions and they actually reminded me of some other things that I really wanted to make a point of bringing up so to specifically to address indicators of growth of women's protections I think that we've seen a real increase in Afghanistan specifically we've seen a real increase in cases that are tried under the EVA law specifically and so for example in the 8 EVA units that IELL has a strong engagement with and strong support for in 2014 alone those 8 EVA units registered almost 1800 cases and over 1300 of those were under the EVA law so it's not just that the laws exist but that they're being appropriately applied and I think that sort of the question of M&E raises this tension working on women's issues and particularly on women's legal rights where there is a tension between wanting to do proper monitoring and oversight of the program and wanting to respect the right to confidentiality of the beneficiaries and I think that's a really tough line to walk and it's something that we try to be very careful about that we ask the information that we need to in order to effectively and responsibly oversee our programs without breaching someone's rights the last thing that I want to raise is I think we have to acknowledge responsibly what we know and what we don't know and what we can do and what we can't do so coming from the IELL perspective our mandate is criminal justice working with criminal justice systems so we don't have purview into civil law or into land rights issues or into the informal justice system and so we work very closely with our partners at USAID and others to try and keep an eye on the fuller picture but if a large percentage of women's cases are civil law issues and it's about divorce or land rights we don't have full purview over that and we have to acknowledge that we don't have eyes on the full system and I guess in closing I'd say that I think a theme of the day will probably be the importance of geographically specific and geographically relevant programming and I think it's important to be really flexible when you know there's this tension between wanting to have a very clear work plan and M&E plan and wanting to have it all laid out at the beginning so we can have a responsible program and responsible oversight of the program but I think there should also be some flexibility to the extent that we can so that we can figure out what we don't know and what we have to adjust for so in the Afghan context specifically we did not or I did not necessarily know when we when I first came into this I didn't think about restrictions around women's travel and so we would talk about how we want to get all these stakeholders together in the capital to talk about women's issues but it's not easy for women from the provinces to get to Kabul and so we had to then make some adjustments and make sure that we had appropriate budgeting and appropriate support for male escorts and that was one thing that we had to be a little bit flexible on so I think just keeping in mind that you don't know everything going in and leaving enough room for flexibility to adapt. I know we're a bit over but I'm just going to offer two closing thoughts and I promise that they're quick one is that even though by training I'm a lawyer I always specialized in police assistance programs and I did so for a reason because I don't think you can have an effective criminal justice system if only one part of it is working and so I encourage you throughout the rest of the day to think about how you bring law enforcement and other parts of the justice sector into this conversation to ensure they can actually interact in a way that is positively reinforcing each other and the other is that to the extent that these issues we're talking about and I think on your point Danielle it's not just about the legal system it's also about social empowerment economic empowerment and all these other pictures I genuinely do believe that national policies like national action plans are potentially an effective tool for elevating women's legal empowerment but doing so in a way that also reflects issues like national support of their ability to travel and access the legal system do they have the access to the education to understand their rights and know how to effectively use the tools at their disposal so I encourage you to think of those tools as you engage in your conversations and thanks so very much for your attention this was a great discussion thanks just to say thank you all and thank you for making it look good for picking the right people just a quick note please make sure that as you look into the back of the program there's an evaluation sheet and part of the way that we improve our symposia and can improve in other ways is to please fill that out I know that many of you have busy schedules and you'll be in and out so please take a moment as you can to to complete that and we will move on to the next panel very promptly thank you first panel that's fine that's the point I need you it's fine it's the way you see it how can we access the power of money but many of you will see what's going on I don't know I want to say next slide are you good with the next slide next slide yeah just make sure thank you thank you let's hope so it's not true it's not true yeah yeah travel it's very important yes all easier is to be yes we talked about I'm not sure. I suppose it's good. I'm not sure. I guess we'll just take the rest of the room. I'm just going to hold on very much. I'll be right back. I feel like I have to do this. I don't think so. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to make my room. I'm just going to have a bite with that. I was sort of trying to find a place to be. I've got an app that wrote to your page. Oh yeah! I'm going to get back to you this afternoon. Only because we've been sitting for an hour and a half or so, but you have to digest what we've heard a little bit and sort of come back in. My name is Wade Channel. I'm a senior economic growth advisor for gender in the Office of Women's Empowerment and Gender Equality at USAID. It is privileged to be here. I'm thankful to our sponsors and to our multiple participants and for all of you who are here to discuss and engage issues that late in life I have become very passionate about. I can admit to you that I grew up as a white male child of privilege in Atlanta, Georgia. I did indeed have a silver spoon. My wife likes to remind me of that. I don't remember it being in my mouth, but yes, I had a silver spoon. And I grew up on the wrong side of every social movement in America. It's been a long journey and it is a journey that takes time for many, but I know from my own experience that changes are possible and significant ones are possible. So it's wonderful to be here in this context. We have an official name for this panel, but I'm going to give you the way I see the panel. It's really about the promise and limits of law for women's empowerment. We're focusing a bit more about economic empowerment on this particular panel. We know those of us who have spent much time in this know that economic empowerment cannot be separated from social empowerment, political empowerment, cultural empowerment, educational empowerment. If there's a realm of empowerment, they are intertwined inextricably. And sometimes we run a danger of focusing on only one aspect, but I think we also must focus individually on these aspects, and we will be looking more at economic this morning. Let me introduce my panel. I will first introduce by saying, unfortunately, Lele Muni was not able to be with us. The reality of life often trumps the plans in life and she could not make it, so we're sorry not to have her with us, but I have come to the conclusion that having more time for existing panelists is never a bad thing. So I'm very pleased that we'll be starting off with a pretty broad view of law and women through Sarah Iqbal, who's the manager of the Women Business and the Law Program at the World Bank after many years with the Doing Business Project. To me, perhaps the greatest set of rule of law indicators in the development world. Most people think that doing business is economic. There's not a single economic indicator in the whole list. It's all about rule of law, empowerment, governance, etc. And now she and others at the bank have recognized that there was a gap. It was not gender-aware, and it was explicitly recognized as not gender-aware. So Sarah and others have led to remarkable development of women business and the law, looking this year at the full 189 economies covered by the World Bank's other research units. After her, we have the pleasure of Elisa Scalise, who is a land law expert, land and not only law, but the customary side. She's worked in 10 rather markedly customary countries on these issues. If you can check, I'm not going to read the bios to you. I think most of you are already doing that, and I'd rather have them talk or steal a little time for myself, I guess. But Elisa is going to go very specific and look at land rights and how women are able to claim, enforce, enjoy, or not the rights that law may have given them and that custom may have compromised. So with that, let me turn to Sarah. Thank you so much, Wade, for that great introduction. And perhaps I can go a little bit more into depth about sort of the genesis of the women business and the law project, because as Wade mentioned, it does really spring from an acknowledgement that the doing business indicators are not gender-aware. And really that acknowledgement came in about 2008 when we started the women business and law work. The idea at the time was to incorporate gender or rather to see how gender could be incorporated within the doing business indicators. And what we saw really when we included some gender questions in about six of the doing business indicators was that when you cycle through the business environment, when you look at how SMEs go through the rule of law environment, it really doesn't affect women or men differently. The process is, for example, inserting a business and employing workers and sort of closing a business, dealing with bankruptcy, all of that. It should not affect whether a woman is running that SME. But rather the problem for women is another area of law that actually prevents them from getting to that level. So as a former boss of mine used to like to present it, basically if you think of a monopoly board, there is another set of laws that may prevent women from actually getting past go to opening up an SME to sort of moving forward in the business environment side. And really that's the areas that we look at. So for example, are there restrictions in family law? Are there restrictions in property law? Is there another set of personal law that may prevent women from actually participating in the business environment? What are the obstacles that women face as women when it comes to participating in rule of law activities? And how do we measure that? How do we look at that sort of across all of the 189 economies that the World Bank covers? So we started with a smaller set of economies. Over the past six years, we've been increasing these measurements. And so what women business and the law does is really look at the laws and regulations that prevent women from participating in economic activity. And so sort of on the next slide, you should be able to see the indicators that we cover. And right now we have seven indicator areas that have been sort of designed to measure the impediments or incentives that women have when it comes to accessing the legal environment and to look at linkages between that and economic outcomes. So for example, in accessing institutions, we look at basic legal capacity issues. You know, can women start a business in the same way as men? Can they interact with public authorities? To get into USIP this morning, I needed to show my driver's license. Well, we look at things like national identity cards. Can men and women get them in the same way? Because a national identity card is a precursor to almost everything, and this is in the formal environment, but also in the informal environment. You need these kind of proofs of identification. We look at travel restrictions on the basis of gender. Do women need their husband's permission to get a passport? To do, you know, really sort of things that you would do in the normal course of business, but also in the normal course of living your life. In terms of registering your kids at school, getting access to the health system, all of these precursor issues. In using property, we also look at women's ability to own, manage, control, and inherit property. And it's kind of looking at women's access to the bundle of rights around property. And this is something that Elisa will speak to, I think, more in-depth. In getting a job, we look at restrictions on women's work, prohibitions on working at night or in certain industries, but also at maternity, paternity, parental leave regimes, retirement ages, whether they're gender disaggregated in terms of the age that women can retire or their pension benefits. In providing incentives to work, we look at personal income tax liabilities, taking into account tax deductions and credits that are available on the basis of gender. And then we also look at processes that can help SMEs because women have been identified to be, women-owned businesses, rather, have been identified to be more likely to be home-based, more likely to be smaller, more likely to be informal. So we look at other ways that women can build their credit histories because they have less access to property. And in developing countries, in particular, sort of banks look at ownership of property for collateral purposes. And because women have less access to property, we look at other ways that they may be able to build up credit histories, including through the rules of private credit bureaus and public credit registries. And then we look at sort of access to justice issues through a narrow lens, looking at the availability and access to small claims courts. We also look at whether customary courts exist in a particular jurisdiction or personal law courts. And then we had a new pilot indicator on protecting women from violence, looking at the laws and regulations around domestic violence and sexual harassment. And that indicator will be scaled up in the next iteration of the dataset, which will be coming out this September. And in the next slide, you'll see the data, the global data that I'm presenting is from our last iteration, which came out in 2013. But the dataset updates every two years, and the next one will be coming out in a few months, actually. So you'll see that women still face challenges across all of these areas. And in the 143 economies that we've previously covered, almost 90% had at least one legal difference under the formal legal system restricting women's economic opportunities. And this was across developing and developed economies, although among the 28 economies that had 10 or more of these restrictions, 25 were in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa slide. So this is an interesting slide. It shows some of the actions that married women legally cannot take in the same way as married men in some economies. And essentially, the way that we disaggregate this data is we look at the situation of married women contrasted with married men and single women contrasted with single men. And essentially, there's almost no economy that we cover where single women have less rights than single men. But we find in the act of getting married what happens is women give up a lot of their legal rights to their husband. The number one restriction we see is being head of household, and that was discussed a little bit in the last panel. But what's interesting, and I do want to flag this for you, is essentially the head of household requirement in a lot of countries actually has a lot of other requirements that are attached to it. So certain tax deductions, for example, can only go to the head of household. And if you're automatically barred as being a head of household, because you are a woman, you won't get those tax deductions. You'll end up paying higher income taxes on the same amount of income. In certain economies, there are subsidies from the government that go to the head of household. So for example, in Indonesia, there's a subsidy on rights that goes to the head of household. Now, if you are a woman headed household, you won't get that subsidy, even if your husband has abandoned you, even if he's left, just because it's a blanket bar. There's also pension rights that go with that. You know, there's a lot of downstream things that people don't often look at. Choosing where to live is another requirement sort of that married women can't legally do in the same way. Conferring citizenship on children, that's actually a big issue in a lot of Middle Eastern and North African economies, because if you look at it, the biggest employer in those economies is the public sector. And one of the requirements in a lot of economies to be employed in the public sector is to be a citizen. Well, if you're a woman in an economy where you can't grant that to your children because your husband is not a citizen of that economy, basically say you have five kids. All of those kids, their citizenship will flow from their father. They won't be able to get jobs in the public sector. And there are a lot of women's groups in the Middle Eastern and North Africa who actually advocate on this issue to be able to grant citizenship to their children because for them it's a core economic issue. It also relates to, for example, getting access to certain schooling, access to health benefits. And one of the things that we try to educate our colleagues at the bank about is the fact that if you don't look at these aggregate restrictions on a sort of macro level, you won't realize that the beneficiaries you're trying to target in your program design may not be targeted at all because they're just blocked out of that because of these larger issues that you're not taking into account. So on the next slide, you'll see something called a marital authorization letter. And this is actually from a business registry in Congo DRC. So a colleague of mine was working on a project in DRC and she went down to the business registry. And essentially, because of some of these family law restrictions that I was talking about in Congo DRC, married women can't register a business. They also can't register property and do, you know, open a bank account, all of these things without permission from their husband. So this letter is basically allowing a married woman to register a business based on the authorization of her husband. And it's part of the record of the registry. It's essentially saying, you know, I, the husband of, say, Sarah Iqbal, give her permission to register this business, you know, as her husband. So that's next slide, please. So one of the things that we did, and this is I think particularly relevant in the context of cultural and customary restrictions that we were talking about earlier, is we actually measured restrictions over 50 years. So we developed a time series of data going from 2060 to 2010, looking at the reform of restrictions in two areas. Legal capacity and property rights in 100 countries. And this graph demonstrates sort of how these have been reformed over the past 50 years since 1960. And what was particularly interesting for me is the level of reform that's happened over the past half century. So you'll see these types of restrictions were actually fairly prevalent in OECD high-income economies. They were prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean. They were prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the level of restrictions has gone down by 50%. That's huge. In OECD high-income economies, it's gone down completely. And I do want to flag this for you because a lot of times people will say, well, these types of restrictions, they're very culturally sensitive and they are culturally sensitive. And they'll say, this is part of our culture, but quite frankly, it was part of the culture in France, in Switzerland, in Germany, in the United States. These things have been reformed over time. But in France, husbands were the head of household. They could allow or disallow their wives from working until the early 70s. In Spain, it was until the 80s where husbands could control basically any economic action that their wives did. This was reformed after, actually, the fall of the Franco regime. And what happened in Latin America is you saw these restrictions being removed throughout the 80s after the Spanish law changed. So you could almost map it on a timeline, and we have done so, in fact, where you saw restrictions being removed in Argentina, in Brazil, in Uruguay, in Paraguay, after the colonial regimes changed their own restrictions. In Switzerland, these were actually reformed very, very late into the game. And Switzerland is held as an exemplar of a lot of human rights issues. But actually, women's rights changed, I would say, in the early 80s when they started removing some of these restrictions. And it's not an area that we look at, for example, voting rights. But if you look at the history of women's voting rights, I believe Switzerland was the last developed economy to grant women voting rights at the Canton level. And that was in the 80s. I have colleagues who are Swiss, and they'll talk about their moms needing permission from their dads to do basic economic activities. So it's not just a cultural issue, and these things do change. And they've changed relatively recently over time. And what's interesting is I've worked on technical assistance programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. I've spoken to colleagues sort of in West Africa. And you mentioned earlier your question about Cameroon, about sort of head of household requirements and things like that. We've seen in the case of Cote d'Ivoire, we've seen in Togo, we've seen in DRC, some of these restrictions were actually not present prior to the colonial regime coming in. So you can almost map it against the French codes. The French brought in this legal system, they left, they reformed their own laws, but a lot of the family law in West Africa is actually verbatim from the Code Napoleon. And you can, the numbers of the provisions are the same, the language is the same. I actually think customary law in Sub-Saharan Africa was a lot more fluid on women's rights. But when the formal systems were locked in, the colonial systems were not that great on women's rights, and those provisions have actually remained on the books. So it may not be a question of culture going back that long, but it may be a question of imported culture that was codified and removed the fluidity of some of the customary regimes that were in place before. And that's actually, I think that's quite enlightening for a lot of people who don't know the history of the legal systems and sort of the legal sources. And when you talk to women's rights groups on the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa, they're actually very familiar with this. But maybe some of the formal regimes aren't that aware because women's rights issues are not at the forefront in a lot of sort of domestic policy issues. So on the next slide, you'll see just some basic, sort of, we did some interesting associations with other economic outcomes. So gender-based legal restrictions are associated with lower female participation in the ownership of firms. So essentially, the more restrictions you have on women's economic activity, the less women you'll have owning firms, which actually makes a lot of sense. And you'll see on the next slide, so in addition to measuring the restrictions on women's economic activity, we also measure incentives. So where economies have put in place, for example, quotas on women's participation in parliaments, quotas on women's participation in things like corporate boards, also paternity leave, maternity leave, breastfeeding breaks for mothers, where women are allowed to come back to their jobs after maternity leave, non-discrimination, hiring practices. And this is just an interesting relationship. The economies that provide greater incentives, sorry, rather the economies that have more restrictions on women's legal rights also tend to provide fewer incentives. So not only are they restricting women from participating in economic activity, they're also not encouraging them from doing so. And that we found actually pretty interesting. On the next slide, you'll see the relationship between women having more incentives to participate in an economic activity, where women have greater incentives, there's also greater income equality for the economy as a whole. And that, I think, also makes intuitive sense where you're encouraging women to work, i.e. where you're opening it up for the whole population. You also have greater income equality as a whole. And on the next slide, I just want to talk a little bit about customary law. And I do want to take this with a grain of salt. So where we measure customary law, we don't measure what the customary law is, because it's not really feasible to measure customary law in that way, but rather we look at the recognition of customary law under the constitutional regime. So, for example, does the Constitution recognize customary law? And this is for Sub-Saharan Africa, this graph in particular. And if the Constitution recognizes customary law, is it exempt from non-discrimination based on gender within the constitutional framework? i.e. sort of most and actually all constitutions in Sub-Saharan Africa recognize principles, broader principles of non-discrimination or equality that's very common language in constitutions. However, some of them exempt customary law from broader principles of non-discrimination. And the question is, if customary law is exempted, what is the recourse? What is the recourse for women? Can you bring strategic impact litigation? There are all these downstream sort of applications from the exemption or non-exemption of customary law from non-discrimination. And countries that recognize customary law is prevailing in areas such as marriage, property inherent and exempted from non-discrimination provisions include Botswana, Lesotho, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Zambia, Zimbabwe. There are a lot of them, but it is changing. So, for example, in Kenya that used to be the case, but with its new constitution in 2010, they actually brought customary law within the purview of constitutional non-discrimination provisions. And on the next slide, you'll see approximately half of the constitutions in sub-Saharan Africa formally recognize customary law and about a third of them recognize religious law. And a third of these constitutions specifically exempt customary law from principles of non-discrimination in areas of family law. And also land law is a particular issue that Alisa will speak more about, but I just wanted to point out that over 80% of land in Zambia is customary land and that falls outside the scope of statutory inheritance laws. So even where statutory laws may be better for women, it's not necessarily the case that they will have recourse to the system if customary law is exempt or outside of the constitutional framework of non-discrimination. And on the next slide, I just want to talk a little bit about case law. It can be positive or negative for women depending on the system and depending sort of on how case law is decided. So for example, the Afani Dhu case in 2010 in Swaziland. So married women, married in community of property which is generally better, is a better property framework. They can now jointly register joint property in their name. The discriminatory statute was declared unconstitutional but it can go both ways. For example, the 2004 case in Nigeria, the Mojaku case, where customary law favored male heirs, it was appalled and the Supreme Court held that customary law could not be rejected just because it did not recognize a role for women. And then I just want to talk a little bit about how reform can happen. What are good strategies for reform? And a lot of the reform that we've seen on the next slide, sorry, if you could go back one, is essentially on the basis of women's rights campaigns. So we've seen collective actions by women's networks actually work on changing the law in Kenya and Ethiopia. Also shadow reports to the CDOC committee. Strategic impact litigation is actually very big in some economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. I want to point out Botswana, which has two key cases. The Unity Dao case in 1995 that had to do with nationality rights for women being able to confer them on their children. Unity Dao is actually a landmark case. And the Mu Mu Si case, which just came out a few years ago on Botswana was on inheritance rights as well. So courts have been a major driver in this effort. And then on the next slide, I just want to talk about two things that we have seen that help catalyze reform. And this we saw with the time series that we built over 50 years. The questions were, what are the major drivers of reform? And there were really two major drivers of reform that we saw. One was actually human rights law. So CDOC, the convention eliminating discrimination against women helped catalyze reforms. Sort of rates of reform doubled within five years of a country ratifying CDOC. So that was a major driver. And the next slide will show the other major driver we saw, which is really women legislatures. Women legislators raised the probability of reforms across the board. So the constraints lessened where you started seeing greater women in power. And we've seen country level as well at the local level. The same thing happens. There's some studies that came out of India demonstrating the effect of women coming into power at the local level, at the Punjab level, where they started focusing on issues that were more relevant towards women. And finally, on the next slide, I want to talk about some of the economic outcomes that really come from improving these legal provisions for women. So there's a recent research paper that came out in the Journal of Feminist Economics that shows a strong positive relationship between having legislation on non-discrimination and hiring on the basis of gender and women's employment relative to men. We've seen in India after the reform of the Hindu Succession Act that it actually led to greater investment in girls' education, higher rates of female bank account ownership, and actually a greater likelihood of having a sanitary latrine in the home. And essentially, it's a question of better reflecting women's preferences when you give them greater agency in the household decision making. And in Ethiopia, we saw with the reform of the family law where they removed the provision where the husband could basically control his wife's employment. And that's a provision that we see in family law in a lot of places where a husband can stop a wife from working outside the home if he believes it's not in the wife's interest. He can actually get her fired if he feels that's not in the interest of the family. In Ethiopia, they also introduced joint titling and a few other provisions as well. And it increased female labor force participation and resulted in more women working outside the home and in more productive sectors. Actually, there are a lot of linkages between legal empowerment for women and outcomes on voice, outcomes on agency. The IMF has done some recent work lately looking at women's labor force participation and actually the linkage between better laws, more equal laws for women and sort of macroeconomic outcomes for the economy as a whole. And there's a whole body of research that's growing in these areas. And I think it's great to have the data available to do this research. And the last slide is just our website. So all of this data is available on our website at WBL.worldbank.org. And as Wade said, we are increasing the size of the data set to look at more economies and that will be coming out in September. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. And I'd like to just move immediately to Elisa, who I did not mention. Not only is she a lawyer as are we all up here. Actually, how many are lawyers in this room? Yeah, you can feel it. Good. She is a co-founder and head of resource equity, NGO that's not NGO, but a company that is doing work to advance women's rights to land and natural resources. So very well positioned to talk about this next topic from having gone through these broad range of restrictions or constraints to women's empowerment to land. Take her away. Yes, Wade and Sarah. I'm going to speak about strengthening land rights for women in legally pluralistic settings and I'll do this by reference to some of our work in Uganda and try to weave in some examples throughout the presentation. I'm glad to hear that land rights have come up so much in other presentations this morning and in what Sarah was just mentioning and also that there are some similar themes and hopefully you're human me getting into the weeds a little bit as we kind of dig into land rights for women in these contexts. Legal pluralism is pertinent for when considering land rights and women's land rights. And this is because land rights generally exist in legally pluralistic settings, usually because of the history of colonisation where statutory and often foreign property rights systems were imposed over customary systems that pre-existed them and also most major political reforms include major land tenure reforms and they're not always completely successful at replacing what went before them. Today, as Sarah mentioned there's also a trend to recognise customary land tenure in statutes without really reconciling some of the inconsistencies with other laws and that kind of creates an internal plurality. When you're looking specifically at women's land rights they tend to be at the intersection of customary, sometimes religious and statutory law. And this is because customary law at its core is family law, it's how families and communities behave toward one another and family law has the biggest impact on women's land rights. So men tend to have rights to land by birth and women tend to have rights to land that relate to life events such as marriage, death of a spouse or bearing children. And at the same time statutory laws governing family are often the site of change in property rights in that it's in those laws that you'll find provisions that grant women rights that they may not have had under customs, so marital property regimes and inheritance laws as an example. And customary laws as we've heard earlier this morning tend to have a strong imbalance in favour of men but can be more relevant and legitimate than statutory law. And although statutory law offers improvements that aim for equality for men and women implemented or influential. So if we look at Northern Uganda where we worked on a project that I'll speak a little bit more about customary land tenure rules in Northern Uganda statutory institutions exist but they're very weak. And under customary law superior rights to land are held by the clan and the clan grants perpetual rights to use and manage parcels of land to male members of the lineage. Those rights can be inherited by sons. Women gain rights to use land through a relationship with a male member of the lineage. So that's through their husbands if they're married through their fathers when they're unmarried and sometimes by virtue of having children who are members of the lineage. But their use rights are linked to the relationships so their rights can end and change as those relationships end and change. Compare that to the statutory situation in Uganda where the constitution prohibits discrimination between men and women. Customary land tenure and distribution law provides for equal inheritance between male and female children and some inheritance rights for spouses though they're largely insufficient. And to further colour the picture the new land policy in Uganda seeks to both further protect customary land tenure and to address discrimination against women on land matters so it creates a clash. The Uganda example is a good one to start with because it helps show a key point that I want to make I think other people have made it too. And that is that it's important to recognise the pluralist system but it's also important to understand that no one system is necessarily better than the other when it comes to strengthening land rights and that each system presents problems and also offers solutions. For example as I said the customary system in Northern Uganda is unbalanced in favour of men and can leave women destitute if they're widowed or abandoned. But it has very strong local legitimacy and it's directly relevant to the day-to-day women who live there. On the other hand the statutory system offers stronger rights for women, rights that would leave women much less vulnerable in the event of divorce or if their husband died but it's not implemented in the area where we worked. So if we take this situation of different systems each with problems and gaps and opportunities I think it begs the question how can you strengthen land rights for women how can you capitalise on those gaps and opportunities so that it actually works to make a difference for women. So here's another question that I posed for you all by presenting a framework for women's land tenure security which we developed, tested and evaluated in Northern Uganda and subsequently in other places as well. I'll start by showing the framework and then use the Northern Uganda project to show how it applied in practice. The framework takes a holistic view of the social, cultural and legal factors that underpin land tenure security. It includes women's land rights it has subjective and objective elements and can be used to assess, design implement, monitor and evaluate interventions. And this matters for legally pluralistic context because it helps paint a picture that is inclusive of all the elements that can help improve women's land rights no matter which legal system you draw from. And it also matters because it starts with women. It includes women's voice perspective, challenges, their aspirations and their view of what is viable and desirable. Before I get into the framework just let me take a moment to explain what I mean by land tenure. It's an often misused term and the way that I use it is that land tenure is the relationship between people as individuals or groups with respect to land. So it covers all of the different rights Sarah mentioned the bundle of rights that can attach to land and it basically determines who can do what and for how long. So it's not just about ownership and it's not just about inheritance but it's about the many different rights and the way that they're governed. Understanding land tenure in this way is really important because it creates the space for the complexity of land tenure systems that exist around the world especially in places where individual private ownership is neither the norm nor the preference. Understanding land tenure in this way is important for women because it can help ensure that the rights that women may have in a particular context are not overlooked simply because they're not ownership or ownership like rights. Okay so the framework under my framework and I realise that I'm terrible at getting the slides to follow me so one more. Yeah that's good. Women's land rights are secure if they're legitimate so that's the question of what are the rights but also who recognises them. The state, the community, the household, the king group the family, their husband, the woman a woman's land rights are secure if they're resilient meaning they're not vulnerable to changes in her family or her social status or changes in her community. A woman's land rights are secure if they are durable so they exist for a fixed or a known period of time that's relatively long if they're enforceable that means that she knows her rights knows where to present a claim can easily get to that forum her case will be heard the process is not too long it's likely to get a decision in her favour it's likely that the decision will be regarded as fair by her and by others and it's likely that the decision will be implemented and finally a woman's land rights are secure if they're exerciseable meaning they're not subject to conditions that men aren't asked to fill for example asking permission before engaging in transactions so in Northern Uganda this framework was used to conduct the baseline assessment with a pilot group where we had some interesting results on the legitimacy side of things at baseline things were quite high there was a strong recognition amongst many different actors for women's land rights as such as they were but vulnerability was also very high especially around certain life events such as divorce divorce, death of a husband or the husband taking a new wife enforceability at baseline was high for whether women on the question of whether women knew where to take a claim but it was quite low on whether women felt those forums were accessible to them duration was a little bit tricky to assess in this context so we used proxies we were looking at rental and borrowing behaviour and rates for women there were around 60-50% respectively and you'll see that I'm not sure how helpful that is to my analysis but I always like to include it because we have faults too you know and then finally on exercise ability we assessed women's influence over different decisions related to land and most landed around the 60% mark in terms of whether women felt they could influence decisions so it was around the middle this is just a very, very, very high level summary to show you what we learned by using the framework in the initial stages of a program but then we also used those results to help really tailor the design of the intervention drawing from both statutory and customary legal systems so we worked with women as individuals women in groups and women in their families and with community leaders to develop specific activities that address the gaps that we found drawing from customary and legal systems so just one small illustration working with community leaders on women's land rights we conducted interactive training covering constitutional principles and statutory law that have good protections for women the idea here was to show that protecting women's rights was required by law and that this was considered acceptable amongst all of many elders around the country at the same time we discussed customary rules and practices that support the idea of protecting women and the important role that women play in the community and showed how stronger land rights for women was better for everybody through this process we learned that there was a traditional role played by elder women in dispute resolution that we have practiced over the years and we worked with community leaders and elder women to revitalize that role so that women felt better represented in dispute resolution at the macro level we were feeding what we learned from this process and from the assessments into the policy implementation process that's underway in Uganda so in the end we saw movement on each of the dimensions of the framework this wasn't an impact evaluation it was just an end of project evaluation it was just an interesting result we saw improvements of 20-30% around legitimacy around 45% improvements on the issues of divorce or resilience to changes in the family structure like divorce and death of a husband duration I mentioned this was a harder one to assess and we noticed a change there that more women borrowed land we still don't have a good explanation for why that happened there were increases of around 40% on the issue of accessibility of forums and on exercise ability we saw jumps of around 20-25% across the board so the point that I want to make by giving this example and by using the framework is in legally pluralistic context women's land rights can be strengthened but a lot of it has to do with the process and to do that kind of requires some rethinking and the rethinking has to put women's experience and perspectives at the centre of any intervention the rethinking should probably adopt a holistic and inclusive view of what stronger land rights mean for women in the social, cultural and legal context that you're working in it should capitalise on the gaps and opportunities that different legal systems present and because we're talking about systems it's important to feed what is learned and feed what's happening on the ground back into the policy process so that the gaps between law and practice can be heard for the long term I have to tell you how hard I am struggling right now because I have enough questions to dominate the rest of our time and leave you completely out of it but I'm not going to do that however I will ask a couple myself and I want to start first by thanking both of you excellent insights part of my reason for the questions is there are about 15 directions we can go right now and we need to go in all of them we need to manage out on all of those to another 15 or 20 per and anyway we can't do that so let's keep it tighter one thing though I note and this comes from the observation earlier we talk about women's economic empowerment but economic empowerment is not enough there are these other forms and so we're looking at rights that provide opportunities for women and we're looking at them through the lens of laws that provide these rights to a whole set of laws and one of the things that I know in northern Uganda from work that's been done by the international justice mission in enforcing widow's rights is that there is a problem that not all widows are widows because widow is not a term of tragedy it is not a term of relationship it is a term of law as relates to rights and the only women who are widows are those who were married in accordance with very specific legal provisions are that in some areas of Uganda 80% of all marriages are not legal marriages they're customary or otherwise seen if you're married in a large Methodist church you're good if you're married in a little Pentecostal hut church you're not good it's not covered by the law so that actually trying to enforce a widow's right becomes very difficult because there is no right let me turn this into a question how do we you know what are some of the steps of how do we achieve where do we get a better sense of making sure that we are capturing what is necessary and sufficient because certainly Uganda has a pretty good inheritance law and if that were enough we'd be good but at least within the reform community both local and international nobody bothered to look at the fact that it was irrelevant to most people in Uganda perhaps I can speak a little bit about that you raise a really interesting point that had I had a ton of time I would have covered and that is around legal interpretation and actually the role that customs play in interpreting laws in particular contexts and the one that you bring up is really good and that is around what does a wife mean in the law and what does it mean to people who are there generally I would say not just in Uganda but in so many places it usually means people who are legally married and what legally married means differs across many different places it can also even in places where customary marriages are recognised customary marriages themselves can have certain rules that aren't necessarily always practised so in northern Uganda one of the things that we found which I found quite interesting because it's a post-conflict setting the conflict even a lot of the customary practices around marriage didn't take place so the payment of bride price and a lot of the rituals around marriage couldn't take place because of the conflict and so a lot of people who were in relationships that they called themselves married they put themselves forward as being married people they weren't even married not just under the law but also under custom and because of that the usual protections that would exist within the customary system for people who were married wouldn't apply to those relationships so that question of what words mean and what status means is really really really important but my take on it and I haven't a different experience of this in Rwanda part of the issue is that unfortunately women's rights to land tend to relate to their status and that's not the case for men right so for men they have rights to land because they're men and women have rights to land because either they're a widow or they're married or there's something else and so that brings in all this additional complexity and the reason why I wanted to quickly mention what took place in Rwanda is that they had a new land law I know there are lawyers here so you'll get where I'm going with this it's the they three official languages in Rwanda it's Kinyawanda, English and French some laws different laws originate in each of those languages depending on who's drafting them but the Kinyawanda is dispositive and Kinyawanda most lawyers are trained in either English or French not in Kinyawanda so there's some translation issues when the state was implementing the land law and they did massive systematic land titling and registration in Rwanda there's a phrase in the English version of the law that says husbands and wives have equal rights to land so this caused a problem because people were saying this means wives legally married women only we can't support women who aren't following the law and for example polygamy is prohibited in Rwanda all those polygamous marriages all those women who are in those relationships they have no rights because they're not a wife because polygamy is prohibited well this caused quite an issue because polygamy though prohibited was widely practised and this could have meant that all those women would not have received rights to land through this systematic titling we went back and looked at so we were working from the English language law we went back and looked at the Kinyawanda and found that actually it said men and women have equal rights to land and this is a huge deal so when we were creating the processes the specific procedures on the ground for implementing the systematic titling and registration camp for our program we removed any question about the relationship between the people who were registering together if they put themselves as husband and wife or people who had joint rights to that property we weren't going to ask the question about their relationship so we didn't even have to dabble in whether they're legally married or not but you know if people are putting themselves forward in that way well then that was what the land system at least was going to pay attention to so sorry a very long wing did answer to that question quite good let me give Sarah a different question then I'm going to open it up to all of you your work looks at laws on the books which of course is what laws are right custom is another approach but when we're trying to enforce human rights etc we're usually looking at official legislation one of the findings that seems to be coming out now by some work being done by Lorna Seitz and Laura Lucas of the Legislature Institute is that implementation of laws which I think most of us know is a major issue in the development agenda we get them passed a clear victory and people don't realize they're not getting implemented at times but implementation of laws is actually improved it starts not after law is passed the basis of implementation is actually the process by which the law was developed and who is involved in it how they are involved in it and so that a participatory approach with those who are affected by a law is implemented more easily than a top down law a system and let's admit it we're talking about custom leaning towards men so does the rest of the legal system in most of the world why the old boys club passed all the laws for a very very long period in the 1980's in Switzerland in the US we still have these issues can you talk a little bit about process I know you don't measure that per se but certainly in your work you see it and maybe some thoughts on how we change the balance so that women actually are participating in the laws that affect their lives and the development of those of course I would be happy to and I just want to bring up first an example of a process that was particularly participatory and had actually quite a bad outcome and that would be the revision of the family code in Mali so what happened and this is approximately in 2008 there was a family code put forward in Mali that didn't sort of the approach I think didn't consult with local religious leaders local customary leaders and it was a little bit I think ahead of the times in Mali it never passed because local religious groups, women's groups sort of customary leaders came out and protest against it and they said this is not our religion this is not our culture we don't want this and that's kind of the classic bad example I think it is really important to take an appropriate sequential approach towards passing legislation in particular legislation that deals with issues of family law because those are fundamental in people's lives and you don't want to for whatever reason whether it's international donor interest, human rights conventions what have you you want to pass legislation that is grounded in that community grounded in the values that they hold dear and that's not to say that the values are different they may want to take a different approach, a more sequential approach and the best way that we have seen to do it is actually to start on an issue that is generally accepted in that community and build that trust, build that dialogue and one example that I've seen that actually worked really well came out of Jordan so for example one issue that you see in religious jurisdictions on inheritance is women are guaranteed certain inheritance rights under that religious system but they don't actually get those rights so for example under Islamic law there are certain shares that women are guaranteed and sort of everyone in that community respects that I think that's generally well regarded both by women's rights organizations, by religious leaders et cetera but what happens is they end up facing a lot of pressure to give up whatever their guaranteed share is so for example they'll face pressure from their own families that okay you're getting this piece of inheritance but you should give it to your brother and in Jordan what they did is they introduced a law whereby for the first six months of getting that inheritance you couldn't sign it over to anyone and the issue around that was basically to allow women to get their rights and allow them to have the time to be able to understand what those rights are and not feel that family pressure that okay you're getting this but you shouldn't be having this anyway because that is a right guaranteed both under the legislation they're getting that share but also under the religious system and we've seen interesting examples of that around the Islamic world because that's something that's very well grounded another example that I saw that was actually really interesting was in Lebanon whereby women would get inheritance rights but they would be taxed more heavily on their share so you know whatever piece of inheritance you got the taxation on that would be higher based on gender and this is something that the women's groups in Lebanon worked on to reform and so there are lots of ways there are lots of areas that you can look at implementation that are very well grounded in the community but the key I think is not to impose a system but to understand what's going on on the ground what are the issues that women's groups are actually talking about because you know whenever we go in to deliver for example technical assistance we find there are lots of women's groups that are actually dealing with those issues who have been dealing with those issues for decades in some cases and they know the context much better than I would say any external organization would know and they will say okay this is the key issue that we want to deal with this is what's grounded in the community this is what we've been advocating for and then that's an issue that you can start with and it's just a question of sequencing and it's a question of understanding what is appropriate within that context and we're in the business of data and we build indicators but I caution everyone that we work with indicators are a mile wide and an inch deep but when you go into a country context you want to dig much deeper than that inch and you want to understand what is appropriate within that community I mean really it's an issue of building trust and I think if you try and go too far too fast you're basically destroying that you could engender okay I'm going to go forego my next five questions and open it up to you my name is Johnny Dock I'm with the Russell's office the donor community thanks in large part to your efforts is paying an increasing amount of attention to the WBL and Axis and land tenure issues I'm curious whether you've seen an uptick as a result of your products or your programs in local cross-border conversations with southern Ugandans talking to western Kenyans or to the southern Ugandans for that matter about land tenure as a result of your effort and if not would it be helpful and what can we do to promote those kinds of conversations I will just go one at a time right now because I've only seen one suspect hand that might be up or might just be resting that's a really good question I think particularly on women's land rights there's been growing awareness and interest and I think generally both in the donor communities and by governments around the world I think part of the challenge that can be an obstacle to the kinds of cross-border conversations that you've been talking about is what we've both mentioned and that is the highly contextual nature of many land rights systems however where I see the value and this is something that my organisation does a little bit is being able to step back and draw out the commonalities and I think I don't know who else to work with earlier but a lot of this is about process it's about the thinking that you apply and the thinking sometimes can be relevant to different contexts so for example if you look at the framework part of the reason why we devised that was to say how can we in different places where we work make sure we're getting the full picture of what land tenure security means for women and that's applicable to different contexts and so I think bringing people together around something like that is really powerful and hasn't happened all that much many of the conversations have been much more about the issues that women face on land rights in their country and less so about what can be done to address that and what have other people been doing and in some places it's happening more than others so I would say in my experience of sub-Saharan Africa there's much more of that regional conversation that's happening though it's still limited my experience of working in North Africa and in the Islamic world those cross-border conversations around women's land rights I don't think it's ever happened or if it has it would be very very it would be used to me but many people wouldn't know about it because so many people have come to me and kind of asked how we could make that happen in Asia it's happening a little bit more again but not as often as it's happening in sub-Saharan Africa but there's definitely a need for something like that so one of the things that we have found really successful is actually doing peer-to-peer exchanges so we did a peer-to-peer exchange about a year ago in Togo and we brought together sort of policy makers and ministers from 11 West African countries and what was fascinating to me is we used the data as a platform and the idea was to have reformers talk to countries or policy makers that were interested in reform so they could learn from each other's experience because it's not us saying okay this is how you should take about a process but rather you know ministers from Cote d'Ivoire and Togo talking to ministers from other countries and these were generally women's ministers ministries of families affairs and what was interesting is they hadn't actually met each other so the first night you know we had this dinner with all these ministers and they were introducing themselves to each other talking to each other and they were building up a network and they had so many issues in common both in running their ministries in areas of legal reform and we were just stunned that basically they'd never talked to each other they'd never really met and this was a great network that was established because I think the experience of talking to someone in a similar situation and finding out how they can learn from each other that's really really powerful and as Danielle mentioned before women's ministries are not by any means the most powerful ministries they have very little budget very little resources and very little access to networks but in building that network I think there's a huge momentum that's developed from that and I think there needs to be more of that actually okay oh boy now we're ready I'm going to start at the back because I saw your hand going up much earlier with the red sleeve there and I'm going to jump to Hamid because he sort of has a certain priority level here and then I'm going to go right behind him and the next round is going to go over to this side of the room so these three, thanks thank you, I'm Suzanne Chalbert again and I promise to be the same all day I want to thank you Sarah for headed down the road that's exactly where I was going and you jumped the gun so going just a little bit further I love the peer-to-peer exchanges but what can we do more or what can we do differently to keep us on that road okay next just a request to look into the crystal ball as land becomes as land is a permanent issue and you've seen the cross-pollination and the interstitial efforts to widen the aperture to include women and what comes to mind is that in an era of climate change or in a growing era of climate change how does that play into issues of land tenure because in my experience in a number of different countries the need for resource scarcity or resource scarcity itself is compelling and compounding perhaps pushing out women and I'm wondering if you could look upon the crystal balls to think about where resources are in the era of climate change and then one more right here Hello, my name is Carly Weiss and my question is for Sarah Aikbal I was encouraged by you saying that one of the events that catalyze reform is CEDA ratification but given that most countries of the world with the exception of the US and a few other countries have ratified CEDA and I'd like to find out did you look at which countries made substantial reservations versus those who did not and also looking at the CEDA committee whether or not their general recommendations made a difference or not and then whether the CEDA committee's country specific recommendations made a difference or not thank you I'm happy to start with Suzanne's question on the peer to peer about what we can do more and what we can do differently and honestly I would say what we can do more is actually to do more so essentially to help develop platforms where policy makers can engage with each other and also to engage with each other on economic issues what we found also out of this peer to peer with these women ministers and policy makers was a lot of the issues that they talked about a lot of what they sort of knew from the international arena was really on the human rights front and this actually relates to your question as well but the challenge is sort of the semantics that they used the dialogue that they used was very much based in a human in a human rights discourse and that I think it's great it's very appropriate to use a human rights discourse what I would add is it's important to add an economics discourse to it it's important to provide them with information and to generate more information about the economic aspects of some of these issues and the reason that I say this is because in terms of the power structure of policy makers when you start having women's ministers talking to ministers of finance ministers of justice often you can kind of see people tuning out because it's another women's issue it's not that important it's not a bread butter fundamental jobs issue but my argument would be that it is and I think there's more and more research coming out from the IMF from the World Bank from others about how these issues are important for economic growth overall for job creation overall and I think the more we can sort of provide platforms the better research we can provide demonstrating the effect you know the more sort of impact evaluations that we see actually really helps elevate the level of the issue and it helps sort of women's ministers achieve better grounding to talk to their colleagues because ultimately it's about resources it's about funding and it's about what matters in the political scheme I mean the earlier panel talked about having women in positions of power right women ministers of defense women ministers of justice I think that's key as well because I think where you have women in positions of power they actually understand women's issues differently they understand women's issues as economic issues as fundamental issues and it's not that it's shunted to the side as okay something that we should be doing sort of as a human rights issue something that's good to do at the bank we say gender equality is smart economics and I actually really believe that it is and that we need to do more to demonstrate the effect of some of these issues and perhaps I'll take the third question now so you're absolutely right CDOT triggered a lot of these changes but I think the issue is the countries that were going to change because of their accession to CDOT they changed already you know those that happened 10 years ago 15 years ago there's hardly any countries that are not a party to CDOT the United States being a one exception they're like a handful of others but the issue is really how do you get countries to reform who are not going to reform because of their commitments under international treaties and I would say the most important way is to demonstrate to them the economic effect of some of these issues I can't say how important it is for example to have organizations such as the IMF talking about these issues as core fundamental economic issues that have to do with growth and job and I mean so you asked about sort of countries that reform based on the CDOT committee's general recommendations and country specific recommendations I have to say we actually don't work on human rights and that's not something that we measure although I do know there are some recent examples of countries that are that had reservations that have pulled away from those reservations Tunisia springs to mind they removed a lot of their reservations under CDOT but in general I would say countries that were going to reform because of their ascension have really already done so and perhaps were coming to a second phase you know in terms of looking at the sort of outcomes of some of these measures one thing that's interesting for me the World Bank recently released the newest iteration of the global findex report which looks at financial inclusion on a variety of measures and the data is actually gendered so you can tell where women are opening bank accounts for example as opposed to men and it's interesting because the second iteration of the findex which came out last month updates the data after three years after the first iteration and there's actually a big gender gap in terms of women opening bank accounts versus men and while more bank accounts have been opened in the ensuing three years while there's greater financial inclusion essentially that gender gap hasn't closed so it's remained the same and the number one reason that sort of women give for not opening bank accounts is because someone in their family already has one and generally that's the male member of their family so there's different ways that we can look at them but if we want to sort of include women in greater outcome measures I think we need to look at women specific issues from a different lens and actually I would argue that sort of an economic lens is a very appropriate one for this time so in answer to the question about climate change there are many many many reasons to be to care about women's land rights right so one of them could be just based on a pure belief that there should be equality between men and women another really important one is that women play a significant role in agriculture and tend to be the users of the land in many many places not everywhere often more so than men and so for that for that reason when you're looking at women's role in agriculture the climate change issue becomes even more important so it's when you're looking at climate change it's that women can be disproportionately affected by it in that they may need to travel longer distances to get water and to get fuel or to just work the land that they've been allocated but also it's women's practices they're the ones who are using the land that can have impact on climate change itself because there's there is some evidence and I think that's growing as well that when women have more secure rights to land they tend to use it in a way that considers the long term impact so they're more likely to engage in following if that's appropriate or basically kind of environmental stewardship is more likely to be part of their bright thinking if they know that they're going to have longer term rights to that land and that directly ties into the climate change discussion what practices can people take on to help mitigate and prevent the impacts of climate change so there's definitely a strong link there and quite a body of research as well Thanks let's take three from the side that was the first hand, second hand and a third hand in the back you can go first Hi I'm Carolyn Tackett I'm with the Public International Law and Policy Group you guys have both mentioned the importance of having women in positions of power largely at sort of a high policy level but I want to ask you to apply that idea more at the local level at least you mentioned your work with sort of revitalizing the elder women's role in the local community and that situation there was a unique opportunity to sort of bring something back that had been there before but what do you see as possible best practices for sort of opening a space for women to take these positions as decision makers within the local context Dave Loudon independent policy analyst I'll just ask the question if you need parameters I can draw them but is the thinking on this also incorporated into conflict resolution so for example if you have independently displaced persons maybe it's the Great Lakes region or the Lakes region of Africa or DRC or what have you is there thinking that is incorporated into that resolution that will help guarantee the rights of women ideally to return but also to re-assume ownership of of that land or or something that would benefit the stability of that nation Thanks and Gordon was three there I'm Gordon Smith from the University of South Carolina in much of the discussion about land we haven't really mentioned much about collectively owned land or commonly held land that is sometimes seen as helping to mitigate problems for widows or women that have been abandoned but of course it has restrictions because they don't actually own it are these kinds of how do you view these kinds of lands and are they disappearing under globalization increasing land values in some of these countries and so does international investment in things like forestry and mining and what kind of impact are they having on communally held land Great So I'll make some comments on each of those questions, sorry on the questions of women in positions of power that are happening in that space for women's leadership I think there's definitely a growing practice around quotas for women even at local levels on community land governance but also in other types of governance I think the real the sticking point there is about meaningful participation of women and that is something that I don't think is really covered all that often so what kind of support do women need to put up at the meetings but also participate in a meaningful way when you look at where that's been implemented probably more than other areas is in the areas of community natural resource management quotas for women and for a long time everyone was touting how wonderful it was that there were quotas for women and they found on deeper analysis that women were making tea for the men and that's how they were participating in a meaningful participation of women and what it takes for women to participate meaningfully, how do the men need to change in their interactions towards women and how do women need to change to be able to do that is really critical for that and it's an area I think that needs a lot more attention especially now relating back to the community lands question there's a growing and I think that your research has supported this as well, there's a growing tendency to recognize communal lands in statutory law that's definitely what's going on around the world I think, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, how women fair in that is actually not really clear at the moment there's not a lot of analysis into how individuals within the communities are benefiting from recognition of community rights and that's something that actually we're looking into at the moment but I think again it has to do with first of all understanding the nature of rights that women have because they're not going to be right up there with the men they're not members of the lineage or whatever it is that determines membership in the group who have the rights but they definitely are using the land and they definitely have rights to land that are part of that so an important piece when you're looking at communal rights is to understand the nuance and how are women interacting, how are women benefiting from the land and to make sure that in these processes of recognizing communal tenure those rights aren't missing out that's a really important point as is ensuring that women can meaningfully participate in the government systems and the question of membership is really important for that so it, I don't know if any of you would track the land sector but right now there's a lot of work in the land sector around global indicators, specifically in relationship to the SDGs that are being developed and there's two camps there's the people who are pushing for indicators that relate to community rights and the recognition of communal lands and there are those who are pushing for kind of land rights generally and actually they disagree, one of the areas that they disagree on is on this question of individuals within those groups among them women so it's a really important piece and then finally on conflict resolution I would say in my experience of working in a few post conflict areas that it is more often the case that women and women's land rights and the important role that for community development and community well-being and family well-being isn't really pushed enough in those early stages in the post conflict setting in my experience it comes much later in the game, it's once the humanitarians and the relief workers have left then the development practitioners come in and that's where women's land rights tend to kind of come more and more into the discussion the NRC does a ton of good work on women's property rights in relief situations and they do a lot of really good work on that specifically looking at how you can use stronger land rights for women to help resolve some of the issues that arise in those contexts so thanks and sort of taking it back to Carolyn's question on women and positions of power at the local level actually one of the things that we do measure is are there quotas for women at the local level and I would say I would sort of second what Alisa said it's really really important that they have meaningful engagement even if there is a quota present and sort of what's interesting about the India example is when they put the quota for women heads of panchayat and sort of women's representation in panchayat that was the argument as well that women will just sort of be straw women right so they'll be the wife of whoever or the daughter of whoever and it won't be meaningful but actually the research has demonstrated that once they were in those positions of power they actually did a lodge at the local level for sort of ensuring women's issues were looked at in that local context so for example whether it was education or rights to water or what have you and the other part of it is actually role models I think women at the local level sort of having them there will provide a role model effect for future generations about what sort of girls and young women deem is an appropriate role for them going forward. Countries have different perspectives on quotas I know in the United States quotas are looked at differently than they are in other places but I think there are other ways of getting women in local positions of power as well and one key issue is capacity building is capacity building for those women women leaders or aspiring women leaders a lot of the same arguments came out of quotas for women on corporate boards i.e. now you have a quota for women on corporate boards but the women themselves are not prepared for that position they're not really bringing to the table what they should be in terms of corporate governance and it's really a lot of these are first generation issues because if women are not trained to have that skill set because they never were able to be in those positions before then they're not going to have the appropriate skills so are there programs in place in conjunction with something like a quota in conjunction with a greater role of women at the local level so that they can exercise the appropriate skills so they can have the appropriate knowledge because you don't put someone in a position that's never been in that position and expect them to function in the same way I think that's a really an inappropriate way of looking at it great well I'm going to wrap this up and I'm going to do it this way I'm going to make a comment then I'm going to ask my two panelists to make each give them a lightning round of one minute to tell us something they hope we know or hope we'll do and then I'm going to come back with one really practical suggestion related to men and then we're going to eat lunch thanks so Sarah, Alisa oh wait I said I was going to give a comment first oh yeah no they're sitting there trying to prepare and I'm jumping the gun this as I mentioned in various ways I'm new to this space and as I've begun to do research heavily and try to come up to speed over the last couple of years a number of things jump out but the one I think that hits me hardest I don't think we win this fight unless we are committed across the board across our projects across our contracts our procurement to eliminating violence I think violence is a key issue because it represses oppresses depresses those who are subject to it when I hear that women don't have confidence in a culture and you know somebody's proposing a confidence building program thinking if I watched every woman I love being beaten I wouldn't be very confident either about competing with men violence is used to oppress and as long as you do not take some sort of extensive movement against violence and you say does now weaving this into all of our economic growth programs even our economic policy programs are supposed to look at how they can address issues of violence against women or gender based violence I mean it can be against boys as well we know that but I just throw that out it's not really on the plate for this some of it's law but a lot of it's far beyond law and I think we have a powerful capacity to do something often just in our contracting ensuring that there are anti-sexual harassment policies in place for anyone who receives our money we can do that we have a contractual right to do that the greatest body of law in the world is contract and that's between parties and we write it so I think we have a wonderful opportunity to start writing into place a better world to put it in small terms okay thanks thank you so what I would say in my closing remarks is the number one issue I think in terms of working on women's economic empowerment working on women's legal empowerment is to get men involved it shouldn't just be a woman's issue I speak at a lot of events and the audience is almost entirely always women so just even stepping into this room seeing sort of the gender parity I think this is great that there's so many men interested in the issue and not this room but in general on a global stage on a national stage we're starting to see counterparts that are not just women but also women and men so for example I was working on a project in Pakistan last year on financial inclusion for women and the central bank was really interested in women's issues the Ministry of Finance was really interested in women's issues and it's I think the key is that they shouldn't just be women's issues and perhaps I should take myself to task for calling but I think it's really their core economic issues their core family level issues and it shouldn't just be sort of shunted off into the corner and discussed as something that's off to the side but really I do think we need to get men on board and encourage men and women to look at these as fundamental economic and governance issues. You guys set me up. I would echo what you've both said and perhaps add one other comment and that is that in my view of so many of the things and I spend quite a lot of time looking at the linkages between women's land rights and all these other development concerns and it all often comes down to status and women's status and so I think when we're thinking about legal pluralism part of what we should be doing is thinking about how can you use whatever it takes for a legal system, whichever aspects of legal system is appropriate to help improve women's status because when women have more power of a decision making they tend to make decisions that are not only in their own best interests but in the best interests of their family and in the community and so it's kind of a win-win-win-win-win situation so that's the one thing I think I would leave people with. Thank you and thank you for setting me up. One I really want to thank the panel for the practical and provocative comments that are useful to us. How do we get more men involved? As one of the few men full-time in this space I get asked that how do we get more men? I'm looking at my guess is approximately 18% male audience today which is about normal, it's pretty good 15 to 20's doing okay. So how do we do it? I think it's actually rather simple invite them invite men to participate in the things that we're working on. I'll give you one example if you're doing a gender analysis, ask a man to edit it for you to see if you missed anything to read it. The numbers are devastating when you start looking at those of us who haven't bothered to research didn't know the numbers on violence the lack of ownership by women, the inability of women to get things that men don't even think about because we've never had to worry about it. Invite us, and let me just expand on that a little bit. It's frequent that people for various cultural reasons like to hint at things. Boy, it'd be great if you could come to this meeting. Hinting to a man is like leaving a note for the dog. It may seem very clear to you, but it doesn't work. All right? For the men that are offended by that, I'm sorry but you know it's true. Honey, did you take out the trash? No. We think it's a survey question. Don't hint. Invite us. Invite us to be involved. Bring more men into this as Sarah has said. It's not because men have more ability, etc. The qualifications are not male or female but the fact is we still are the gatekeepers for the most part and at various points whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not, we are. Get the gatekeepers in there and help us change the way we see the world if we want to see the world change. Thanks. Now it's my time to invite you all to lunch. Downstairs in the Great Hall I encourage you all to sit with somebody you don't know and during the time we will reconvene as promptly as possible at one o'clock for the third panel. Thank you. Thank you. Technical reminder of evaluations. As we're about to reconvene two points before I turn it over to the moderator. First and foremost again a quick reminder on evaluations. If you hadn't had the chance please do so. Also everyone here and all the participants who are registered hopefully those who attended this morning but also keep in mind that you will actually get a subsequent evaluation six months or a period afterwards in which to further comment because part of this part of the JustTrack experiment is to talk about things like sustainability and usefulness and so oftentimes we may not find all the material useful or all the substantive useful until we actually go back to our offices and have to be imprisoned by them but we want to be able to evaluate the utility of these things as it progresses and as time progresses because we don't want the ideas lost here today and we don't want them lost certainly but we want them to be useful as time progresses so thank you. And thank you Hamid. My name is Kathleen Kinist and I direct the Gender and Peace Building program here at USIP and the morning was marvelous I don't know if Wade is still in the audience but I wanted to begin the afternoon session here by asking how many people in the room are anthropologists. I just wanted to know who I was among here. Well you already have then a sense of how I want to run this panel this afternoon because I think one of the rich parts of this conversation over the afternoon is really the fieldwork and the contextualization of the questions that we have been pursuing through this JustTrack program today. As an anthropologist and for the record I wanted to say just a couple of things before we get going. Anthropologists are kind of picky about the term gender and so I'm going to just put it on the table for us gender is not about your biological sex it's not an either-or it's not a silo of women it is actually a very complex dynamic and interactive engagement of social norms customs, statuses social practices and I think the key operable word here it is mutable and that is why we work on gender and peace building because when societies are undergoing drastic, tragic sometimes or some sort of economic or political change this is when we see a lot of changes in the possibility as far as what women's roles what men's roles what other gendered identities could be considered and so I want to add that to the conversation I also want to add the word intersectionality because although we can talk about women the fact is women are marvelously diverse, multi-aged although many of us wish we were much younger but the fact is I think we have to get age regionality whether we're talking urban or rural we have to get religion into the conversation ethnicity a lot of dynamics that I hope we can call upon this panel to really fine-tune the conversation a little bit because the devil is in the details and it is this intersectionality where we find both challenges but also great opportunities and finally I wanted to say just about seven years ago when I was working at the World Bank I did a study called whose rules rule and it took the form of a study in Central Asia and one of the things that I also have picked up this morning a little bit is that we're thinking of these countries as very static places the fact is our world is transitioning what I found in Central Asia doing my field work is that nobody knew whose rules rule it just depended who had the power at that moment there were international ideas national, Soviet, former Soviet, local customs religious customs and it was all a part of the navigation and negotiation of space as well as rules so with that I am happy to introduce what I think is a dynamite panel I've asked them to keep their remarks to ten minutes each because I really do want a conversation here this is a community of practice it may be the first one but it's not the last one so let's stir things up a little bit so on my left and you've been introduced to him before is Hamid Khan who is the deputy director of the rule of law collaborative and a specialist in the field of Islamic law as you've heard he was senior program officer here in the rule of law center but what I want to emphasize in his marvelous CV is the fact that Hamid Khan is at the intersection of some very important transitional parts of our world the fact that he is a man that he is the son of an immigrant family all of those things matter when it comes to talking about gender and peace building we need men who get it and we need men who understand that they play many roles as a father as a brother, as a son and that those are the roles that we can help start to shape on Hamid's left is another old friend Debbie Isser who is senior counsel for governance and inclusive institutions in the governance global practice of the World Bank she also was a senior rule of law advisor here at USIP for about six years when I met her we keep them very near to us, near and dear and again she has a stellar CV I think you have most of this in front of you but I think one of the very first conversations that I had at USIP was with Debbie because of the work that she was doing in crossing over disciplines and that also is very exciting to me here's a lawyer, a well educated lawyer from Harvard Fletcher School of Law and all asking ethnographic questions what does customary law really look like on the ground and how do I find out about it so she's a star as well and my newest friend Aparna Palawarapu, how did I do on that pretty well is a assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina where her research focuses on human rights with particular emphasis on land rights, customary and statutory law interaction especially as they affect women and children another Fletcher School of Law and also BS from MIT welcome and my fellow anthropologists we're going to have to hold this up right Dr. Kristin Darity she is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester is the lake on frozen yet okay just barely she's come to summer here she received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her book Remediation of Rwanda Harmony and Punishment in Grassroots Courts is forthcoming so as you see we have a dynamic group ahead of us I'm going to ask Hamid to kick us off with a discussion about the really the intersection of women and Islamic constitutional making I also want to draw your attention to his special report that just came out last month called Islamic Law Customary Law and Afghan Normal Justice and the floor is yours and you know I'm kind of a timekeeper here I'll nudge you a little bit but take your time you guys are all going to get tired of me thank you for that warm introduction and I wanted to briefly delve into the issue of Islamic law as a means for empowerment for women it is obviously an area as I like to tell my students a new parlance of curse words Sharia is the new curse word Fatwa is the new F word and the reality is that it's actually far more dynamic in one in which has in my work and in my travels proven quite potent in terms as a force of legitimacy it is also however been utilized in ways that have also beset conflict and one does not need to go far in the headlines to see this but having said that I think that there is ample opportunity to see this as a positive force and one that has gained fraction among practitioners and scholars throughout the Muslim world and one needs to go again too far to delve into this issue and so I want to recount a couple of tales to sort of illustrate this point foremost in my previous life here at USIP one of my areas of focus was on the issue of Afghanistan and specifically at the intersection of customary law and Islamic law now this first of its kind study really tried to parse out some of the differences and Pawasha who preceded me took a first stab at this when she was at Harvard and I went to the ground and actually looked in two different provinces to examine the question of how the law plays in the dispute resolution at the local level and the findings were very or quite remarkable one we didn't have a clear sense about the structures of the norms that created and articulated the customary system in Afghanistan but more importantly the conflation of Islamic law with customary norms was in many ways deeply troubling because Islamic law to simply being a nomenclature a way in which identity was preceded rather than a substantive body of norms now why is this particularly important because in many different parts of the world religious identity isn't of paramount concern but when it comes to women it is of great concern because many of the strictures of Islamic law as was hinted and alluded to previously deal very directly with the issue of women the issues of marriage inheritance and even the social standing of women in large part even as basic as their dignity but the conflation of tribal leaders to these very important issues meant that women's rights were being relegated to something of a dustbin they were being argued as part of the protectionary patriarchy of men and when we examine the issue of Muslim leaders by going to participants we found remarkable results results in which customary law which was at its strongest in areas of Pashtun Wali were trying to dismiss Islamic law as relevant largely because it ran afoul of the changes in society and on the other hand in societies or in parts of the of the Afghan countryside that had been more exposed to these areas we found actual turbulence because for the first time women were gaining not only the knowledge about Islamic law and their particular rights under Islamic law it was causing a bit of a social construct to change in which women were actually had the temerity backed by their religious conviction to bring these issues to the fore and following in the tradition of storytelling I'll give you one story where I was allowed to participate in a jerga and in a relatively safe province but a heterogeneous province in which when we were invited to participate with the local elders one of the local elders once I was identified as somebody who understood Islamic law came up to me and said you're causing a lot of trouble and I said why and he said all these women are talking about things they shouldn't talk about them I wanted to know what he wanted to talk about so he actually previewed this case before me in which a young woman wanted to divorce and and the young women's family said listen we have grounds under Islamic law for the dissolution of this marriage and the grounds were this man's impotent now again this is a very traditional society discussions about the potency of men is not something you would see in a gathering of elders and you know he pointed to me and said this is exactly the problem but what was telling was actually under a classical Islamic law that is a grounds for divorce and so a few of the men and I gathered with the husband who was disgruntled and publicly he said of course I'm fully virile I'm a man then we took him aside and he confessed in fact that he wasn't able to meet his obligations and so we went back to the jerga and we said listen we make a finding that if that's in fact what it is it should be divorced now that's not the type of conversation that you would have and it's not the type of conversation you would think common but certainly by involving a religious issue that is deeply and closely held as a conviction this woman felt empowered enough to actually raise a pertinent issue is it going to be wholesale is it going to be common probably not but it does give women a voice in many instances where they can speak and one of the programs that we developed after a series of several studies that we had done in these areas of Afghanistan look then at the question of how do we get how do we get at the issues of custody of divorce and dowry in an afghan context using Islamic law so what we proposed was we went to youth volunteers in Nangarhar province near Jalalabad who were very motivated very well respected but also very interested in being civically involved and what they what we came up or what I devised was an idea that actually came back from 11th century Egypt which was that we should be able to procure form contracts of marriage and the idea was that we would give young afghans a gilded copy of their marriage of their nikah which is an Islamic contract and that nikah would give them the right to care for as a ceremonial mention of their marriage now immediately our immediate response from the locals and from religious leaders and even from those young married couples was what is this this seems like an imposition of outside culture but when we explained that the nikah is a construct of Islamic law they immediately bought into the idea and the form contract did a few simple things it identified the groom it identified the bride it identified the mahar the proprietary construct within Islamic law that he was a gift and it identified the witnesses now within a month we had thought that this would sort of die out that we had offered a few pounds of rice to the young married couples but what we found is that by having the copies done in triplicate we could get the young married couple a copy in this ceremonial way but then we could also get the filing of the same marital contract in the local court and we could also get some way to memorialize the marital contract with the local religious leader within a month we had religious leaders approaching us saying they wanted to take part in this endeavor because it validated Islamic law it validated a place and the courts became interested because it also did something very unique at least in the Afghan context was that it gave written proof to identifying the bride which has been and remains a difficult issue to identify a bride not only to the issue if pertinent to a divorce but also to child custody issues it also identified the bride or the wife is potentially being the beneficiary of an inheritance right now does this solve, does this achieve all the things that we would want ideally for the equality of women certainly not but it was an important way in which we got immediate buy in and for which we could utilize the constructs later under Islamic law as a means and a mechanism for women's rights now I also emphasize another point when it comes to Islamic law which is Islamic law is a very potent force it can be used in a very positive way but it can also be used very negatively and I have been privy to traveling to other Islamic countries in Somalia in Libya in Afghanistan to look at the issue of Islamic constitutionalism to look at the area of where how do women become best accustomed to the idea of Islamic law as a means for empowerment and what's difficult to say the least are the fundamental assumptions that women and men make about what Islamic law says that women are inherently defective that they are not allowed to be leaders that there are certain constraints about their ability to hold judgeships and the reality is that all of these things actually turn out to be myths or focal points for certain areas of jurisprudence and the last thing I will mention as was previously alluded to is that international treaties have proven important turning points among a number of series of other transitions and one of the case examples would be CEDAW we've mentioned it before but actually one of the important listness tests that CEDAW provided was an action for religious leaders to re-evaluate religious doctrine religious doctrine that was often used to hold back women's rights such that a multiplicity of Islamic countries actually shifted their position under Islamic law to different schools of jurisprudence and in particular to give women stronger standing to achieve a divorce so in that regard I would emphasize that Islamic law while seen as the boogeyman as a means for empowerment on a multiplicity of issues because it is dynamic and to consider the fact that it's potency and legitimacy is not to be underestimated so with that I will see the floor Thank you Hamid Yes it's wonderful because your example so demonstrates how really basically expanding the imagination through the knowledge about the Sharia how exactly stakeholders could come together and all of them benefit and it's a wonderful example I'm going to turn the floor over to you to bring in some of the ethnographic research and why that method has worked in your opinion I hope you'll answer that in the mix of all your others Okay Well thank you it's a pleasure to be here and talk about the artwork that I really started when I was back here at USIP so I'm going to start by telling you some stories that come from this research and just to say this is based on field research that was done and published by USIP in 2009 about local justice in Liberia and then updated also by a recent study that was commissioned by the World Bank on the specialized criminal court in Liberia which I'll talk about so I'm going to focus on gender based violence in Liberia and justice so here are three stories that I hope will help us think about some of the issues I have to say so the first one comes from the ethnographic work we did on local justice in Liberia and what the study was was there was a lot of discussion about customary law and formal law and it was all kind of done by lawyers who are concerned about the fact that we didn't know what was really going on and what ruled that there was concern that customary law doesn't meet international human rights obligations and all of that so what we set out to do when I worked closely with an anthropologist on the study was to say what does it look like? Let's not make assumptions about customary law but let's actually go and document the experience of people the kinds of disputes they have how they resolve those disputes and from that we'll have something more to say about this so the first case comes from that research and it's a terrible story, a tragic story of an 83 year old woman who was raped the suspect was arrested and put in jail the victim's daughter brought her to a hospital where she had a first medical report and then they decided to go to the magistrate court and file a case so they get to the magistrate court and they said well you have to pay a fee and I thought huh, why do I have to pay a fee I'm the victim but then he said yes you have to pay a fee and then you have to go back you have to get another medical report, you need all this to go on so they went through all of this and then finally the magistrate court said ok now you have to go to the circuit court which is located in the county capital of Vujama which is a good several hours at best walk from where they were so the daughter put her mother in a wheelbarrow which was the best thing that she could use for transport and pushed her all the way to Vujama they get to the circuit court they wait around for a while and the judge says sorry the term of the court has just ended you're going to have to come back next term so they go back, they miss a term because they couldn't get any transportation to get there the next term the daughter decides she's going to take her mother again they get halfway there, it's the rainy season the wheelbarrow is stuck, her mother is ailing so she decides she brings her mother back home, goes herself to the court she gets to the court and the judge says no victim, no case by the time the woman gets home the daughter gets home, her mother had died and the perpetrator had broken out of jail so story number one story number two a man lured this is also from Liberia, same research a man lured a school girl to his home under the pretense that he was going to help her with her school work and raped her the next day she went home she was obviously very distraught after a while she told the story to her family and the family went and they confronted the man and the man said yes, yes I'm so sorry, I did it but I'm really sorry and they said well sorry is not good enough and so they said what can you do and he said look I don't have a lot of money but I can't pay for her medical expenses but I can help you transport her to the hospital and I have some money to cover her school fees so they made a deal she got medical care and she went back to school that's case number two now case number three, rape has been a really chronic and really just pervasive problem in Liberia in particular since the civil war and the international community has been trying really hard to figure out what can we do about it and so one of the initiatives was to say let's create a special court there obviously there's a problem, courts are backlogged all this kind of stuff so let's not have what happened to that 83 year old woman let's create a court of direct instance that is just for sexual based violence we'll create it in Monrovia and we'll base it on this great South African model and we'll give it all the resources to have it up and running so that court was created in 2009 over the next four years that court had hundreds of cases come to it but only had 18 trials 93% of the cases that were brought before that court of the hundreds were dismissed under a technical criminal procedure rule because by the time they got to the court the accused had been in pre-trial detention long beyond the legal limit and so 93% of the cases they had to let the perpetrator go that was the end so just think about that when we're thinking about what is justice justice for whom and as Kathleen said who's rules rule how do we do this so what does this tell us I put those examples I'm sorry they're quite shocking but to help us think through this discussion so just in the few minutes I have left just a couple of thoughts for takeaways so the first is maybe this is beyond already where we're thinking right now but at the time there was such a strong tendency to assume that customary systems are inherently discriminatory towards women and what that led to was basically two different main pathways for international interventions one was to say let's cut off their jurisdiction let's just say on issues related to women they shouldn't touch it that has to go to the formal system and the other is to say well okay we get that the formal system is not quite working either but so we can fix it let's go in and we'll train them and we'll teach them how to do better and I would argue that both of these have been deeply flawed for a number of reasons one is that we know formal systems I mean this tendency to basically compare a customary system to an idealized formal system is a problem that maybe in our ideal these formal systems look like western systems and we can even get laws passed and train judges and things that look like they adopt certain western norms but the truth is and this is where the anthropological approach comes in is there's nothing essential and unique about courts they are also reflecting the same kinds of social norms the same political dynamics the same things that are doing everything else and we just assume way too much I think from one thing I have learned this is that law is not really all that powerful an instrument and there's only so much that one can do with legal technical interventions so what these cases also suggest is that things look very different if you start with sort of an institutionalized system approach that asks what should it be and you say what do we want for women what should this system look like versus taking a much more ethnographic kind of approach that asks really what does this actually look like what do potential pathways look like and so that has an implication for the kind of analytical and assessment work we do so here maybe I'll leave it but we can go more into the methodology but so here the idea was standard justice assessments go in they look at course they look at laws they kind of measure gaps from what we think the ideal is to what we see totally different approaches to go in and say let's start by asking by figuring out what are people's concerns what do they consider to be justice issues or injustices and let's ask what do they do where do they go and moving away from a binary of customary or formal into actually what does the playing field actually look like for people and what you find out actually is that it's you have all kinds of hybridity you have all kinds of actors and authorities that are really determinative decisions and one of the other things that you that I think you find when you do this is that sometimes the results lead us down uncomfortable roads so let me ask you in the Liberia case which one was the most just could it be that the school girl who was raped and basically got fees you know maybe that was justice or maybe from your perspective the fact that accused to you know were held too long and pre-trial detention you know that that's a form of justice I think we could all agree that the 83-year-old woman there's nothing about justice in that case whatsoever but it very much goes to this question of whose rules rule I like that who gets to decide are we talking about the interests of the victim are we talking about the interests of the victim's parents which in a lot of cases really matter especially when you're talking about issues of rape we did a similar report in South Sudan and looking there also about what is really in the victim's interest because it's to end the shame end the problem that now this tainted goods is not going to be able to get married and so it's to marry the rapist who are we to judge what is the right outcome in these sort of cases is it the government's interest is it the international community's interest international norms just to raise another example in Timor-Lest also there was the UN put a big effort on domestic violence and so a big effort also on training prosecutors and putting people in place to enable victims of domestic violence to come forward and what happened is they were so effective that women decided they didn't want to go anywhere near them anymore because what was happening is their husbands were being taken to jail and women were left without the breadwinner at home without a social safety network and with all the shame that there was involved in that so I mean just to raise that one has to be quite aware of what does this look like from the perspective of the people that we think we're actually trying to help in all of this so just sort of on the positive side what can be done to support women so I think what I take away from a lot of this is one is the importance of using these empirics to understand experience to understand the reality of pathways to understand that this is a lot about power dynamics and social norms and as Hamid said these are changing contexts but that there's opportunity in that fluidity and I think that's really important that rather than try to fix systems you look for the opportunities within this fluidity to promote spaces for contestation if you will so another legalistic perspective is what we don't like about legal pluralism is that it's confusing, it's not predictable, it's uncertain let's have a clear set of rules but actually I would argue in a lot of these places you're instead cutting off pathways they might all not, none of them be great pathways but you know at least the combination of pathways with the right kind of support you might find users of this might be better navigators of what's going to work for them than we are in terms of deciding what pathways should be cut off from the beginning so again I'll leave it there it's okay I like that it's up to this sense of the challenges and opportunities of the ambiguous space and stakeholders as well I think also your point about the questions we ask are really shaping what we think should be the answers and the only other thing I would add on the Liberia case is one of the kind of slow but sure understandings that are coming to this whole field of sexual conflict related sexual violence is how many men and boys are victims of sexual violence as a part of hazing into armed groups if they were kidnapped and that if we don't ask the full set of questions we really don't get at a holistic solution so on that note I'm going to now turn to Aparna to bring your work into light and especially around this intersection of customary and statutory law thank you so I want to jump off from this idea that Debbie presented about pathways and making sure that we offer pathways not just single pathway but maybe keep all pathways open in terms of accessing justice because that's really I agree with that that's really what needs to happen in mixed legal systems now my perspective is not USG I have worked with legal service providers and NGOs in various countries in East Africa specifically so what I'll be discussing draws from my experiences working with them advocating for legal reform so the focus is on changing norms creating access to sites of norm negotiation and changing laws such that all of these institutions work better for women so throughout the day one of the things I really liked about this symposium is that everyone discussed the ways in which formal customary and religious law all have relevance and they do all have relevance in mixed legal systems and the communities one particular tradition may have a monopoly but what you often see is a lot of movement between legal traditions so for example in an earlier panel today we talked about Uganda and women's marriage laws and how marriage might impact a woman's ability to exercise land rights and what's interesting in Uganda is when I was there I met a number of women who said well I don't actually my friends and I wouldn't feel that we fit only within one type of legal tradition when it comes to marriage so we'll make our decisions based on who we're marrying and also is this our second or third or fourth marriage so one woman I spoke to said my first marriage was a Christian marriage under the church but then that marriage ended I felt that I could not get married again under church law and under Christian law so instead I went and had a customary marriage and if that ends then maybe I'll go and do a state marriage or maybe I'll have another customary marriage so what she was trying to convey to me was I'm not stuck in one system and I might have any different type of marriage depending on who I get married to if I marry a Muslim man then I will be married under Islamic law so women's groups engaging in reform efforts need to engage with all of these legal traditions formal and informal religious, non-religious each has its drawbacks and benefits and the constant question the constant larger question that reformers are asking themselves how do these traditions work together and also how should they work together to the extent that we can answer that question at all so I want to talk about some of the different opportunities for reform I think a lot of them came up in earlier panels so to the extent that there are questions maybe we can talk about them later but I'll go through them rather quickly there's the obvious, there's what we know as westerners we can help women exercise their rights by providing legal representation when they go to formal courts typical straightforward litigation there's also constitutional litigation which has been as was mentioned in an earlier panel very effective in some contexts and also very ineffective so in Uganda for example LawU, which stands for law and advocacy for women in Uganda was very successful in challenging a very discriminatory divorce act arguing that it was violative of the constitution because it had completely different grounds for divorce for men and women and in a way that was mostly unfair to women but also in some cases unfair to men on the other hand another NGO tried to challenge the practice of bride price and I don't believe that's been discussed in great detail so just briefly bride price, bride wealth, LeBola is practice in which the bride's family will pay some often times amount of money nowadays back in the day maybe it was goods or cattle to the I'm sorry the groom's family will pay this to the bride's family in order to get the bride's family to agree to the marriage it's often criticized as as being a practice that allows women to be treated as chattel as something to be sold one of the bigger problems that's happening in Uganda is if a woman wants to leave that marriage many people will say the groom's family will often say well you need to repay bride price and that bride price is often no longer available especially it didn't even go to the bride right it went to her family and her family has spent it presumably you know for either their own needs or to pay their son's bride price so the challenge on bride price which had a lot of support among women's groups supported with a number of affidavits of women who experienced being stuck in really bad marriages you know was unsuccessful right so in the same constitutional court that granted women's rights for the divorce act wasn't willing to go as far as abolishing bride price so these are ways in which you can rely on courts a little bit but again you know in so far as they are advocates for women they are also you know the same time not willing to challenge some of the harder more rooted traditions right and bride price is a very rooted tradition in Uganda the marriage and divorce bill right so here's another way that reform efforts occur at a formal level is through legislative advocacy the marriage and divorce bill has been in front of parliament for over four decades right in Uganda and I think in 2012 it was before parliament again the speaker of parliament is woman in Uganda and she promised that it would get passed this time and of course it didn't why because of very troublesome provisions that presumed to equalize marriage rights in Uganda one of which was to ban the repayment of bride wealth so that women could effectively leave bad marriages other problematic provisions for certain parliamentarians criminalization of marital rape for example equalizing access to marital property was deemed too problematic so these this is a very important law that needs to be passed because the formal law is also pretty unequal right now in Uganda but it is still meeting a lot of deeply rooted opposition frankly the reason that we can even have this discussion in Uganda parliament is because there is a great deal of public participation by women in part because of quotas but it also goes to show you that when we're dealing with issues that are very very deeply rooted that really get at the heart of power inequality even that increase in women parliamentarians doesn't quite get us there right so on the other hand let's say this law does pass one of the things that has come up in earlier panels was that they might not make a difference right formal law is not all that legitimate in certain communities so another avenue that's been pursued by NGOs and legal advocacy groups is increasing access to norm negotiation sites in the customary system so we want to make sure that men can't demand the return of bride wealth for women who want to leave marriages well maybe we need to be talking to traditional councils or in Uganda local council course the traditional leaders you know appeal to the norms that underlie customary law these norms of fairness and the fact that customary law is supposed to be adaptive and argue for the fact that perhaps now we need to reconsider what these norms should be honestly it's a difficult with again with bride wealth it's very difficult because and I hate to sound too cynical I'm not cynical but we all understand that legal systems in large part are controlled by people with power and legal systems partially exist to maintain that power and balance and so any fight to try to equalize is always going to be met with a lot of resistance on any level the formal level informal level I mean this is a common theme I think among all legal systems I don't have a lot of time so I just want to wrap up with one point so I mentioned you know we might want to women's advocacy groups sometimes want to empower women to learn more about customary norms rhetoric so that they can fight for the changing of norms in traditional dispute resolution bodies or among traditional councils but sometimes the way that states recognize customary law not just in the constitution as we learned about earlier but in their statutory law is very harmful so in some countries their statutory laws that you know were designed in South Africa for example to increase the authority of traditional leaders but what they actually end up doing is concentrate authority in one traditional leader or in a really small oligarchy right so what was once maybe a larger community driven norm negotiation process is now being slowly restricted by the way the statutory laws are being drafted in Kenya and Tanzania certain statutory laws exempt customary law from their own provisions so the Kenya Succession Act exempts certain districts from their own inheritance provisions the Tanzania Marriage Act exempts certain districts from its marriage provisions both of which say customary law shall apply in these areas in Kenya customary law has been restated or kind of codified in a restatement that was written like 1969 and in Tanzania the customary law has been codified in schedules to the act so what has it done in both cases we've lost that fluidity of customary law so now you've rigidified norms that existed in the 1960s right and that's what's still being applied so to the extent that we're talking about how to change customary law how to change formal law we also need to remember that the legal systems you know in their attempt to recognize multiple traditions sometimes actually hold those traditions back from change so the way they're hybridized also needs to be the focus of some attention of reform efforts so I'll stop there Bravo boy I think you've really nailed an area of not only research but policy exploration in our good attempts to help we often as you have put it we solidify things where their best hope is being in agile almost entrepreneurial being able to go between the systems to actually find justice so thank you very much Kristin I'm looking to you to get the anthropological perspective into the discussion today please the floor is yours thank you and again thanks to everyone for inviting me here and to all of you for sticking around for this lovely day I'm going to talk a bit about Rwanda I know there's a lot of people who have spoken about Rwanda throughout the day so hopefully when we move on to the discussion in about 10 minutes we can if you have specific questions to this or issues to speak to I'm happy to talk about it more I only have two slides so I'm going to click the main reason I have slides is because I just wanted to give you some images of the institutions the legal forums that my work was with so this is based on ethnographic work that I conducted in Rwanda I spent about I think it's like 20 or 22 months living in Rwanda predominantly between 2004 and 2008 and I worked with several different legal forums that I'll discuss in a moment and really the question that sort of animated this work and my forthcoming book and what I'm talking about here was are people themselves experiencing a couple different trends in post-genocide Rwanda one was the shift to sort of the emphasis of rule of law in the wake of the genocide but particularly the embedding of reconciliation efforts in law and that happened through in a variety of ways but in part through the creation of several different legal forums and that happened alongside a real emphasis on gender equity policies throughout the country and that also occurred alongside what is now being acknowledged as a possibly a strong state another way of putting it is a highly authoritarian state so we need to keep those three dynamics at play in what I'm going to try to present here and what I'm really trying to understand is how did people themselves experience the shift to rule of law in the new Rwanda so I'm not going to say much about what the push to gender equity was in Rwanda but I think if you look at sort of outside indicators or metrics Rwanda has seen as doing a lot of things for the right as a few examples there's a constitutionally mandated minimum of 30% women in all government decision making bodies female majority parliament was elected in 2008 there's a lot of increased legal protection such as new laws allowing women to inherit to own land etc there's a lot of things that are quite positive and many people have talked about the ways that this has had positive impacts on women not only positive all positive and also this can be seen as sort of perhaps self-serving for the ruling regime but there are you know this is not only at the top level it is trickling down in a variety of ways the three forums that I worked with that you see here I'll just say very briefly about them the gachacha courts many of you may have heard about the gachacha courts they were created in the early 2000s as a way of handling the huge backlog of genocide suspects in jail for suspected genocide crimes they were deeply decentralized courts where genocide suspects were tried among their neighbors before locally elected basically unprofessional judges with no especially with no lawyers they were ostensibly based in customary law but with the same caveats that people have mentioned around how we understand customary law really as something that had been shifting over time i.e. what was reinvoked as customary was really something that had taken form under the colonial period and it really needs to be understood as a reinvented tradition in the moment that it was reinvoked these were definitely state backed courts they could deliver sentences up to 30 years there was no there was no question anybody's mind participating in these courts these were heavily state driven but again they were based in they were not sort of typical adversarial courts I also worked with Comité Abounzi which are mediation committees that's literally what it means Comité's committee Abounzi is the word for mediators they were put in place around the same time as Kachacha they were permanent addition to the legal system housed under the Ministry of Justice while the Kachacha courts were intended only for jurisdiction of genocide crimes the mediation committees were ongoing they were based on the same loose model of customary law so when I first started talking to people about these when I was doing my work they said oh no no many people would say no no those are two totally different things they're not the same at all one is for genocide and the other is for ordinary disputes but I would talk to people themselves interacting with these courts or watch them happen and they were really really quite similar in terms of where they occurred spatially who participated in them and what the process looked like even if the subject manager of the jurisdiction was distinct and I also worked with the legal aid clinic which was operated out of the National University of Rwanda in Butare that I think looks a lot like legal aid clinics in many places around the world it's staffed by some permanent faculty of the law school law students would rotate through as part of their coursework and also as a way of providing services to people with a variety of disputes the point here is from the respective of Rwandans these were the kinds of decentralized legal spaces that they had access to across a range of jurisdictions and the main point I want to make here is that what I found across these different forums is that despite these wide variances of being rooted in universal human rights versus being rooted in customary law having jurisdiction over divorce or land or genocide Rwandans who came to these forums found themselves facing efforts at mediation they found themselves facing efforts to avoid adversarial disputation to compromise with their adversaries to accept compromise in the name of harmony in the name of the collective good in the name of the new Rwanda so that's really what I'm trying to understand that focus on mediation in a legal forum because they also would face mediation by their priests, by other people but there's something different about law-backed mediation and again I'm glossing the term mediation a bit and there's obviously a huge literature on how we differentiate mediation from lots of other similar processes and that's my point is not to be sort of too specialized there but rather to recognize that there's something at stake in the fact that across this wide range of forums the push to rule of law on the new Rwanda was experienced by ordinary Rwandans as a focus on mediation so what I wanted to say very briefly here is that that had gender dimensions to it and that in particular what I sort of want to argue here is that law-based mediation was based on culture it was based on these open-ended notions of compromise and harmony that drew from culture as a shared but unarticulated reservoir as the key form of legitimate authority as framework for social roles and appropriate behavior and so again what we're seeing is that across these forums against the nation my backdrop that emphasized gender equity which you saw was women typically being told that they were supposed to behave in particular ways and I'll say that in just a moment but really behave as good mothers as good wives as good daughters and as conflict avoiders and that that is something we should just pay attention to that could have both good and bad effects normatively if we think normatively anthropologists I'm somewhat allergic to that but I think the point is that we have to critique this idea of harmony at least a little bit and recognize the ways that it could actually be deeply silencing and coercive for vulnerable people so if I have do I have a few membranets this is the problem I talk really fast so when I get panicked about time I go really fast I'll say two things and I'll give you my other slide because I do have one other slide see my key points just to say that and really I think the two things and I had written more about this but they've come up throughout the day today so I think I can just say them very quickly but really part of the issue is that women were referenced in particular as relational beings as I said as mothers as daughters as sisters and there's a whole literature on this and lots of you have spoken about it already today but that's an issue when women are being told that they have to accept compromise sometimes even when there was something actually informal law that might give them more when they were told they had to behave a certain way because it was just they were not properly inhabiting their social role if they chose to push harder we have to think carefully about that and examples like that during gacha trials people would confront women for let's say for betraying their rather than instinct by not protecting other women's children in mediation women seeking divorce were told to prioritize their children's needs to stay together for the sake of the children I'm sure many of you have heard this in other contexts as well in Komite Yabunzi cases often it was women who were chastised for their children's behavior whether the children had mishandled neighbors livestock or broken too many glass bottles that they were supposed to be returning women were told to forgive other women as you would forgive an errant child this idea of the metaphor of motherhood was a really really prominent one and then I'll just say the other piece as is noted on there is this issue of the assumption that men are the ones who make war and women are the ones who make peace that's perfectly powerful in some ways and I think there's a cross context there's a lot of empowerment to that but it's also deeply silencing when women actually want to sump around and be angry and I think there's a real danger we don't have to look too far out our window to see ways in which when we tell people that they shouldn't agitate it's enforcing a certain kind of status quo and it's silencing so I won't go off on that rant but I think it's an important thing to consider in this context as well yes that it's not only in other countries where there are mixed legal environments but we should think about that at home too so maybe I'll just say one the point is there's pros and cons to these to these dynamics well I have one case I could give but I can just say do I have a moment to just talk through one case or should I save it for the Q&A? then I'll close and I guess the last thing I'll say is that the thing for Rwanda which again is such a provocative example because it's got so many benefits but also this problem of the risks of authoritarian governance I think the combination of the restrictive public sphere under authoritarian governance with a law-backed mediation that calls for reconciliation and unity as inherently better to conflict with this widespread essentializing of women it's those three ingredients together that I think can be particularly pernicious and that we need to sort of disentangle that a little bit more I'll leave it at that, thank you okay I could listen to you all day those are great comments and I think you've added another dimension to this conversation is when these negotiated spaces actually reify different types of essentialization and as you pointed out restrictive and silencing in fact the people that we hope here in this conversation to have more power I'm going to forgo my questions and I'm going to immediately open it up to the floor because I know there's a lot of conversation to be had here and if you would mind just standing up and taking the mic because we are webcasting and introducing yourself right here in the green and could I get the next speaker so I'm aiming the mic that way, okay very good my name is Tarsha Krabi I'm with Democracy Council which is a non-profit that works in civil society my question is I guess it's more geared towards Hamid since you spoke about Sharia law so once society goes and includes religious equality women are able to practice equality within the religion what's the next step to go beyond that because even within Sharia especially when it comes to like Shahada the witness women are still considered half of a man how do you go beyond that to insert equality and rights just beyond the religious context as well I'm going to take a couple of questions give the panelist time to think here please so I have a question for this is a Lisa's colleagues from Lisa's equity I have a question for any one of you I'm interested in this I have to form this a little bit better but we talk about justice we tend to and we talk about we kind of use enforcement and implementation of laws interchangeably and I see them as actually quite different and I'm interested if any of you have any experience or comments on regulations and procedures in many regulations and procedures there's elements of adjudication taking place and that that is also kind of justice so I'm wondering if any of you in your work kind of have any thoughts on that and kind of how that relates to gender and legal pluralism as well if that makes sense thank you one more please two more then okay there and then we'll bring you'll have the last question hi I'm Rowan Yerri I'm from Lebanon and I have a couple of questions actually one about the Sharia law and about how can getting a copy of the Akdel Qiran or about the contract give her better rights and the second is in countries where the legal system is more about religious one so like in Lebanon we don't have we only had the civil marriage last year and it's still very complicated so if you want to get into civil marriage you should remove your religion from your ID we don't want to have religion on our ID but if we remove it we are not allowed to run for office for example it takes us one of other rights so if we're getting like the religious marriage there how are we able to get any other if we're getting like this marriage how are we getting our other rights so it's sometimes complicated and we don't want to assume things if we want to do something better thank you last question for this round thank you I have a question for Debbie I don't know if I understood your stories correctly but it sounded as if the perpetrators the alleged perpetrators were in jail in pre-trial detention and I was wondering how that occurred how that system was implemented how were they arrested how were statements taken etc okay okay I'm going to just go to my left and all the way down the question raised is a good one and it's constantly raised within an Islamic context which is there is sort of two stages right the first informative stage often times for practitioners and for policy makers is to actually gain traction with participation and then and then the other question is legal change right so often times it's not often it's not difficult to get the discussion going about the role of women in Islam as it pertains to the Sharia because many of the many of the functional aspects of women's participation already delineated within the Quran and often times the barrier that one often has to overcome is making aware what that actually is the second issue which you raised and I think it's actually an appropriate way because it's a staged and it goes to the other question about contracts is how to create legal change and one of the dramatic problems we have seen in the Muslim world is not so much that there isn't a whole body of jurisprudence or that there's diversity of that jurisprudence to the issue of witnesses to the role of participation in women but the lack of institutional and governmental support has actually removed legal authority from traditional religious leaders the Olaman and that has caused because of the sort of rise of the state right as the manipulator as the controller of all legal authority particularly in the Muslim world it actually counters Islamic history whereby religious leaders were seen as diverse as having sanctioned to go with diverse points of view within that legal body finally having the state uphold whatever whatever their instrumentalized view Islamic law might be and so the state has in a very similar vein to what we've seen in customary traditions has actually taken authority away and vouched that authority in politically astute individuals in Iran for example you can actually go to the various seminaries that address this particular issue about women's rights and have laid out broad treatises that have articulated the point that much of what we see in the Quranic discourse about women was meant to be and if you look at the Quranic dictates regarding women they're all limits against men and the question is the broader question is why does the Quran create limits against men why are these why are these bundle of rights so to speak or bundle of restrictions against men well the conclusion by many Iranian jurists has been because we need to reevaluate what the fundamental goal of Islamic law is to be which is equity and so but these treatises are often under lock and key they're certainly not going to reach the power dynamics of many who are already established and certainly it's far more readily ease with relative ease to go to the Quran and say well this says it in the Quran and that's it it's final as this to assume like any other law or any other religious text that this is clear it can be contextualized it can't be understood and it can't be evaluated under both modern jurisprudence and Islamic history and so what we are seeing in the Islamic world is a fixation on the idea of Islamic law without looking at the substance of Islamic law without looking at its genesis the good part about all of this is that there seems to be a wellspring of interest in this area and there have been a number of sources and seminaries that actually try to uncover this jurisprudence to actually look at some of these issues that go back to the 11th to the 10th century on the issues of women's rights because these issues are not new and that also goes to the issue of the Nika'a the mayoral contract and contracts in general the ability of women to participate in contracts again the issue is where the restriction of the Quran arises and that restriction can be placed under contextualization and scholars have actually pointed out that that was a time place and manner distinction under the Quran because of the various interests in 7th century Arabia the question is can they be evaluated to its broader goal the goal of the Quran to for example make clear that what was so transformative in the 7th century is that women should partake in the interests of business Muhammad's first follower was herself a business woman so there is ample discussion among jurists and again part of it has to be uncovered and part of it has to be articulated by religious leaders sometimes less self-servingly to go that round the issue of Lebanon is a particularly difficult one and as much as I would love to tell you that religious leaders can get involved I think that's part of the consequence of a political mosaic and a historical accident or historical reluctance on the part of political leaders to even even get a clear demographic of what Lebanon actually looks like right because the system that's in place the confessionalist system in Lebanon is such that it has been stratified and no one wants to take another census because they don't want to upset the balance and so as much as I would like to tell you that the Muslim identity or the Shia Sunni or the Christian identities are enlisted on identity cards are there it's largely there to keep political stability rather than the religious identity of people thank you Elise I think I'm going to try your question if I understood what you were saying it very much resonates so you know I think if the idea is when we think about justice we shouldn't just be thinking about what happens at the end in terms of dispute resolution but you know if we think sort of preemptively even the ways that rights and entitlements are mediated and the way these things are actually sort of determined and experienced usually has very little to do with courts but a lot to do with as you said a lot of different regulatory authorities so I absolutely fully agree and in fact you know one of the reasons I was talking about Liberia from the work from 2009 is because since then my work has been less about court systems and more about other issues which I nonetheless consider to be justice in fact a lot of the work I've been doing at the World Bank has been following the World Development Report 2011 which was on public security and development which had a basically it ends up in a sound bite saying justice security and jobs and my job has been to figure out what does this mean justice wise and what I've been arguing is no it doesn't mean we should go in and just you know do more justice sector projects it's really about injustice and so if you start with you know how injustice is experienced and you take again an empirical approach to all of this to sort of understand what is what is it about injustice you know that is particularly stabilizing or resulting in fragility and again the WGR's formula is kind of injustice stresses together with an absence of effective and legitimate institutions to manage them is the formula for sort of chronic fragility and conflict and so the question is what's the nature of that injustice stress and then you know what are the nature of the institutions the rules of the game the different kinds of authorities that actually manage those stresses and you know where is their space to create more effectiveness and legitimacy there so for example the work that I'm doing in Liberia now is around natural resource concessions because I think one of the biggest sources of grievance and injustice is the just mass amount of concessions that have that have gone on the last five ten years and is creating all kinds of problems with the local communities but when I look at that and I start what's the nature of that injustice I don't get anywhere near the courts I mean the courts is the last thing you want to deal with but you have a whole range of things including the land law as you would know well and different kinds of regulatory mechanisms that actually regulate the relationship between communities local communities and concessionaires so I would totally agree with you I don't have any great insights to say about gender in those spaces except that how those mechanisms are managing people's experiences from again from an empirical perspective sorry the question about Liberia how do people get into pre-trial detention yeah it's a good one what happens actually recently I was in Liberia talking to the minister of justice and they've got a huge problem with pre-trial detention and they have for ten years and they've tried to do all kinds of things about it and basically what happens is the rest of their system is so slow that nobody gets charged and they just kind of sit there forever now what the minister of justice had this idea that actually if you go back to where decisions are being made to put people in jail he had a very interesting theory here that the incentives what happened in Liberia is because there were no solicitors there weren't any prosecutors sufficiently around the country that the magistrates had the authority to hear claims when they came in and decide what to do with them so it was the magistrate who would hear a person come in and they would say this is a criminal case this is a civil case whatever and their incentive because of a whole quote of corrupt network was to make everything a criminal case and so what you have in a way so this explains an awful lot of pre-trial detention that is really wrongfully there those people shouldn't be there in the first place but it also maybe gives some explanation for why the one thing that seems to work about the system is getting people into detention although you do worry about their rights I really like that question about regulations in part because I mean I think that's really where you find a lot of the problems when we're looking at the formal legal system in any event there are a lot of beautiful new laws that are passed that I mean have been largely written by I don't know international experts and people who come in and say here's what your children act should look like and if you've looked at the children act of very sub-saharan African nations but they look largely very similar but it's the schedules to the act and the norms that matter now right so you're absolutely right it is I think it's in that implementation and not enforcement part of the act where you can find still instances of inequality obstacles to actually sort of exercising your rights under that act so the schedules that I talked about under the Tanzania law of marriage act those that's part of the subsidiary legislation that not a lot of people read right so they look at the law of marriage act and they're like this looks great it's all neutral on its face and then it's when you actually read the schedules that you realize hold on a second it's required if you live in certain districts in Tanzania that this written set of rules of marriage be applied to you you don't have the option of living under the rules of marriage that are written in the primary legislation right so you lose all of the equality in terms of grounds of divorce if you're a woman so similarly with I mean I know you spoke about land rights so you probably know this but in sometimes it's in the forms right those land registration forms the fact that you might have to have a spouse sign with you or like a male over the age of 18 and so that's where you're losing all your rights that we're just guaranteed under your primary legislation I think that's absolutely right that there's a huge huge issue there and that those need to be examined as well and I've you know in terms of fixing that I've seen a number of different approaches and I don't know that anyone's really hit the magic bullet so some people say well let's add more to the primary legislation I mean I guess we could just keep adding words to the primary law and hope that it'll eventually take but I don't know that that's the way I think that there just needs to be more accountability in the equivalent of what are the common law administrative courts so you can hope you know reduce corruption so the fees that Debbie was talking about I've seen that to you where local solicitors right I mean this is an administrative law problem will say oh you want me to pursue this you know charges against this person who committed a crime against you you need to now pay me X amount of dollars that's that's my fee right so I think that you know especially as a corruption plays a role there implications for genders that it's almost disproportionately always negatively impacts women and of course negatively impacts those who are further disempowered so usually the poorer and more rural that Lebanon example I just want to say I think that's really interesting one I agree with me that you know the answer might is probably not going to be that we should now give you the right to vote if you remove your religion from your car just because of the power sharing nature of the government and how tentative it is but you know it does make me wonder if there was some ill intent behind that requirement and if really the agitation now should be towards letting people who still have religious affiliation on their ID cards at least to choose civil marriage but it's a really interesting example thank you for raising that Kristen if you want to give us your anecdote now yeah I think I will because I think it fits into thinking about the one way of pointing to the gender dimensions of these variations in enforcement and at multiple levels of adjudication and implementation I think that the main issue is to point out that if I learned anything from talking to people and sitting in these cases was that we have to think of this any disputation or dispute resolution or justice as processual and as long as unfolding over time not as a snapshot and I'll use this case maybe to illustrate it so it's one case that springs to mind was before the community of the mediation committees between or sensibly between two men who I'll call Alexi and Prosper and originally the case seemed to be a dispute over land where Prosper said he had bought land from Alexi and Alexi refused to sign the deed of sale and then it turned out that the issue was that Alexi's family particularly his wife and his aunt were saying that he didn't have the right to sell the land because it's family owned land and not individually owned land right so in the case over multiple weeks sort of hinged on figuring out how in fact he had bought this particular piece and where he got the money for it and his aunt who in fact was a Nyong'o Mogayo, a Getachi judge who I'd known through other you know circuits she and who therefore was a you know a woman of some authority in the community right she claimed that the land that Alexi had had been inherited you know through their you know their shared family line he claimed that he that his father had purchased the land separately and then given it to him right so the point is the question of whether it was it was family land and thus joined joined the owned and thus could only be sold by everyone in the family agreeing to sell it versus individually owned was really the issue but ultimately the Abunzi decided that Alexi should sign the contract of sale and that Prospera should get the land and their rationale what they said was that I mean this took several months for this to happen and their rationale was that the family that basically he belongs to you so you should bear the burden of his debt right and they literally used the term you know you watch who you know when the wife and aunt were complaining about it they were saying you know how he's ours but we never got anything from this like they're saying that he's ours and therefore we need to bear this burden and that's what I was pointing to before about this this very heavy notion of belonging that comes with family and that it's gendered in different ways and I think we need to attend to and you know the other thing that was very telling out of that example was that they said to me you know they think they're solving problems they're just creating new ones right and then the key thing the last thing to say about this is they then went on and immediately in the minute that that they were sort of signing you know as Alexi signed he was just weary like thankfully this is like at least at this point it's done I've been dealing with these people mad at me for you know a couple years now because a he had the case had been going through many other levels before it got to abunzi right it had gone to the leader that had gone to the local authority then it had right so this was a long process and then both the aunt and wife said you know look we're going to take this to the next level like we're not going to let this go right away and so I think and that was in part because of these different kinds of it was being enforced differently at different levels and they were continuing to forum shop and meanwhile you know as this was being signed part of the dispute was that at different periods Prosper had brought people to chop trees off the land and sort of use it in ways that they were fighting against and that was sometimes people would intervene to stop that other times they wouldn't in different ways depending on who was who was asking about it so I think yeah in order to really understand the details as you said at the beginning we have to attend to all these different levels and the uneven enforcement and implementation it's very messy I always had this idea that love was very neat I want the panelists to take a moment to reflect on one another's comments so they've they've answered some of your your comments questions but I want to give the floor to them one last time before we end this panel session I think it's important to emphasize that the mosaic of law offers those pathways and I agree completely and holy with what has been put forward Debbie I think probably sums it up perhaps most beautifully is that there is a series of there are these series of pathways and the question is do we foreclose them or do we do we open them and one should not look to any set of legal norms as prohibitive I think oftentimes we become fixated because of our own overarching sense of law today being National Law Day that somehow it should be clean that it should be nice and clear and ingrained in stone and we have beautiful monuments to say these things but oftentimes our own legal construct suggests dynamism and yet we don't we sometimes perversely foist that on other systems thinking that they should be unchanging and create greater injustice I think I would just say what a pleasure it is to be on a panel of sort of like-minded and complementary experiences sometimes I find myself being the lone kind of person pushing against much more orthodox kind of ways of thinking about it I mean the only thing that I just want to say that struck me I was really glad that Aparna talked about what happens when you try to formalize hybridity and just to say yes yes yes but I'm glad you talked about it I didn't but I could go on and on if you wanted me to on the problem especially in South Sudan with this obsession of codifying customary law so you know you talked about what happened in Kenya back in the 60s there's a whole state of those that went on under the British actually anthropologists who were responsible for that but now instead of anthropologists who are doing that now you have international human rights advocates who are saying okay we get that customary law has some good stuff but we need to it needs to be legible we need to fit it in to our world view and so we need to make it predictable we need to make it certain and we'll just erase the parts that we don't like and fix it and one of the other reports that I did I mentioned on South Sudan looks at what some of the pernicious things that happened about that absolutely the power dynamics that are associated with that and the fact that once you start playing around with this and trying to recognize you are completely changing the power dynamics between the cheap and their constituents and the state and all of this and it changes the whole thing and also you know not to mention cutting off that kind of fluidity that is you know the positive means of contestation of these yeah I'd also like to reiterate my thanks I really enjoyed this panel one of the things I want to close with that I didn't get to say in my remarks was that you know often times you find I find that I'll meet people who are very very interchanging formal law or very very interfocusing on customary law and the fact of the matter is that they are both so connected in these systems in part because the political leaders in both systems are so connected and they rely on each other so really any approach to try to improve engagement with the you know people's experiences with the legal system has to address all of these different legal traditions we can't ignore one in order to try to work on the other and especially because you know changing one does have impacts on the other we just don't often think about it but they are already so connected because the state ultimately is trying to assert control over the kind of legal tradition and we just need to acknowledge that I wanted to say one other thing and I of course forgot exactly what it was this is one other thing I did want to mention today the symposium is focused on women specifically but one of the things that I just want to make explicit that I heard coming out in some of the other speakers was you know trying to protect guarantee promote women's rights we often have to think about the other rights other forms of justice and injustice so especially with land often times and in light of climate change land scarcity investment from the west and China investors you know there's this real push to try to protect women's rights but then we also forget that there's this other push of how to protect indigenous rights right and so we're really only looking at a very small part of the picture today and I know that this I think came out implicitly in everyone's conversations and I just wanted to make that explicit that there is this larger picture of how all of these different rights and all of these different justices interact well said yeah I'll just say very briefly also that it's been this is really a joy to get to be a part of and I guess I just the thing I'll add is that I would really one thing I really appreciate about everybody's papers is that that there was this fluidity around how we're talking about customary law and culture you know I'm like I was saying over lunch that I'm an anthropologist who spends more time sort of criticizing how we talk about culture than sort of invoking culture because I think I think often when we talk too much about sort of customary law or culture we risk we also can strip it of any politics and especially in a place like Ronda we need to really pay attention to how culture gets invoked within certain landscapes of power and to justify certain things and that certainly happens in some of the ways I was beginning to point to I think there's also this notion that culture is something that resides over there far away in other places and then we distract ourselves from thinking of the kinds of culture change that maybe needs to happen in relation to law in other environments so in any case that to me I found very heartening that was that that was implicit in everything that everybody here was talking about so I really appreciated that, thank you and I hope all of you will join me in thanking this marvelous panel it's very enriching and thank you for your question and we have a scene change now so you have about five minutes while our next group of panelists come forward, thanks so much Thank you Welcome Welcome Welcome Welcome Welcome Oh yeah, yeah Yeah, hello Yes I was very proud of you Yeah Okay So, thank you so much People have been using your battles so I like I think you should share your thoughts and check them out Yeah Thank you Hi Hi Hi Thank you Thank you You're welcome Thank you Hi How is that? Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, nice to meet you. Thank you so much, Stephanie, Paulina, and Kathleen. You've all raised a number of issues and themes that have, I think, helped bring today's discussions together, starting with Stephanie who pointed out that we need to ask the question, why are we trying to incorporate women? And she gave a couple of answers, for example, trying to bring different perspectives and helping to change norms about women's role in society. And then Paulina talked to us a little bit about how, what types of programming strategies might be useful in trying to promote meaningful inclusion. And she talked about the importance of meaningful inclusion of women in transitional mechanisms, peace processes, constitutional drafting bodies. And she talked about the importance of not only including women, but giving them tools and space to succeed once they are incorporated into these processes. And she also talked about promoting women within the legal profession and the judiciary and using techniques such as mentoring and networking and promoting the use of those techniques. And then finally she talked about promoting the participation of users of justice systems and increasing access to justice and doing so by trying to reduce gender biases that exist within those systems. And then finally, of course, we heard from Kathleen who talked about the fact that many of the things that we discuss when we're doing work abroad, many of the issues that we find our host country counterparts struggling with, we can honestly say we have struggled with these same issues here in the United States. And I think that being able to say that makes our participation in those conversations stronger. And she gave us some specific examples such as the struggle with policies such as maternity leave and also with the question of removing barriers to entry to professions, particularly any barriers that are artificial and not related to operational effectiveness. So thank you very much. I think we had some very strong points raised by the panel. And before I open it for questions, I just want to see if any of our panelists would like to make any further comments on what they've heard. Great. Okay. So I see we already have some people ready to ask questions and I'd like to take a few questions and then we'll turn the questions over to our panelists. So please start. Hello, my name is Josh. And I just wanted to ask you about specifically the UCMGA. I was in the Navy for five years. And I found that the UCMGA, especially this was pre when it got amended in 2012 or 11. Okay. And the mixed legal system in the military, I found a lot of that really disenfranchised a lot of different people. There was a lot of problems with it. Implementation across the board had a lot of issues. So quite a lot of documented evidence, which they've since amended of having to turn in, you know, your your complaints to the people who and they're getting investigated by your authorities. So the people who basically are the bar, you know, you're complaining against the same people who are investigating. I just kind of wanted to get a read from you as to the, you know, how well that system was working for the military and how well it's working for our institutions. Great. Thanks, Josh. And we'll go ahead and take a couple of other questions before I turn over to the panelists. Back here, please. I'm a policy analyst. This is, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. The United States and perhaps goes more to what the captain was speaking about. The United States invites various countries to send Academy attendees to participate in our service academies, both at the graduate or undergraduate level and then in some of the more higher level classes. I'd like to thoughts on, is this something we might propose to our own government so as to encourage that countries send women to participate in these programs in our service academy schools, whether it's a national defense university or what have you, but I just like your thoughts on that. It may be one way of seeding the effort and growing more interest worldwide. Thank you. Any other questions? I'm Jonathan Dock. I work with Stephanie in the Office of Global Women's Issues and she and I took a trip to the DRC for part of December. The big takeaways for us from that trip was the struggle for the formal justice system, particularly the civilian side, in dealing with the judgment proof defendants. You had judges who were handing down multi-year verdicts, multi-million per multi-year sentences and multi-million dollar verdicts, who had no capacity to execute on those because you could walk in the front door of the prison now at the back and because if you had gotten to the point of being convicted in the court it meant that you didn't have enough money to bribe your way out of it, essentially. And so I'm curious for Paulina mostly about how ABA really thinks about ways of encouraging the plaintiffs that we need to approach the formal system in order to scale capacity of the rule of law to put up with the vaguerities of the system if they're not going to get anything out of it. And I'm curious for the captain, because one of the things that we saw in the DRC was that the military justice system was much more able to deal with these issues because they were in a better position to garnish the wages of security sector employees or to actually have the state indemnify the victims from their own treasuries or their ways to work with other countries on encouraging the military justice system to kickstart that. Great. Thank you for the questions. And now I'll invite our panelists to respond. And Kathleen, I'll start with you. Okay, first I'll start with the question about the UCMJ. I think it's very instructive to have people, obviously, who are serving in, make comments about the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as the fact that obviously Congress is taking a great interest in it now, which I think it's healthy when people take an interest in a justice system, expose light on it and debate what's good and what's bad. I'm not going to comment about the working part or not working part. I'd like to think we make it work, of course. We're sitting in a different position right now. But what I will comment on is the fact that you had made some observations about the convening authority. And I think it's important to explain how the military justice system is different, why it's different, and how it got to be that way. So the reason we have the whole system of justice we have is pretty much we inherited it from Great Britain. We took it over wholesale, part and parcel when we started the Continental Army, and pretty much that was the system that had been used and it works. And it kind of ties into this gentleman's question about in the DRC it works, and the reason it works is because it's swift, because you're able to have jurisdiction over the individuals that are over you. And it's intended a little bit different now that you're not intended to have justice, right, but it's intended for good order and discipline. And that's really the importance of it. So it's more of a justice system now than it was when it started because, right, we're not flogging anybody anymore. And we actually, you know, we have a system where lawyers are involved. Everybody who's involved in the military justice system, when you get to a court martial and if the judge, the defense counsel, the prosecutor are all lawyers, trained lawyers and trained additionally in military justice. So, and that was a change that was only really instituted after the Vietnam War. Because of the fact that there was a great interest in the system and after civilians, civilian soldiers come home, there was discussion about is this a system of justice that we want to keep or do we want to improve upon it? So there's sweeping changes made after the Vietnam War. And I think what you're seeing now is that same sort of healthy investigation into the system after Iraq and Afghanistan. People coming home and saying, you know, it worked or it didn't work. The public looking at the system saying, does it work or doesn't it work? But I think if you look at the higher goals of what the system was intended to do and how it's evolved, there's always room for changes in evolution. You pointed out the 2012 changes. There'll probably be more. I have no doubt about it. And I think that's healthy for a country to do that. One last point I'd like to make about your question is that we took the system wholesale from Great Britain. But with the European Court of Human Rights and their addition of a layer of review on their system, their system is completely changed now. It's different. They've actually, the whole idea of the committing authority being in the command and it's the commander who decides whether to bring the cases forward has been turned on its head. They have defense counsel who are civilians who are appointed from legal aid. They have a number of different changes that they've instituted in response to questions and concerns and quite frankly case law that the European Court of Human Rights levied against the British military justice system about 15 years ago. So I think it's instructive to look at that when we're looking at ourselves and say, there are ways perhaps to improve. We'll see what happens. And certainly the reason the system of justice is in place is because of that good order and discipline element. So do we want to lose that? It's a balance. That's my comment here, your question. I'm to the gentleman's question about service academies. We do. We have many international students at the service academies. I'm most familiar with the fact that we have many each year at the Coast Guard Academy. And we actually send, as the United States military, on a much lesser scale, but we have sent individuals to other service academies. I only know because I have a friend who actually went to, I think, it was the French Military Institute in Paris and studied for three years. Part of our barrier to doing that is language ability. He happened to speak fluent French, so that works. But in a country where I don't think we value languages as much as other countries, it's hard if you don't have a country where the individual doesn't speak the language, it's not going to work as well. And so that's one of the things, I think, societally that would help us be able to send individuals to other countries. I'm sorry, sir, yes. Do you replace, do you ensure that there are quotas to make sure that women from these foreign countries are represented, though, have these opportunities? I know that women have, I mean, there's certainly equal opportunity there. Quotas are very difficult because then you're talking about, you know, are you going to balance that against qualifications? I think we're encouraged, and just like in recruiting now, right, we're encouraged to recruit from all of society. It's not just gender-based, right? You want to look at economics. You want to look at national background. You want to look at a whole host of issues to ensure that you are representing society in the best way. So I think to the extent that we do that in recruiting, we're doing the same thing when we exchange students at schools. The hard part, right, is that you have to start by, first of all, attracting the women in, and then you have to keep the women, and you have to train them to a point and have them grow long enough to be able to even qualify to do such an academy swap. I mean, if you look at the service statistics, and I don't have them off the top of my head, but I can give you a ballpark figure, about at the eight-year mark is when you have a huge drop-off, 68-year mark, huge drop-off in women's serving. Very few women make it to the point, I've been in 23 years. There aren't that many women that stay that long, and some of the barriers have to do more with career flexibility, moving around. A lot of women decide to get out because they want a family, and those are societal things. They're not necessarily legal barriers. They're cultural barriers, or they're societal barriers, or they're just personal choices that people make. And so I think when you look at that, you have to look at all of those factors and interplay and figure out, you want to train and attract and create an environment where women want to stay, and you also want to ensure that you're not artificially placing a reverse barrier, but a quota and just saying, oh, we need a woman, let's pick her. Because that's going to dilute the quality, I think, of the education and the people that you get in those positions. You want it based on merit. So you have to balance those two things. And yes, I think it should be consideration. You want a diverse pool of people to pick from. You want to ensure that you're not artificially excluding anyone. And to build upon your comment about, do we send women outside to other countries? And the answer is yes. I mean, based on the work that I did several African countries, it was very interesting to go to a place like Morocco, where the women who were serving in their Navy, and they have women in their Navy, but they were the women serving the food and the tea, right? And they came out and then they went back into the back room. And I'm not speaking, it was a wonderful experience I had, but it was just different. It is different. We're at different levels. And we did that with our women in World War II, right? We had separate corps. We had the waves and the wax, and they did wonderful work at home, and it was great. And they paid the way for someone like me to be able to serve today in any type of career I want. So I thank them. But it's an evolutionary process. And as long as we keep talking about it and we keep chipping away and we keep making those opportunities available, I think we'll eventually get to the point where things seem more even. And I'll answer the last question because I want to turn it over to Paulina about the DRC. The military justice system, because it's more effective and it's local, and because there's control over those soldiers, like you said, docking the pay, it's more effective. And that's why I think that that's the importance of mixed legal systems, right? Some work better in some situations than others. There's been debate if we're talking about comparative military justice about why do we even need a military justice system in the United States anymore? I mean, there are some commentators that have asked that. And the interesting thing I think that came about because of Iraq and Afghanistan is that sometimes if you don't have a military justice system, you don't have jurisdiction. Because the U.S. system has worldwide jurisdiction. It's based on your status. It's not based on your location. Whereas if you bring that back to the United States, you're talking about witnesses from around the world and you're talking about a whole host of complex issues that those barriers are brought down when you have a military justice system, I think you can make arguments for the fact that even though the United States is in a different position than the DRC, that there's still some relevance. And so that even though there are systems different from the civilian system, that there still is relevance when you're talking about remoteness, location, good order and discipline issues in that area to be able to actually affect punishment that is meaningful. Thank you. Thank you for the question on the DRC and I certainly agree with a lot of points that Kathleen made. Our organization has been implementing programs to combat gender-based violence as a weapon of war in the DRC since 2008. And one of the main strategies is to bring military justice courts to the locations where the atrocities are committed. And yes, of course, one of the main reasons why we have those trials is to ensure that perpetrators are punished for the atrocities that they committed. And yes, there are problems with prisons and we have done programming to address the prison issues, but it's not the only purpose of those trials. There are many other purposes, even decreasing impunity in general in the country for these kinds of offenses. And because of those trials take place in front of the affective communities, it really brings the sense of resolution for many of the people affected. So I don't think that this is only about punishment. And I think part of your question was about encouraging women to access formal justice system versus informal justice systems. Is that right? I'm a lawyer, right? And if I were representing a plaintiff in the DRC, clearly it's good for the system and for recruiting governments to do a law to take those cases to the formal system, have them take place in an open court, but I would have an ethical boundary given my responsibility to be an individual client saying you're going to get a fairer shake in the formal system than you would if we pursued something in a more customary way, which is going to be faster, which is going to be more amicable, which is an unlikely result in you getting more damages than you might through the formal system. Right, and I think a lot of lawyers struggled with this, right? I think, you know, for us, it's not about actually encouraging individual litigants to choose. It's giving them information about what, you know, what system works in what way. So providing them legal awareness and legal education and providing them information about pros and cons about those two systems, but it's also about strengthening the provision and the delivery of justice, whether it's in the informal or formal justice courts. And I think, you know, a lot of times, you know, we operate on grants and, you know, sometimes we may receive, you know, a grant to do programming with the formal justice system and you may think that this is not affecting, you know, what's going on on the local level, but it's not necessarily true because in many countries, not in all, appeals from, for example, local courts go to the formal justice system. So even, you know, training magistrates that hear those appeals on issues that are very relevant to women at the very local level helps to make the justice system delivery more effective and as a result, build trust within the communities to access the justice systems. But I think, you know, I don't know, I think all sort of rule of law implementers and development practitioners struggle with this issue. You know, even when you have victims of domestic violence, you know, here you feel like, yes, you know, you must go to the court and the perpetrator must be punished and put into jail, but this doesn't always take into account the realities on the ground and, you know, for example, the issue of compensation for victims, the issue of their protection in the formal legal system and also the fact that often the perpetrators of domestic violence are the main sort of breadwinners for the family. So we need to also think about what systems are in place to ensure that the victims of domestic violence, you know, have livelihood after their abusers go to jail and, for example, that the families of the husband or of the spouse don't resort to property grabbing, basically leaving, you know, the woman and the children on the streets. So I think it's a much more complex issue than, you know, just saying, you know, having this very sort of legalistic approach to, you know, let's take this person to court and put him to jail. You know, I personally struggle with it. I don't know if others have sort of any comments on this on the panel. I'll just say a couple of quick things. I know we're getting close to running out of time. I think the interesting question and I know we've talked a lot about it since the trip we took to DRC and many of you I know have worked there, too. But I think the issue to me is how we ensure that we are educating people about the systems, but also I think ensuring that we're not ignoring the fact that, you know, if people feel they're not going to get a transparent, fair and, you know, accessible resolution of their dispute, right, the standards that we think people probably look to to resolve disputes, they're going to go to a system that gives them some part of that and I think our goal should be to ensure that we don't ignore that that happens. And then think about how to ensure that those systems are imbued with the standards that are, you know, the kind of standards that can make people feel like they're getting a good forum to resolve their dispute or at least the best forum possible because, you know, people are forum shopping, right, they're looking for how do I get this dispute resolved, they may choose to go to a less formal system because it's faster, but can we also help that system be more transparent, be more accountable, have clearer rules, be more attuned to the specific needs that particularly women have because I think that's obviously why we're here today to talk about how to ensure that we're looking to ensure that women have appropriate and equitable access to justice. So I think we need to be thinking about that when we're looking at the two sorts of systems that, or multiple types of systems, but two type, you know, sort of general types of systems that people might go to. Thank you. We've been given another 10 minutes by the organizers, so thank you, and I'm going to go ahead and take one or two more questions. I see we have a question in the back. Good afternoon. My name is Kelsey. I'm also a U.S. military veteran, and we'll be going to law school this fall. And yeah, I joined the military at a young age, and I guess never thought of myself as living in mixed legal system with the Constitution and the UCMJ. So my question is about how are legal renderings transferred between the two legal systems? So when veterans leave the service, they're back in the civilian court system, and so there was an article that came on a couple months ago about convicted rapists in the military that when they shifted to this back to civilian society that reputation didn't follow into their state. They weren't registered sex offenders, and so a girl became another victim of this individual. And when her mother found out that he had been a convicted rapist in the military, of course she was very upset because I guess it's on a volunteer basis for these individuals to register in the state. So there seems to be some gaps when people are transferring between the two systems. Thank you. And are there any other questions? Okay, I think we have one over on this side of the room. Thank you. Just to broaden out the discussion a little bit into looking at the roles of courts. So I think that question got to the informational role a little bit. And how does the mixed system need to balance those interests differently? So in a traditional formal system where you're publishing the decisions in some kind of written or official forum, as opposed to a traditional system where it might be an oral judgment, how do you try and harmonize those interests when you're working to reform or strengthen a mixed system, particularly in light of the kind of considerations that go into gender focused cases. I know there was a panel earlier where we discussed land rights where that's clearly an information heavier area, but gender-based violence might be an area where information is more sensitive and therefore there might be a greater interest in privacy. Any other questions? Okay, I'm going to turn the last two questions over to our panelists and invite them to first respond to one or both questions and then also to offer any closing remarks that they might have and so you each have about three minutes. Well, I'll take Kelsey's question about military justice system. First to clarify, the Constitution applies. Even when you wear uniform, the Constitution applies. Now where it gets more complicated is that there are limitations on your constitutional rights that don't exist for civilians who are not wearing the uniform. So that there are decisions that are made that say your freedom of speech is somewhat limited, more limited. Obviously, that's one example. When you're wearing uniform, then we're not. You know, as you're aware because you've served, the UCMJ limits words that you can say against the President because the President is the Commander-in-Chief, limits what you can say about Congress because, of course, they have oversight of the military. And so to ensure that we have civilian oversight of the military, it was determined that those constitutional rights are limited so that we keep our military from essentially taking over the government, having a military coup. So that's why those rights are balanced like that. So any limitation that's placed on your constitutional rights is under scrutiny. It's supposed to be directly related to military function, military mission. And that's always a balance that sometimes makes its way up to the Supreme Court. And those make for interesting cases for sure. To get to your comment about sex offenders, the military justice system does when you get a court-martial conviction, that's a conviction. And it can be entered into the sex offender registration system. What you pointed out is a process failure for sure. And it's something that I think a lot of the states have become aware of. It's a state-by-state process depending on where your conviction takes place. That's the issue, right, because the military justice system is a global system. So let's say your conviction was overseas. What state is going to be the one with responsibility for ensuring that that conviction gets entered into the system? There are cases that I'm aware of just from my time when I spent in Alaska where there were people pressing for having those systems more closely tied together, having a court-martial conviction entered into the sex registration system for that very reason. But you definitely point out something that I think needs work. It's a procedural gap. It's not that those court-martial convictions cannot get entered into the system. That's not the barrier. The barrier I think is more in trying to figure out in a large bureaucracy how people don't slip through the cracks and making it effective. You bring up a very valid point. But it is that interplay between how you have a conviction and what the consequences are. For instance, I think you have these cases that are in the news where that happens in the civilian system, where somebody gets let out on, say, probation or parole, commits another crime. And there's criticism about why that particular judge or why that particular court, why that particular defendant was granted freedom early in order to go out and commit another crime. So certainly you could look at both systems and say that there are issues, the similar issues, I think, between the civilian system as well as the military justice system. I did have one thing I wanted to add about the DRC. I think you would ask me about whether we send people over to work on military justice issues with the Congolese and the answer is yes for many years now. I mean, I know of people in the United States military at the behest of the Department of State. We work together. There's the Defense International Institute of Legal Studies that works on funding to bring people in that are qualified to send to the DRC. You know, the Canadian government is very active in providing people to be able to assist the Congolese in building the military justice system. So the answer is yes. There's kind of like a mentee relationship in bringing people and training people and bringing judges in and qualified prosecutors to ensure that that system continues to work. Thank you. So gender based violence and domestic violence. I mean, this is such a, you know, it's a very difficult topic when you know, when you talk about formal versus informal justice systems. Technically speaking in many countries that have mixed legal systems, criminal matter issues are not supposed to be adjudicated by at the, you know, local level by informal justice system. Technically they should go to the justice system. In practice, you know, this doesn't happen all the time and there are many different reasons why women would not report a crime to the police and why they would not want to engage in sort of formal prosecution. And there are issues with privacy and confidentiality in both systems. So I think, you know, it's important for organizations like ours and, you know, for other implementers as well to educate both formal justice actors and informal justice actors and promote victim-centric prosecution in the formal justice system and make sure that women who, you know, who approach the informal justice actors about those issues have some sort of help and representation. For example, by well-trained paralegal or paralegals and social advocates. I think it's also important to, you know, train justice system actors, judges and prosecutors on their use of discretion in terms of charging versus not charging certain individuals in some countries. I've heard that accusing women of witchcraft is one of the defenses that perpetrators use in cases of rape or domestic violence and witchcraft is a crime in a penal code. So technically, the, you know, women who are victims can be prosecuted for a crime. You know, in other countries, they may be prosecuted for adultery, for example. So the use of discretion about prosecuting those crimes is a big issue. And my final comment, you know, I think it's very important to mention the engagement of men and boys in promoting equality of women and engaging them in combating gender-based violence and domestic violence. I, you know, I heard, there was an excellent TED talk. I forgot who spoke, but he said that, you know, these are not women's issues. These are human rights issues and women and men have sort of equal responsibility of working together on resolving those issues. I think it's very important. And there are excellent organizations that work specifically on engaging men and boys. We partner with one of those organizations, Premundo, on our global gender-based violence response initiative with vital voices, also an IOM. And Premundo, you know, they are, they really specialize in engaging men and boys. There is also men-engaged network all over the world. So I highly encourage you to look into those sort of strategies and techniques. Thank you. I get to be the last one. Okay. Just responding to the question about harmonizing sort of in a mixed system, how do you harmonize and strengthen? I think the question to ask is, what can we learn? What can each system learn from each other? And are there things that are working in a formal system that if they can be utilized and sort of the more informal part of the legal of the justice system can learn from them? Are there things that we see that in an informal or tribal system, maybe around community norms and how those get used in law? Do those help in any way? Does it help sort of more of a community mediation approach in certain kinds of disputes? I don't know the answer, but I think the question is a very good one. And I think the ultimate thing we need to ask is how can we look at these systems and learn what is working to both ensure that everybody has the right to equal justice or to justice and that we're striving towards systems that do help us get to a place where disputes can be resolved in a timely, fair, accessible manner that's predictable, etc. In my view, those are the goals, should be our goals. So I think it's more about how do we learn as we're working in multiple systems in multiple countries, because I think that's a very specific question that can really get to a lot of very important outcomes and approaches to really designing systems that can be much more effective all around for everyone, because as we've talked about during the day, people are looking for that system that's going to get them where they want to be sooner rather than later perhaps, or at least in a way that they perceive is the place where they will do the best by whatever their equities are. So I want to close by saying thanks again to everybody who's been a part of putting this together and say that I think one of the most important things that this conference has been about is about really focusing us all on thinking about how women fare in various justice systems, and I think that's a part of a bigger discussion that's going on around the world and work that we all do, our office does, many, many people do, to think about how we make institutions much more fair in general, so that the rule of law is important, justice sector is important, but so is every other institution, and they're all interrelated. So if we can help women gain political rights, economic rights, and help them have a bigger place in those systems, not only do we see better outcomes in terms of economic growth or in terms of the quality, hopefully of the laws that get passed and the issues that get raised, but I think that has an impact on the type of justice that is also available to people in their countries and their communities. I want to end on one note. I feel I always say this when I speak to groups and I'm glad you mentioned the role of men and boys. I would say this a little differently, yes, engaging men and boys is important, but I also think we need to be mindful, and I know one speaker said this before, women are not all alike, we are not a homogeneous group, and men are not homogeneous, so there are, and not all women are victims, not all women are good, not all men are bad. We need to be mindful that this is a complex landscape of people and that we're engaging people to help us make these changes not only at every level of the system, not only in every country, but that we're looking for the people who really want to help us have systems that are more fair, that give everybody an equal shot at the justice they deserve, and that we don't make assumptions all the time about who can help us do that the best. So we hope that we can continue this discussion later, and thank you again for all the work to put this together. Thank you, Kathleen, as usual, for, I work with Kathleen on many things and I'm surprised she still talks to me half the time, but thank you. Thank you also to our participants who joined in the conversation today. Thank you to everyone. We're going to move right into the last session, so if you'll bear with us, we'll just take one minute to transition and then do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I think we're going to get started, if we could, with our last session of the day. My name is Joel Samuels. I'm the director of the rule of law collaborative. In my 15 years as a law professor, I've never before moderated a panel of zero, but that was my role today. As Hamid mentioned this morning, for those of you who are here, Pyle Shaw, who was going to present a case study to us, gave birth on Wednesday night to a daughter, her second child, their daughter, Maya, and down in Columbia, wasn't able to make it. We were going to have her appear via Skype, but she's still in the hospital today. So mother and baby are fine, but what I wanted to do then was just take a few minutes and talk a little bit about Pyle's research, highlight that for you, talk a little bit about the work of JustTrack and the rule of law collaborative, and then I've asked to me to sit up here with me, A, so I didn't feel so lonely, and B, so that he could wrap up our day's proceedings. The first thing I want to ask you to do is if you look in your packets that we've given you, in addition to the agenda and bios, there's a two-page front and back longer description of the project that Pyle is engaged in. It's a very important project and very relevant to today's proceedings, and it focuses on a program in Gujarat region of India called the MS program, which focuses on women's and girls' education and specifically education through human rights training, and she has done and will through the JustTrack program grant this summer be doing additional follow-up research on that program, its effectiveness, its impact on rule of law, the communal aspects of the program and their power, and I think that I won't go further into it except to point you in the direction of her program. Talking about that does give me the opportunity to mention a couple of things about JustTrack. First, this symposium is the first of what will be over the course of five years, 15 symposia that will be put on by JustTrack, and we're very excited first of all to have had this as our first topic to have had the attendance and participation that we've had and we're excited for the future symposia. The next two for this year will be abroad, but next year two of the three symposia will be in Washington, and all of that information will be available on our website, which is also in your course materials, the Rolk website as well as a separate JustTrack website, giving you a lot of information about all of this, but what I'll also tell you is that by attending today you will have been added to a quarterly newsletter that we'll put out on JustTrack that will update you about going on not just related to our programming, but in general related to rule of law, and this will keep you clued into the other symposia that we have, and we hope that you'll come to those future events. Our JustTrack program with the State Department is a big part of what we do with the rule of law collaborative, and the symposia are one portion of that program. The program also includes training in rule of law, two-day trainings our next session will be in June, open to the US government at this stage, focused on interagency cooperation and collaboration in rule of law programming, the newsletter and website which I hope you'll visit, and most important for the panel that would have happened today is research support for two faculty at the University of South Carolina to do research that is both focused on rule of law and connected to the programming of JustTrack, and so you see the work that Pyle is doing, Pyle is a professor in our College of Education, and a part of who spoke earlier to you will be heading to Uganda to do research this summer as well, supported by that same grant. The results of their research will be produced in a white paper that they'll be producing by the end of September, and that information will be summarized and posted on the website and available to the newsletter, so you'll be able to see the fruits of their labors and hopefully connect with them if you have any questions or information that you want to learn. I want to join sort of before turning over to Hamid in the chorus of those thanking the partners in this event. USIP has been a wonderful partner. What wasn't said earlier is that Hamid as you know, as many of you will know was at USIP before coming, so I was glad to see that the hospitality was still there for all of us, having stolen him down to the rule of law as the new deputy director for us, and we're hopeful and this, I think, gives strong indication that this will solidify the relationship between the two organizations, and most important are partners at INL who are granting agency and with whom we have this collaborative agreement and with whom we work very closely in these activities and we look forward to working closely with going forward. You'll have known a lot about USIP and INL before you got here. You'll have known very little, if anything, about the rule of law collaborative, and so I wanted to spend one minute telling you a little bit about us and what we do. You have, again, some information on us in your materials, but we are one of the leading centers on academic centers on rule of law in the country. It's a dangerous term to use, by the way, because we're also one of the only academic centers focused on rule of law in the country, so it depends whether you start counting from the top or the bottom where you get when you get to us. But we have a robust program that includes workshops and conferences on our campus focused on issues related to rule of law. We held a major conference on corruption last year and that was an academic conference that, like many of our events, and I think I was very happy that when a partner was talking earlier the moderator of our panel commented when she was done about the policy focus of her work and one of the things that we really focus on is that although we are an academic center we're very policy-oriented, policy-driven. We are not interested in writing for an academic audience only and we support research and work being done by faculty on campus with that very much in mind. We do other programming too. We are developing a fellows program that will have different aspects, including a short-term fellows program that will be open to government officials and leaders in civil society to take three to six weeks sabbaticals come down to us and we will provide an environment and some financial support for them to produce an article or work on the kinds of things that you don't get time to do in your day-to-day job to sort of sit back and reflect and share lessons learned or experiences or questions raised by the work that you're doing on a day-to-day basis and we're also in the process of developing a peer-to-peer workshop process that will focus on rule of law development around the world. The last point I want to make about the work we do is that we and I want to pick up actually on the comment that Stephanie made before in her sort of closing remarks of the last panel we do not view rule of law as a question simply of laws and legal institutions and it's very important to us that we embrace a very broad approach to rule of law. We have more than 60 faculty affiliates on our campus in departments ranging from the ones that you might expect, law, political science history to social work, public health, anthropology, geography and really anything under the sun. When I took over as director last July as a law professor, most people assumed that on campus even that this would lead to an even more strong orientation towards laws and legal institutions and they were surprised to learn as I worked my way around campus in the fall that my orientation is as much focused on access to water, access to education as it is access to justice that it's all part of a larger picture and if we only focus on access to justice we're in a myopic world where we're not actually making the kinds of meaningful, sustainable change that we all care about and that's important to our work. I think it distinguishes us from the other centers, academic centers focused on rule of law. I think it's exciting and this has been enforced in our institution by a change in our reporting structure we now report to the provost of the university and again this really emphasizes our interdisciplinary nature and that's that's a feature that we're very proud of and that focuses not only our work on our campus but the work we're doing through JustTrack and I think everything you've seen today and the hard work that so many people have put in to have such an interdisciplinary and broad based group government civil society and beyond on the panels in the audience I think really reflects our focus and at the collaborative so I'll stop there I wanted to share that with you and I will now turn things over to Hamid. So I want to conclude our symposium today by first of all offering my thanks, my personal thanks to the folks here at USIP who have always been proven not only generous but always a natural place for the nexus that we always seek to have, policymakers, practitioners academics and the like so this has always been a welcome place and a necessary gateway for the work particularly to Nicoletta Barbera who has been a staunch and worthy soldier and all the requests that we've made and answering our emails at the dead of night and to Kathleen Kunis who has always been my long time supporter here at USIP and the director of the Gender and Peace Building Program here at the institute. I have to say that we have covered a gamut of different subjects they're important ones worthy of particular attention and hopefully you have drawn as much from it as I have in terms of the important lessons learned and finally to bid you all a very nice weekend as we enjoy the remaining winning hours of this Friday. Thank you very much.