 Welcome everybody. I'm Massimo Tomazzoli. I'm the Permanent Observer for International Idea to the United Nations and Director of Global Programs at International Idea and I will be moderating today a side event promoted by the SDG16 data initiative on the margins of the high-level political forum on sustainable development at the United Nations. The title of today's meeting is Progress on SDG16. How are we doing and what happens if we fail? This is going to be an interesting panel. We have different speakers who are presenting from some of the 17 organizations that compose the SDG16 data initiative, a project that was launched in 2015 and has the aim of monitoring progress on the implementation of SDG16 by combining official and non-official data. We promote a website on these data where you can combine the indicators that are produced by the United Nations and by member states on SDG16 with indicators that are produced by some of the partners or aggregated and disseminated by others. We also produce an annual global report. The report from 2021 is this one and we are in the process of working and developing the report on 2022. Today actually we'll provide an opportunity to dig into some of the preliminary findings that our partner associations are presenting in the context of the high-level political forum. Without further ado, I will now introduce the first speaker who is my colleague Miguel Angel Lara Otaola, who is a senior democracy assessment specialist at International ADEA. Miguel, you are the floor. Thank you. Thank you dear Massimo and hello everyone. Welcome today to this presentation. I am delivering the first presentation as it is more general in content and has the aim of showing how SDG16, peace, justice and strong institutions matters for achieving other SDGs and how SDG16 and democracy more broadly is a threshold condition and contributes to development. Without further ado, I will start sharing my presentation. Sorry Miguel, we cannot hear you. Me now? I apologize, I don't know what happened. So I was saying that I will deliver the first presentation because it's a more general presentation, it's more general in content and has the aim of showing how SDG16, which deals with peace, justice and strong institutions can contribute to the achievement of other SDGs and how SDG16 and democracy more largely is a threshold condition to development. So with that, I will start by showing some of the data that we have at International ADEA that can be used, as you mentioned, to track SDG16. So here's my presentation. And I will start first with our own definition of democracy, which has to do with popular control over public decision making and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control. So as you can see, this definition is not reduced to having periodical clean elections, but also involves other components like fundamental rights, like the rule of law. And these, as you can see, they're more naturally linked, better connected to SDG16. And the way we do this, we take this definition of democracy and we divide it into five main attributes, which is the second level circle that you can see in the presentation, and then 16 sub attributes, and we get scores for those. And these enable us to track a number of fundamental components of democracy. And using this data has some advantages to use as a complement to official indicators. Well, first it comes from an independent institution. These data, the global state of democracy indices, are very rich and have a wide coverage. We have 116 different indicators for 173 countries. And as you could see in this slide before, we measure aspects ranging from judicial independence, clean elections, freedom of expression, freedom of association. So there's a wealth of data there. And also another advantage is that these indices are updated annually. We started measuring, we have data going from 1975 to 2021, and every year we update this. So that is really useful for all types of research. Also, it's easily obtainable. It's public. We have a website where you can download the data. We have interactive maps where you can play with. It's quite useful. And most importantly, as I mentioned, it's a good complement to the official SDG16 indicators, as they offer a more comprehensive view. For instance, here I wrote target 16.3. For this target, the main, the official indicators talk about victims of violence, unsentenced detainees, and access to a dispute mechanism. But as we all know, the rule of law is not limited to that. It also has to do with judicial independence, with a fair trial, with laws being enforced across all cases, with having strong access to justice, respecting due process, and of course, compliance with the law. So these complementary indicators are not only the ones offered by international idea, but by our partners, five of which are participating in this panel today is a good complement to the official data, because they have a more broad measure of the underlying concepts. These are some of the key targets that you can track using international ideas data. The main ones 16.3, 16.5, 16.6, and 16.7. And just to give you, before I get into the subject matter, an example of how these can be used, here we graphed a couple of the sub-attributes that we measure and took a selection of countries. So you can see the performance between 1975 and 2021. So first here for absence of corruption, we did graph for New Zealand, Turkey, Somalia, Venezuela, and you can see how these countries have either decreased or increased throughout the years. No surprises there with Turkey and Venezuela, for instance, access to justice. We have cases at the top at the bottom and others that have made some improvements in the last decades. You can see the big jump in Poland and South Africa after apartheid in the second case and after the fall of the Berlin Wall for the case of Poland. So this is just to give you an idea of how our indices can be used to track SDG 16 for different countries and across time. But after this advertisement, why is this important? As I said, SDG 16 is connected to democracy more broadly and democracy is very important both in itself and for development. Here I speak about democracy's double value. I won't go into details. There's a number of authors and academics that mentioned that democracy is not only important because it yields important relevant empirical results and has positive consequences, but also because democracy is important in itself. It has an inherent benefit. To just give you one example, Cohen in 1971 talked about the justification and vindication of democracy and where vindication is related to its consequences, it's more empirical, justification means that it's right in itself because it's based on moral principles. In this case, what he raised was the principle that we are equals and equals should be treated equally. Democracy has this value in itself. In itself, political freedom is desirable and political and social participation has an intrinsic value for human life. But democracy is not only valuable because of that. It also has consequences and this is democracy's instrumental value because democracy basically enhances the hearing that people get in expressing and supporting their claims. Here the best example is Amartya Sen's claim that famines do not occur in democracies. By doing a comparison between China and India in the 60s and 70s, he claimed that China suffered a famine while India didn't, even when India was poor that China at the time. The reason why is that India was a democracy and their people had different mechanisms to push their government or make themselves heard to avert these kind of disasters. That does not only apply to famines. In any other country, you can always protest, you can write a letter to your MP, you can go to your local radio station and most importantly, you can vote. That's a big incentive for governments to deliver or to try to deliver. Democracy, it's important because of the mechanism itself and then this mechanism brings about positive effects in a number of areas. There's a long list of research showing democracy's contribution and here in the second set of bullet points, I describe this. Some of them have measured and demonstrated that democracies achieve higher GDP and GDP per capita. Also, others have focused that democracies perform better in other social indicators like literacy, education. Others have focused in its distributional consequences and how democracy has a possibility to reduce economic inequality. Here, what I am doing is showing a little bit of this of democracy's potential to deliver with hard facts and using our own data. As I mentioned, that international idea, we have five main attributes and 16 sub-attributes. We measure different aspects of democracy and here you can see, of course, we are measuring democracies. So, democracies will have a better performance than other types of regimes, but here you can see that for all of our attributes, democracies, which is the lighter shade of green, perform better than authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Of course, this is quite evident, but if out of these 16 sub-attributes, we focus on five that do not necessarily have to do with the way democracy works and more like its outcome. So, corruption, access to justice, basic welfare, gender equality and social group equality, as you can see in the bar chart, democracies have a higher score, perform better than hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Moreover, I took a couple of different SDGs, the other SDGs, because as I mentioned at the beginning, one of the objectives of this presentation is to show that SDG 16, rule of law, strong institutions, peace, justice, can help achieving these other SDGs. So, here I focus on SDG 3, which has to do with good health and well-being. And first, I show how democracies have better scores in basic welfare, which includes, amongst other things, health than hybrids and authoritarians. And then the second graph shows that even when we're controlling by GDP per capita, democracies perform better in universal health coverage. The same argument stands for SDG 5, which has to do with gender equality. In the first two graphs, I show how using the global state of democracy in this data, democracies perform better than hybrids and authoritarians for gender equality and for social group equality. And then in the second graph in the scatterplot, I show how democracies have more women in managerial positions in government than non-democratic regimes. And finally, I wanted to show this quote from Norberto Bobio, an Italian political theorist who that explains the causal mechanism in a very good way and also explains the birth of the welfare state. So, he says that political rights are a catalyst for economic and social rights. And he says that when only people that owned property could vote, then property was protected. But then when the vote was extended to a literal people, these people asked and pushed the state to create preschools. Then when the vote was extended to people that did not have property, so those that only had their own labor, their own hands, the consequences that these people that were now empowered and could vote, they requested and then obtained social protection from the state. So, he says, and he ends by saying that the origin of the welfare state is a response to a demand coming from below, in essence to a democratic request. And here I use this data to explain this. I mean, unfortunately for this indicator, the World Bank only has data for African countries, so not for the entire world, but this shows the equity of public resource spending and which assesses the extent to which expenditures and revenue collection affect the poor. And as you can see here, democracies which are marked in green have a better performance in distributing resources than non-democratic regimes, illustrating in a very quantitative way the quote by Bobbio. And with this, what I want to say is that democracy and development are not two separate concepts. First, because as we have seen, SDG 16 and democracy can and do contribute to other SDGs. I showed you SDG 3, SDG 5, but also and more importantly, because democracy matters in itself. Having a voice, having the freedom to choose the possibility to participate and being equal, that is important in itself. A few slides back, I didn't go into detail, but I showed a quote by Kant and he said that something that produces value can always be replaced by something else that produces value. And I'm thinking about this in the case of the current debate that China delivers an authoritarian regime delivers better than democracies. But what Kant says is that while something that produces value can be substituted by something else that produces value, something that has dignity cannot be replaced. And that is democracy. And it is because of this that democracy in itself is development. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Miguel, for your presentation. You're making the case for democracy and development. Democracy has a dual role, a dual value, an intrinsic value, and also an instrumental value for delivering, as you said. Our next speaker is Toby Mendel. He's the founder and executive director of the Center for Law and Democracy. Before giving you the floor, Toby, I want to remind all participants that you may post your questions or comments in the chat. I've seen already one of you has done so, and we'll get back to you during the Q&A session. Toby, you are the floor. Thank you very much. I hope everyone can hear me. I'd like to start by making just a little comment on the sort of threatening nature of the title of this session. What happens if we fail? And I just want to say that for me, my focus in that regard is what will happen in terms of the overall achievement of the SDGs and not the wider human impact of that. I'm not going to probe into that. Although, of course, I recognize that the two are very closely related. In other words, if we don't make progress in achieving the SDGs, you know, that's the implications for humanity, of course, are very, very serious. And the starting point of my presentation is that we are not quite, but almost to the halfway point of the SDGs. They started in September of 2015, so the exact halfway point is March 2023, but, you know, over a 30-year time, oh, sorry, a 15-year time frame, you know, we're pretty close to the halfway point for this purpose. And I'm going to start with making some comments on indicator, SDG indicator 1610.2, which is about the adoption and implementation of laws giving people a right to access information held by public authorities. And then I'm going to link that to the other SDG 16 targets. Then I'll say a very few words about progress on those 16 targets, and then I'm going to link it all to the other SDGs. So if we're looking at progress on the SDGs, I would start by noting that what that means within the framework of the SDGs is very, very unclear. If you look at the indicators, many of them, for example, talk about, you know, the proportion of the countries, of the world, of the people that, you know, for example, have clean water or educational opportunities. Many of them refer to the number, for example, of countries that do something or don't do something, or one of them, for example, talks about the number of people that die from climate change causes. So, you know, these are very numerical things. Obviously, we want those percentages and numbers to go up or down, depending on what they are, positive or negative things. But there's nothing really built into the SDGs that say how far they should go up or down. So it's a little bit different from the MDGs where they had much harder and clearer targets. So you really have to define what success is basically indicator by indicator. So focusing now on indicator 16.10.2. And as I said, it looks at the adoption and implementation of what I will call right to information laws, again, laws giving individuals a right to access information held by public authority, so opening up government. By September 2015, the beginning of the SDGs, 107 of the 193 UN member states had such laws, such laws or regulations or legal instruments giving effect to that right. So that left us with 96 that didn't. As of today, we have added 26 more, so between September 2015 and today. So that's approximately 27% of the 96 that we were missing. And here it's where my comments before about what constitutes success really become important. If the goal is to reduce the 96 by half, so to get halfway to everyone, then 27% at the halfway point is more than halfway to 50% by the endpoint. And you could call it a success. Personally, as an expert, really focusing on this issue. And when I think about how extremely modest an objective it is simply to pass a law giving effect to this right. I mean, it's not a big lift for countries, you know, reducing poverty. I mean, that actually requires some heavy lifting, passing a law fairly easy. I would say we should at least be aiming for three quarters of the way. So only leaving a quarter of the countries that didn't have them before. And then we're only 36% of the way at the halfway point. So we are failing. We're not making the progress that we need to make to get there. And in case people think, well, you know, maybe it takes a little while to warm up and get going on these things. I'd note that 2016 and 2017. So the first two full years of the SDGs were by far the strongest years in this area. Indeed, half of the 26 laws were adopted in those two years. And we have really slowed down since then. So it's not like we had some difficulties getting going. We actually were going better before and we're slowing down. Of course, COVID had a negative impact in this area like it did everywhere. But already by 2019, only one country had adopted a new law. And so far in 2022, we don't have any countries that have adopted a law. So I mean, I think, you know, we can't blame either the early start or the COVID period for the challenges in this area. Now, implementation of these laws is a much more important in a sense, and a much more complicated issue to assess. And we don't have the same kind of precise, exact data on that, because it's simply not possible to generate it. However, various actors have done a tremendous amount of work to assess progress in terms of how we're doing on implementation. And I would say that, you know, without being able to give the numerical indicators that I gave before, I think there's very little sign of clear improvement on this issue in most countries. That's not to say that some countries haven't made important progress on implementation. Certainly there are some, but overall, I don't think we're doing very well on that. So in this, you know, on this indicator, at the halfway point, we are nowhere near, in my opinion, what we need to do to, you know, what we should be setting ourselves as success goals. And looking now at the relationship between RTI, as I call it, and other SDG-16 targets, just 16, we, in preparation for this presentation, we did some research on three of them, some of which Miguel also mentioned, 16.3, the rule of law, 16.5, you know, control and corruption, and 16.6, accountable institutions. And I mean, due to the time, I'm not going to go into great detail on what we found. But basically, we found that there are incredibly strong linkages between the achievement of these, you know, different sets of targets. And I think the strong indicator of that is not just what the access to information my community is saying, but each of the expert groups, in fact, multiple expert groups working in each of those areas, has always stressed the importance of RTI to the achievement of their issue. And I'll just give, as one kind of dominant example of this, the UN Convention Against Corruption, so the world-leading legal treaty against corruption specifically calls on states to adopt RTI laws as part of the support measures for controlling corruption. So I don't think you can get a stronger statement of the link between the two of them. I'm not going to try to talk about how far we are in terms of achieving the other SDG-16 targets. Indeed, that is the people, the other panelists on this show, on this presentation will talk about that. But we've been following it fairly closely as part of the SDG-16 data initiative since the outset. And this is one of the claims I'm going to make a claim now. And I really hope that somebody proves me wrong about this. But I think I can say with some confidence that by and large, progress on all of the SDG-16 targets has been relatively weak. And I know one presenter today is going to disagree with that. And I'm happy for that because, of course, we all want to see this progress. But by and large, I think we have a long way to go on SDG-16. So my final comments are going to look at the relationship between SDG-16 and the other SDGs. And I want to be a little bit careful here because I recognize that all of the SDGs are fundamentally interconnected. Without education, we are not going to address inequality, reduce poverty, or address climate change. So the relationship between the SDGs is very, very close, almost umbilical all the time, I would say. And I certainly don't want to get into a nitpicking debate about which one is more linked and which one is more important and that kind of thing. But I think it is important to make a couple of comments about the somewhat special nature of SDG-16. And certainly there was enormous progress between the MDGs, which were the goals that were set from 2000 to 2015, and the SDGs the next 15 years from 2015 to 2030. So SDGs are far more sophisticated and developed than the MDGs were. But I think it's fair to say that SDG-16 was the most radical jump in terms of the addition of the SDGs overall. And I would say as well, and I mean a little bit like Miguel mentioned about democracy, SDG-16, which has a lot of different elements to it, of course, but it essentially focuses on what I would say is the wider institutional legal and contextual features that are needed both as elements of sustainable development. So like Miguel said, democracy is a value in its own right. We need these things as part of development, but also as a vehicle for delivering the rest of the SDGs. So I mean I think it's really structurally designed and you know put together in that way. And so to that extent I would say the very nature of SDG-16 and the targets and indicators within it is really about supporting broader progress on the SDGs. In terms of sort of drawing specific links, it's actually surprisingly difficult from a research point of view to come up with empirical evidence of those interlinkages. And I've been you know in my own area been working on that for 20 plus years, so I'm very well aware of that. However, as part of this, we mapped the references in the wider SDGs to the four SDG-16 targets that I've talked about in my presentation, and again Miguel also did, right to information rule of law, anti-corruption and accountable institutions. And I will just say that it's incredible. I mean I was surprised, I expected there to be a lot of cross-references, but it's incredible how relevant references to these values are throughout the whole SDG framework. And I take that as a strong sign of the importance of the linkages. I'm not going to again go into the details or give specific examples of that, but I'll put a little hook in the end of my presentation. As Massimo mentioned, we are this year the SDG-16 data initiative is again publishing a report on this area. And most of what I have been talking about today will be reflected in a couple of the chapters in that report. So of course I hope we have more time to discuss today, but there will be a much richer feed of it when we finish that publication. So please look that up. Thank you. Thank you so much, Toby. Perfect timing. I would like to stress what you said about the fact that we are midway through the implementation. Next year will be a very important year. We are also midway in a very critical period. You refer to the impact of the pandemic and 16 is an SDG that deals also with conflict and we cannot forget the impact of the war of aggression against Ukraine and the persistence of other worlds in different regions of the world. Despite the adoption of these agenda, there are still many elements that actually obscure the bright side of this implementation. But we don't lose hope. Let's listen to the next speaker who is Akila Kolisetti, Senior Advocacy Officer at NAMATI. Akila, you are the floor. Great. Thank you so much, Massimo, for the introduction. Let me just share my presentation. All right. So today I'd like to share a little bit about legal empowerment and our progress towards achieving access to justice for all and the linkages between SDG 16 and all the other SDGs. So I work with NAMATI where we work to advance social and environmental justice and deepen democracy by building a movement of people who know, use, and shape the law, which is what we call legal empowerment. We also convene what we call the Legal Empowerment Network, which is the largest community of grasswood defenders, justice defenders in the world, comprising more than 11,000 individuals, 3,000 organizations. And what we mean by grasswood justice defenders is individuals, community paralegals, grasswood activists who work directly with communities to enable them, work with them through this process, enable them to know, use, and shape the law. They often work with communities to advance citizenship rights, confront gender-based violence, advance land rights and environmental justice, and much more. And so as we know, SDG 16 commits to providing equal access to justice for all by 2030 and Target 16.3 specifically focuses on promoting the rule of law and ensuring equal access to justice for all. But to achieve SDG 16 and Target 16.3, the bottom up work of legal empowerment, it's really critical to ensuring that justice systems can actually function barely and effectively and deliver justice. There's also significant evidence, I believe that SDG 16 and it promotes other sustainable development goals as well. Justice is really what we see as a thread that runs through all 17 SDGs and legal empowerment is really critical piece of that. For example, legal empowerment has been shown to reduce poverty. For example, one study showed that in Liberia, families that worked with community paralegals were able to see increases in their household and child food security. Legal empowerment can also tackle power asymmetries and address social inequalities, including promoting gender equality and supporting SDG 5, for example. And there's double studies. For example, one in Mozambique showed that community paralegals were able to support widows or divorced women who often face significant gender discrimination in their communities with better access to land rights that they have under the law. And there's also studies that show the impact of legal empowerment of efforts in reducing gender-based violence. When it comes to public service delivery, legal empowerment approaches often enable people to monitor, to report on, and influence public service delivery. And that can help governments improve the quality and the availability of those services. In the area of healthcare, for example, grassroots health advocates in Mozambique often raise awareness of the law and people's rights in the healthcare sector. They resolve grievances. And through doing so, they've had significant impact, for example, expanding access to drug treatment for patients, bringing healthcare workers to more rural areas, expanding services at clinics, improving hospital infrastructure, among other things. And finally, around the linkage with climate and environmental justice, in India, for example, community paralegals have worked with communities to document and report industrial activities that are illicit and that affect their health and livelihood. And they followed up and worked with regulators to actually enforce regulations in many cases involving industrial pollution. These are just a few examples, and I think the tip of the iceberg that illustrates how critical legal empowerment can be to not only achieving justice for all, but the entire SDG agenda. And at the same time, as we approach the halfway mark that's been mentioned, toward the 2030 SDG agenda, we really are falling behind on achieving goals 16 and specifically on justice for all. And there's two reasons for that that I want to share today. One is the lack of resources and financing for grassroots justice defenders and organizations. So every year, the legal empowerment network, we conduct an annual survey of our membership. And this year's survey from 2021 showed that only 16% said that their funding situation has improved, while 45% said that their funding situation has worsened. And these are often small grassroots organizations working directly with communities to improve justice, to enable people to understand the law, to use the law. 78% of respondents also said that they have to make cuts to operate or may not be able to operate due to lack of funds. And this number has actually increased over time. So since 2018, we've seen an increase in the financial struggles reported by our membership. The second barrier that many members of our network, grassroots organizations working on justice space is the threats that they face, especially in the case of arriving authoritarianism and closing civic space that we're seeing, as well as war and conflict. So 74% of respondents said they struggle to do legal empowerment work in the country's political and social context. And more than half of them said that the political and social environment has actually worsened compared to the previous year. And finally, 50% of the respondents or members of their organizations or people that they serve have been threatened, arrested or harassed pursuing justice in the last year. So this survey data I think shows just how dire the situation is. We need to direct more finance thing to grassroots justice groups and to do so urgently to achieve goal 16 and the 2030 agenda. And our community of grassroots justice activists in part leveraging this data to make a case for investment was able to successfully advocate for the legal empowerment fund, which is the first ever fund to support frontline activists and movements and provide them with vital core long-term support that they need in order to advance justice and close the justice gap globally. In response to their first call for proposals this year, they received an overwhelming number of applications from small organizations, totaling requests for more than 200 million in funding. And so the demand is really significant and we need to build partnerships between government, private sector, and philanthropy combined to meet this need. And on the issue of protection, we need to continue to push for the protection of grassroots justice defenders. One strong mechanism has been the regional escadoo agreement in Latin America and we need to build on efforts like that. With respect to data coverage, indicator 16.3.3, which was newly adopted in March 2020, measured the number of people who experienced a dispute in the past two years and who accessed a formal or informal dispute resolution mechanism. So data is often collected through legal needs surveys, nationally representative surveys, which are growing in number. The world justice project has a great atlas of legal needs surveys that include more than 230 that have been conducted since 1991. Legal needs surveys can help us understand civil justice issues from the perspective of people. They can help map the diverse pathways that people are taking in order to access justice and resolve their legal problems. And oftentimes they do address elements of legal empowerment. In addition to that, we need to complement official data with non-official data. Grassroots organizations are often, I think, sitting on a treasure trove of evidence and data about the types of disputes that communities are facing, where they are turning to resolve those disputes, their experiences with the justice mechanism, and working with grassroots groups on case management can also yield very rich insight about people's lived experience with justice and can be vital to designing policy solutions to address systemic problems. And not only that, it can reveal critical evidence about what works. And so we need to partner more closely with grassroots justice organizations and resource them to gather and report on and monitor data. And ultimately, we believe that access to justice is more than accessing a formal or informal mechanism, right? It requires understanding one's experience with the justice system, one's legal awareness and understanding and the outcome, whether they were actually able to satisfactorily resolve the justice problem and claim their rights. And oftentimes, grassroots groups, community paralegals, are really key in that process. And so we need to support effort to gather that kind of data as well. And as part of our effort to expand non-official data, we need to invest in additional learning for the field. And that's what we're doing at the Legal Empowerment Network. We have recently launched a learning agenda, which tackles many big questions for our field. For example, how do we combine the power of law and organizing in order to achieve systemic change? What impact do we have? How do legal empowerment strategies help counter repression and threats to our democracy? And by tackling these questions collectively and offering practitioners resources to build their capacity on learning, we can generate very rich evidence that helps us understand what works across different contexts. And we're also supporting a participatory action research project. Eight projects across 12 countries in Southeast Asia and Africa in partnership with IDRC. These projects use legal empowerment strategies across a wide range of issue areas, from access to basic services and informal settlements, to the example here, advancing refugee protection in Southeast Asia in partnership with a network member, asylum aspects. And these projects will engage in deep learning using a participatory action research approach, working closely with communities, with paralegals, with grassroots organizations to design and implement the learning. So just a few recommendations to sum up. You know, we need to pair effort to gather data with a more expansive approach to learning, invest much-needed resources in learning and data collection, specifically in partnership with grassroots organizations, and link to that drawn non-official data to harness existing data that many grassroots organizations already have. Collaborate with them to generate evidence using participatory action research methods. Strengthen collaboration within between government and civil society to collect data. And through data, we can make the stronger case for investment in grassroots justice and legal empowerment and harness the much-needed resources in order to protect grassroots justice defenders. So thank you. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Thanks a lot, Akila. Many interesting points that we'll address also afterwards in the discussion. But I'd like to stress your warning signal about closing civic space, which was rather worrying. Now, the next speaker is Leon Willems, his senior advisor for international partnerships at the Free Press Unlimited. Leon, you're the floor. Thank you so much, Massimo. Before I dive into a couple of slides, I would like to stress that what we're looking at at the moment in terms of trends in the safety of journalists and impunity, which builds on what Akila has just shared with us. Let me go back a little bit into why media and the defense of the freedom of journalists matters for civic space, participation, and so on. First of all, also at the request of the chat, I think it is very important to see that the protection of journalists is always under stress when major conflict erupts. And so we see the deliberate targeting of journalists and the killing of journalists in the war that is being waged by Russia against Ukraine, a number of very graphic and also already investigated incidents show that there has been deliberate killing of journalists, which is a problematic aspect for access to information and our ability as citizens of the world to take note of what is actually happening on the ground. When it comes to the civic space domain, I would say that we did a research study and the link to that is actually in the chat at the moment and you can dig into it. We investigated the access to information vis-à-vis civic space. We think civic space is extremely important that independent media, freedom of information, and the safety of journalists actually have a crucial role in this and independent media, when supported well, actually can deliver on inclusion, especially when all audience have access to independent media, when there's trustworthiness of the media and independent media are seen as credible and in terms of accountability, upward accountability in terms of fighting corruption and downward accountability in delivering on participation and inclusion. And one of the relationships between civic space access to information and the SDG agenda is actually related to the potential of independent trusted information to enhance civic space. It's very important and we see a lack of national ownership for change within the data delivery efforts of member states in the voluntary national review process. There should be much more improved reporting on infringements of rights and we see lack of national coalition building between CSO media and stakeholders from national governments. And that is something we investigated and reported on last year when we were speaking about the free person limited conducted in collaboration with a number of partners, voluntary national reporting, but then on the let's say on the basis of shadow reporting and you can find our report of last year actually in the link that I share now in the chat. And one of the most crucial aspects that we saw is that of the 44 countries that were asked to deliver a voluntary national report last year, only four contributed with data regarding the safety of journalists. And almost none of the other countries actually reported at all about goal 1610 and then more specifically 1610-1 safety of journalists. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because when we did and I'm sorry that I can't share massive data, when we conducted a meeting last week in East Africa, we gathered people around the table from civil society organizations working from Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, etc. Actually the most shared observation is if you want to effectively protect journalists in distress, we need monitoring. We need to have an adequate response, but we cannot consistently monitor because of lack of resources, because of lack of transparent methodology, what system to use and to also have an affordable system. Now if the member states are not reporting on journalist safety, then the shadow reporting of civil society organizations should be focused much more. They can develop effective shadow monitoring, but they're not. Now going back to my initial statement and this is where I will share some of the emergency assistance data that we have and I would like to I hope that you can see my screen now. We have an emergency assistance project and as you can see the amount of emergency requests that is reported, the number of journalists that we need to support in order to escape threats has risen dramatically in 2022 and that is of course due to the war in Ukraine, but not only that. We see a huge surge in temporary relocation requests. In other words journalists are leaving their country. We see a lot of increase on legal support requests indicating that there are problems with journalists being brought into problems because of legal measures countering the defamation. We see a surge in protection materials and then if I go to where these journalists that we supported in the past and actually in this year, where they originate from, you see where some of the evidence on what is happening is actually coming from. Tremendous surge in requests coming from crisis countries, mostly serving people in Ukraine, but increasingly also journalists from Russia. There's a continued problem with journalists in Nigragua and in Myanmar and Afghanistan actually is basically the highlight of last year with almost in total 25,000 requests delivered by Afghan journalists to international members of the Journalist in Distress network, which comprises all civil society organizations internationally that provide assistance. So you see here that there is this problem related to emergencies. Now one of the things that we should look at when we once SDG 1610 action, actually there is also an upside of this. First of all, I would like to stress that never before during crisis we've managed to support so many journalists as in the current two years. So there is more alertness and more awareness of the need to support journalists. There's more incidental case advocacy happening through the media freedom coalition. There is more access to information progress. Toby spoke about it. It is not entirely positive is the glass half full or half empty. Of course, we need more progress on all these things, but a critical shortcoming at the national level is the reporting and the monitoring. And we think that it is really needed to have much more stress on facilitating civil society organizations locally to do adequate monitoring of journalist safety. Now, another issue that we investigated in the last year and I think it's also relevant to share Free Press Unlimited has conducted 10 deep investigations into cold cases of journalist killing in countries that are ranking very high in the impunity index of the Committee to Protect Journalists. So that is countries like India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, etc. And we did these investigations into cold cases because basically after 10 years you can conclude that justice has not been served. So by reinvestigating these cases with judicial actors, lawyers, civil society organizations, there's a couple of notions that we would like to share with you. First of all, you see that the impunity level in countries with a federal constitution like Mexico, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, etc. You see that if provisions for the safety and protection of journalists exist and legal provisions exist to prosecute crimes against journalists, at the subnational level these provisions are failing. So cases of crime against journalists on the subnational level, and for example the Philippines, are not prosecuted adequately, whereas the federal level exists but they are not being referred there. That is a common outcome. The second thing that I would like to say is that in most of the shortcomings that we found into investigations, one of the things we see is that the crime scene investigations have not been conducted properly. Basically on the basis of the Minnesota protocol, which should be familiar to all police departments around the world, you see a lot of bad crime scene investigations, you see many eyewitnesses that have not been heard by the police or by the investigating authorities and we've managed in these 10 cold cases to investigate that we investigated, we were able to find new evidence. Now where does that lead us? It basically lead us to say that there's a lot of space for the improvement of legal practices. Best practices should be shared much more often. UNESCO actually produced guidelines for investigators on how to improve on crime scene investigations. These guidelines are not being followed all the time. But one of the most important things that we really have as a recommendation is that when you look at the non-emerging crises, so not the war-related crimes against journalists, but rather the crimes against journalists that are happening in countries that are at peace, so like the ones that we did in cold case investigations, you see a very high in the data sets, collaboration between corruption investigations and the killing of journalists. So whenever journalists get close to people in power and they really get close, that is when impunity happens. This research is currently being investigated and we're going to produce that at the People's Tribunal for Crimes Against Journalists, which is going to have its closing hearing on 19 September in The Hague. And we will produce a paper based on our findings. So we are currently investigating these data sets on how impunity actually happens when it comes to crime against journalists. But the research unfortunately has been delayed because of COVID. So I cannot share it with you at the moment, but I will share it with you before the celebration of the UN plan of action, which is going to be happening on the 3rd and 4th of November this year. I hope this helps and thank you for listening to me. Thank you very much, Leon. Indeed, you are aligning a number of data and observations that are really coherent with the previous speakers. And this is a way of highlighting also empirically the correlations between the different targets covered by 16, as indicated before by Tobi. Our next and last speaker in the panel is Gergely Hiedek. He is a survey specialist and methodology advisor at the Small Arms Survey. Gergely, you are the floor. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Okay. Let me share my presentation. So thank you again and good day or afternoon or morning, everyone. I will be briefly introducing developments related to a numeric SDG indicator as Tobi was referring to some of those, namely 16.1.1 and 1.2, which assess respectively the rates of most widespread types of violent deaths, intentional homicides and conflict deaths. These are, of course, not so much democracy related but more to human security. And therefore, I will be a bit divergent from the previous speakers that I still think that I have very interesting things to show. So the presentation will be about that is super briefly, super quick background on the organization I represent. Then I will go to the trends, which have been just published. So just this afternoon, in my local time, so just hours before, this update of Small Arms Survey's global violent deaths database has been released. And they are now available also a short summary and medium and the data set itself and some infographics on the internet for which I will share links after I finish my talk. So the Small Arms Survey is a project of the Graduate Institute in Geneva. A small team of multidisciplinary experts are trying to work towards reducing illicit arms flows and violence through building knowledge and assisting capacity buildings for various kinds of stakeholders. Of all the various activities that Small Arms Survey is doing, I'm now talking about this more quantitative and numeric aspect which is its global database or data sets. So Small Arms Survey is managing four important global data sets. Firearms Holdings about how many firearms there are in the world. Trade Transparency Barometer, which refers to arms trade and are linked to SDG 16.4 or 1.4. I'm sorry. And one that is an event-based data set for unplanned explosions at munition sites. And finally the one that I'm talking about today, which is the global violent deaths data set, which GVD, so I'm going to call it GVD, which means global violent deaths. The data set is drawing from multiple sources. We are building it from national and international data sources from various students of data from the criminal justice and public health domains. The database collects existing homicides and I'm trying to go somewhere where there's less sun. And direct conflict deaths. So these are existing data that we collect from national and international sources. And we are adding an estimate on the top of these that estimate other types of interpersonal violence resulting in deaths that are much harder to measure internationally in a comparative way, such as unintentional homicide, the killings in self-defense, the killings in legal interventions and the like. In the data set, missing data points, which we have of course several, are estimated statistically and inputted in the data set so that we have a full set of data for all countries and territories that we are monitoring for each year. And altogether these produce a single violent death indicator dating back to 2004, actually a bit earlier, but since 2004 we have a low enough missingness of data that we are confident to publish our time series. Besides of this top level indicator, the GVD also keeps track of lethal violence against women as a gendered sex disaggregated data and violent deaths by firearm, which is of course the special focus of the small lab survey as a research institute. The current update of the GVD comes after a gap year that we didn't publish an update last year. So now we are adding two years 2019 and 2020 to the series. This presentation focuses on trends including those two years and ending with the year 2020. So it's a bit weird that I'm talking about trends which ended two years ago, but this is the nature of data availability. So what do we see? We see that there are approximately 531,000 violent deaths in 2020 throughout the world. This is a bit less than 1% of the 59-60 million deaths, depending how we count COVID in 2020, but still out of about every 112 global deaths. One is due to violence, which is pretty high if you think about it. I would have guessed. Hello, I remember. Violent deaths are of course considered highly preventable in theory, they indeed are, and they can be higher than every socioeconomic cost. Even more importantly, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Violent deaths represent a small fraction of the violence intended to be addressed by goal 16.1, which talks about significantly reducing all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere. This fatality also affects how safe everybody else in the community feels, which again is a separate indicator in the SDG system, 1.4. And on a personal level, violent deaths affect many more lives than those who are killed. It directly impacts the life of those who are left behind. So this 531,000 is a high number, but the number of violent deaths have been declining fairly steeply since 2016. In 2020, there were nearly 146,000 fewer deaths compared to five years before. This chart shows on the left, the violent deaths count in thousands. So how many thousands people have died violently? And on the right side you see the rate per 100,000. The violent deaths count has been declining by 22% and the rate by 26%. The violent deaths rate of 2020 has been the lowest since the measurement started for us. The previous lowest figure was recorded in 2010 and over the 10 years, the rate declined from 7.25 to 6.79, violent deaths per 100,000 population, which is a significant reduction, but even more significant if you compare the 2016, which peaked at 9.06 just five years ago. So violent deaths are composed, of course, of two big components. The first of them is homicide. Homicide count is more stable. You see that these lines are not changing that much, although 2016 was a pivotal year in that regard as well. Back then we had 403,000 intentional homicides, which decreased by 13% to 153,000 by 2020. And if we are looking at the rates, which of course the decrease is higher because we are comparing these number of deaths to a higher number of total population in the world. So we saw a 13% decline in the number of homicide deaths and a 16% decline in the rate of homicide deaths. The thing that we have to remember here is that 2019 and 2020, these new years have been both bringing declines and 2020 also brought some decline in homicides and also as you will see conflict deaths. But homicides were kind of affected or not. It's yet to be seen because studies are yet not conclusive in that regard by the COVID epidemic. So we saw that COVID affected positive with some types of contact crimes. For example, there were less rubberies, there were less burglaries, but it's not yet clear if homicides were really affected. We had a 6% decline in the number of homicides between 2018 and 2019 and only 3.6 from 2019 to 2020. So it is yet to be seen if this trend in between 2019 and 2020 is just a continuation from an earlier existing downward trend and favorable trend of decreasing homicides or COVID had to do something with it in a positive sense. We have examples for in fact the only world region where we saw that COVID positively affected the homicide rate in 2020 compared to 2019 and earlier years was Southern Africa. So both South Africa and Lesotho after a period of ever increasing and quite typically increasing homicide rates suddenly 2020 brought a break and a negative I mean a decrease which is a positive development in homicide numbers and homicide rates. But all the other regions they either continued an earlier existing trend or were not really affected by the first year of COVID. The big counter example of this is of course the United States where homicide rates have been increased by 30% from 2019 to 2020 which is a record increase over I don't even know how many decades record annual increase and the homicide, firearm homicide rate also reached a level which has not been yet seen I think over a quarter of century. So it's really it was a really bad term that the events took in the US. But overall globally we can see that these after the pivotal year of 2016 trends were quite favorable. Now the two the the other major component which is which is conflict that's of course more volatile and they can change more and they did change more. Again in this respect as well 2016 was a turning point in 2016 the world saw 191 violent deaths due to armed conflict and these are only direct conflict deaths. We are they're only able to measure those at this point and it decreased by nearly half 204,000 documented deaths in 2020. I mean this decline is mostly due to a decline of or a decreased intensity of the four deadliest conflicts that we had in the in the past decade which are Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. In all those conflicts depending on the conflict the years of 16, 17 and 18 returning points and now they all are in the I mean the escalating to some extent or have been until 2020 when this data series. At that point in 2020 Afghanistan was the deadliest conflict of the world with over 30,000 victims a year so nearly a third of these victims were from Afghanistan and the second deadliest conflict was Yemen. At the same time at that time the trends in Africa started to be relatively discouraging especially DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Sahel belt saw increased and actual activity and conflict activity and an increased number of deaths as well but overall the fading out of of these Western Asian wars and Afghanistan contributed a lot to this spectacular decline that we are seeing here. So just a couple words. The news as of 2020 overwhelmingly also positive for women as much as we can tell from from the relatively incomplete data because gender or segregated data are not always available for from all countries and especially difficult to obtain those in conflict settings but from what we can work from it seems that that female violent death rate has also reached a record low in 2020 after the same turning point in 2016 and and overall 88,000 women were killed in that year which is 17% of all victims most violence victims are males typically young or middle-aged males. One quarter of female victims of fatal violence were killed by firearm and these are some more chats that you can access at the links that I'm going to share on the infographics. We are focusing of course quite a bit on firearm induced violence and mortality. In that regard as well if you look at the line at the bottom the death rates by firearm which is the number of people who died out of I mean standardized for 400,000 population stands at 2.7% so the huge decline since 2016 which of course was the most intensive conflict year where Syria and Iraq were still producing a lot of victims and generally the trend was positive here as well. These pencil shaped charts show you the relative share of firearms in total violent deaths by world region it's selected regions of the world you can see that in some of the of those regions where homicide levels are really high firearms really play an important role in perpetuating those crimes South America Central America the Caribbean and even North America with the US being increasing the probability. So in summary violent deaths decreased nearly by about a quarter over the past five years which meant basically that the world seemed to be on the right path to maybe even achieve that the ambitious goals which were set for by the famous or infamous 2015 WHO conference and policy paper that envisioned decreasing by around that by 50% which was not adopted as a goal the adopted goal was substantially reduced by that and these decreases that we see between well not 15 but 16 which was the pivotal year and 2020 really substantial but talking about this progress today feels a bit silly and not invading Ukraine late February this year this China this dynamic has changed substantially right of course casually casualty numbers of that war or the the current stage of that war are still very murky the 2020 Ukraine invasion seems to be on track to reach to become one of the deadliest annual I mean one of the one of the conflict that produces the highest annual number of fatalities of this military could you please come to an end yes that's my conclusion actually that's a final word sorry I'm just saying that this war is going to bring up chip away much of the progress that we are we are seeing until 2020 and and it's also yet to be seen we have not reached the conclusive result of what COVID has caused or could have caused in terms of homicides the new updates with the 2021 data will be enlightening in that regard and one might vary that that this positive chance will be to some extent reversed at the end and here I conclude I'm sorry thank you very much we have about 10 minutes for possible questions from the chat as I said there are a few of them they've been partly addressed by some of the speakers in particular couple of questions that were opposed to Leon have already been addressed by his presentation but there is one that is about the assistance that can be provided in the field of democracy building with respect to the case of Bangladesh and this was posed this question was posed by the peace and justice alliance we will get back to you bilaterally but definitely we can as international media also assist in supporting actors at the country level and we do have a regional program for Asian the Pacific so I can put in touch you with our colleagues who are working in that region there was another question that that was about the erosion of democratic processes and civil liberties in Russia in the effects of the war in Ukraine on global democracy I think this is a question that has to do really with trends that are very recent and they are not captured by most of the figures that have been shared here including the figures on the global state of democracy that are related to a period preceding the February war in Ukraine of course in Ukraine there was a low intensive conflict since many years and the notion of erosion is you know gradual and cumulative so we can't really link it just to the to the sparking of the conflict in February of 2022 but yes there is a correlation between the erosion of democratic processes and civil liberties that is the short answer and the risk of war and specifically we produced the international idea a briefing on these which you can find in our website that looks retrospectively at how these trends have been associated I just wonder whether any of the speakers would like to address any of the questions that were posed Akila you already replied on the number of countries and which countries are included in your survey to Z2 who asked for it and let me see whether there are any other more recent questions from Bill Kelly I recall that progress on SDG 16 was proposed to be reviewed every year at the HLPS what happened well I wonder whether any wants to answer to this question but yes there was this proposal but then it was not eventually approved there was a stronger pressure to reviewing annually these but eventually it was not approved and however next year the we are as Toby also referred to we are in the midpoint in the implementation of the 2030 agenda and it will be an opportunity to review also SDG 16 it will it will not be specifically only on SDG 16 but that will be the big opportunity we'll have to provide a sense of where we are in the implementation of the agenda looking at both ways I mean the achievement of SDG per se and and as many of the speakers say also the inter-relationship between the achievement of the SDG 16 targets and other targets within SDG and the SDG as a goal and other SDG goals and I wonder whether any other panelist wants to get back with the observations also on each other's presentation at this stage yes Toby yeah just I mean a couple of slightly random observations I mean firstly and apologize for mocking up your name Gergelli I something like that I mean I guess the on the conflict side there's a slight random factor there of you know conflicts come and go and you know like the the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not exactly predicted and I mean I for one didn't think it was happening even until the eve of it actually happening and obviously it completely alters the whole calculus there and other conflicts you know I mean the Taliban took over Afghanistan perhaps you know that was in the works for quite a while but when it did happen then of course the the number of deaths which I guess is not yet even recorded fully recorded on your thing but but on the other side of course the the homicides is a little bit more predictable and trackable and measurable as an SDG target I do want to say I mean I think there's been a lot of attention on the the Russian invasion of Ukraine obviously it's a gross abuse of international law and it's horrific happening and I mean it just you know what's going on in Ukraine is heartbreaking but I don't know how again I'm gonna mungle mangle up the name a little bit but the Zed who you know wanted to talk about me and Mar my organization has been involved in me and Mar for a very long time we have an ongoing project there the goal of the project was to help build democracy on the 1st of February 2021 that objective basically disappeared and I mean the the military takeover of of me and Mar which has led to an increasingly intense military conflict is also an outrage you know it's not an international conflict in the same way as the Russian invasion of Ukraine but I think the the level of breach of international standards including human rights standards and humanitarian standards and the whole package of standards is at the same level and I you know I think we should not you know not forget that I think it's very important to keep that in mind and just one final comment I mean obviously the situation in Russia within Russia and Leon mentioned you know I mean we focus on Ukraine because of course the abuse that's happening there is outrageous but the situation in Russia has gotten much worse for human rights defenders including journalists and that is another very serious consequence of this invasion just a few thoughts thank you Tobi there is in fact here a number of lessons that we may draw from these presentations one I think is already noted by you in recalling each other's data and information one is about the interrelationship between targets in SDG 16 I think that it has been recalled that SDG 16 has been one of the great innovations with respect to the MDG the Millennial Development Goals framework and it is showing its power in many ways one is to bring these partners who focus on on different topics and issues together and we are analyzing trends looking at the interrelationships between different policy fields and policy areas that up to before the adoption of the SDGs were somewhat divided separated from each other so this is already an important element which I want to underscore the second element is that some of the data that have been presented are different data than the official indicators also because they are perception based they are based on surveys and there is a breadth of data in the analysis that would otherwise be missed in reporting on the implementation of the agenda some of the panelists underscored also the importance of keeping in mind these lessons when carrying out voluntary national reviews and actually pointed that the weaknesses of some voluntary national reviews in that respect when it comes to integrating data that are generated by non-official sources that are still reliable credible and solid in in their construction the in a way we are shown about the importance and richness of the data ecosystem that can be used for monitoring progress on the implementation of the agenda and also for monitoring the weaknesses and the areas where we are not really delivering well I think that one comment that was made was about the level of ambition set in the goals the difficulty in measuring success in defining success only if it is focused on what we would call outputs like adoption of lows that is not enough implementation should be also measured and assessed we know how difficult it is but we should also recognize how important it is and well the prism of all these data add considerably to the depth of the analysis that is a key message I am taking away from today's side event I would like also to signal that we are still working on the basis of data that to some extent predate the major global crisis that shocked the world in 2020 so many of these data are actually still about the pre-pandemic situation and there were some comments about the impact of the pandemic but I think we'll be able to fully appreciate that probably starting next year in many ways these pandemic has impacted on data collection collection on data analysis especially the country level there will be probably some retro perspective analysis that will paint a more accurate picture once data will be available so I think stay tuned because these analysis will also probably redefine the terms of trends in that perspective and I would like also to say that there are some worrisome trends but also some interesting positive trends at the same time where to keep an eye also on what may be the positive messages gloomy as the situation may look now I think that we should all engage and strive for the implementation of the 2030 agenda in a highly and increasingly polarized the multilateral scene the 2030 agenda is one of the few things that is left as a global agenda that is subscribed to by virtually all countries in the world and it is very important for us to stick to that it's one of the few processes that is still existent and I hope that more will open up in the future but the perspective is as a result of you know the return of geopolitics in international relations that was marked by the war of aggression of Russia against Ukraine well as a result of that the perspectives are not not at all positive I hope that all these alliance together will continue to strive in order to make available with transparency and honesty and openness the data that we are collecting or that we are analyzing and having said that I would like to thank all the panelists in this side event we will make available a recording a video recording of this event I want to thank those who participated directly in this platform and also those who followed our event on YouTube so my thanks to Miguel Angel Lara Otaola my colleague from International Idea Toby Mendel from the Center for Law and Democracy Akila Kolisetti from Namati Leon Villens from the Free Press Unlimited and Gear Gehly Idec from the Small Arms Survey this is Massimo Dumasoli from International Idea talking on behalf of the SDG 16 data initiative please follow our website and follow us also further notices about the launch of our global report later in the year many thanks also to my colleague Amanda Surek who facilitated the technically this meeting of today thank you very much