 Good morning. Yes, thank you. Good to see you all here today. We're so glad you could join us. My name is Kathleen Kinist. I'm the senior gender advisor here at the US Institute of Peace. And for those of you who may be new to the Institute, otherwise known as USIP, you'll hear us say USIP, like you to know that USIP was founded and mandated and funded by the US Congress 32 years ago as an Institute independent but dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible. It's practical, and it's essential to our national and international security. And so it is great privilege today. Sorry about this there. It's in my eye here to welcome you to this event, Displaced Women from Violations to Voice, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan cases to show the strength of women and to end impunity. This particular event takes place about a week from the International Day of Peace. I think what we will hear today is about innovation, vision, and commitment. And so I wanted to draw your attention before we begin the program to consider what your actions may be to commit to on this year's International Day of Peace. One of my favorite statements is by Martin Luther King Jr. And you'll see it over here. It is about how we organize. It is about our commitments. And the tribunals that you will hear about today really amplify this commitment to peace. Of course, there are other special folks who have contributed to our vision of action. And so if you will, the next slide, we see Eleanor Roosevelt's commitment to action here. And you'll see the Peace Day Challenge hashtag. Think about it today while you listen to these amazing stories of very courageous people who took a vision and made it into action. They're ordinary people, really, like all of us. But they did extraordinary things over the course of the last several years. I want to challenge each of you here today that you too can be a part of this extraordinary and legendary, in my opinion, effort underway in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. So without further delay, I want to introduce somebody that I have come to think of not only as one of my dear colleagues, but actually dear friends as well, Patricia Cooper, who is the founder and convener of Women's Regional Network. Otherwise, you'll hear this morning called WRN, another acronym. Pat and I met about eight years ago in a little restaurant in Dupont Circle, and she had an idea. And as you all have been in those spaces of having ideas, I think of myself as a witness to her idea. And so it gives me great pleasure that she and her team of experts now have come to share with us their lessons learned and stories about this remarkable tribunal effort of women. So without further delay, Pat, I'd like to invite you to the podium. She will introduce our panelists and give you a little background. So welcome, and thank you all for coming. Kathleen said this is one giant leap for woman kind. My goodness. Good thing I didn't have that knee replaced. Well, my privilege for us to be here again and to thank USIP for once again allowing some of the members of the Women's Regional Network to share our research and our recommendations with you. This is our second such opportunity for the network, and it's made possible by the leadership of Kathleen, Ambassador Steiner, and Danielle Robertson, who attended to every detail. So thank you, Danielle. Thank you, Ambassador Steiner. Thank you, Kathleen, for being so eager to have us here today. There are three core issues that brought the network members together in 2011. So I just want to share with you that it's only five years old, corruption, extremisms, and militarization. As leaders of civil society organizations, they knew there was added value in listening to and learning from each other. Sharing challenges, replicating successes, and developing a broad cross-border agenda, all to ensure that women's rights, equitable development, and a just peace is secured across the region. They asked two questions. First, how do you take discussions of security, conflict, and militarization outside of elite policy circles? Second, how do we integrate women's experiences and concerns into security discourse? Brainstorming around these questions generated the idea of community conversations, a safe word that we use in order to access women in the most remote parts of the conflict zones. We focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, but as Mr. Kirk said in the back, when are we going to add Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Iran, and I say, give us a little time, let us stabilize. We focus on then to better understand the women in those conflict zones, in those conflicted and remote regions, to better understand their experiences, their fears, and their agency. Our objective was to document the impact of militarization, extremisms, and corruption on their ability to access rights and justice. These conversations emphasize women as survivors and make visible their leadership in everyday life and in resistance movements. This research anchors the women's regional network firmly in the real world of women's experiences. By identifying common threads and themes, the network is creating cross-border strategies, seeking strategies and solutions is what led the network to focus on women and their children fleeing conflict. Why? Because they are the most visible face of civilians in armed conflict. Our focus on these internally displaced is because unlike refugees, internally displaced persons do not lose the protection of their state. It is the state that has the primary responsibility to its own citizens, to provide protection through all stages of the displacement cycle. From early warning of pending conflict, to security while in flight, to humanitarian assistance during and after flight, and in the end, a stable solution. This is a global phenomena. The number of forcibly displaced people reached 65 million by the end of 2014, with Asia as the world's most major displacement region. One of the most major display. I think there's one other, right? Our hope is that our conversation today will be an opportunity to end the callous indifference of states to those forcibly displaced due to conflict. Our hope is to not only end the indifference of states but set new standards of what is possible. In other words, reset the benchmarks for not only the states, but the role of the international community when sovereign states fail on those obligations. Our two panels today are well-equipped to begin this journey with us. For all of you joining us and for helping us, thank you to all of you for joining us and for helping us to set new standards. And we will begin this discussion first on the humanitarian and then on the legal to provide protection for those who are fleeing conflict. And I wanna thank all the participants of the panels for joining us. And Stephanie Foster is going to begin as the moderator of the first panel. Stephanie, as many of you know, is the senior advisor at the Office of Global Women's Issues at the U.S. State Department. She also served admirably for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and knows these issues firsthand. And thank you, Stephanie. And I think your panel can come up, there's some stairs here and you don't have to make that giant leap for womankind, okay? Yeah. Can you hear me okay? Is the mic on? Well, thank you to USIP and the Women's Regional Network for having me here as your moderator today for the first panel. Very happy to be here. I think this is a very timely issue. Just so people know, I'm gonna have each of the panelists to give some opening, short opening remarks. And I have a few questions we can use to kick that off and then we'll open the floor to you. We'll end it right back at 10.30 because the next panel, which is on the legal implications other than go on. And we wanna keep this on time for those of you who are here in the room and also those of you watching on camera. So I wanna say just in general, I think this is the first panel is to really set the stage for this conversation and look at the humanitarian impact of forced migration and highlighting particularly the global impacts, the gender impacts here. How women and children are impacted differently than men and boys. How we can develop responses that really take those gender inequities usually into account. How we can look at developing better political will in countries, stronger rule of law to address issues but really also more importantly, I think to give voice and visibility to the women who are at the center of this discussion so that they are able to participate fully in decisions that are made about their futures and about what happens to them on a daily basis and then on a basis into the future. So I think it's a very important way to think about this issue and really very happy to welcome the panelists we have here today. We're gonna start with really putting this in context. And so with that, I am gonna start with Joan Timoney. She's the senior director of advocacy and external affairs at the Women's Refugee Commission. She's been there for about 11 years I think. And before that has done extensive work around the world but I think relevant here as well has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, been on the ground and really I worked in that crisis arena as well through the Peace Corps work. So I'm gonna turn it over first to Joan who's gonna really sort of set the stage for us and really talk about some of the things that have been happening around the world focusing on humanitarian issues and really looking at those platforms as a way for us to understand what's going on. Thank you so much. Hi everybody. You know, it's so great I think that we have this panel on internal displacement because I think Greta and I were talking a little bit beforehand and with all the, there's been a lot of activity around humanitarian issues this year that I'll talk about in a second but I think we all have a real concern that the internally displaced are somehow not really being given the focus and attention that they need. And while we can all understand, appreciate and hugely welcome the attention on refugees I think we always have to remember that of that 65 million plus that are displaced the largest number since World War II the vast majority are internally displaced persons, right? And so I think that's something we need to keep coming back to and in our advocacy keep reminding policymakers and others. What I thought I would do as a way to kind of set the stage and get us thinking about advocacy opportunities we have going forward is to talk about in my five minutes mind you the World Humanitarian Summit in five minutes. But it was such an interesting historic event in the sense that it brought together some well there was a whole process but it brought together at the event itself in May some 9,000 people and I think it's the first time probably you had that kind of a gathering around humanitarian issues that was member states, international organizations civil society, quite a gathering and the secretary general had laid out an agenda for humanity that was meant to inform what happened at that summit. And participants in the summit whether they were state or whatever kind of stakeholder they were states, international organizations as I said NGOs were asked to come to the summit and make concrete commitments against this agenda for humanity. And I just wanted to talk about the parts that are most relevant to our discussion today reflect a little bit on what happened and didn't happen and then where we go from here. And so if you look about the agenda for humanity there were five core responsibilities and the one that I think is particularly relevant today is leave no one behind. And so it was picking up on that sort of central promise of the sustainable development goals that we would make this commitment to leave no one behind and if you think of those most at risk of being left behind it would be conflict affected, crisis affected people. And under leave no one behind there were several elements to that one of them was that entities were meant to reduce and address displacement make commitments against that. And the secretary general proposed that there be a commitment to a comprehensive global plan to reduce internal displacement in a dignified and safe manner hugely important right by at least 50% by 2030. And then there were pieces under that that I'm sure many of you would recognize who work on these issues in this room investing in political solutions to end it I mean the very thing that matters most developing national legislation's policy capacity to protect and integrate internally displaced into education and to labor markets into national development plans bringing the resources that are needed to do that both for IDPs themselves but also the communities that host them and promoting self-reliance. So if you had that sort of overarching the goal to reduce internal displacement then what are some specific areas you can make commitments against? Also under leave no one behind empower and protect women and girls. And the elements of that fund to implement the full and equal participation of women and girls for reasons that we all know and I think you'll hear about especially in this report hold all parties account to integrating women and girls into development and humanitarian program and funding ensure access to livelihoods and sexual and reproductive health services and substantially increase funding to local women's groups, okay? So, and there was also under a separate core area related to international humanitarian law and standards there was also a whole section on sexual and gender-based violence and commitments you could make under that. So what happened? Well about 4,000 commitments were made at the summit and they're not yet publicly out but they will be the secretary general has said that they will be there'll be some kind of a platform on which you will be able to see all the commitments those who made them will be expected to report on them and there'll be some kind of a synthesis report that the UN prepares every year for the general assembly on how we're doing against the commitment. So we'll all wanna be aware of that I think in our advocacy. On internal displacement, you know I think for most of us who advocate on this issues it was in the end disappointing. And so what the secretary general is making a report to the general assembly on the World Humanitarian Summit at UNGA next week, right? If you look at his report on what came out of the World Humanitarian Summit and he says there was a consensus for building a new approach to addressing forced displacement. But you know, so good. And he also says, and I think this is what we're gonna wanna look at, specific commitments were made by some states so we'll have to see what that means when we see it to integrate refugees and IDPs into national and local development plans. So those are specific things we'll wanna take a look at what exactly does it say? Are they measurable and all that. Women and girls, a number of commitments were made by states and others to put in place targets to increase our resources for women's organizations importantly to align funding with principles of gender equality. His report says we'll see new financing and commitments around new financing and program for women and girls education, training, livelihoods, sexual and reproductive health. And then he urges in his report he urges everyone as they take forward their commitments to fully integrate women and girls across those commitments. So again, I think this sounds much stronger, much more promising. We'll just have to see what specifically the commitments look like when they come out and who made what kind of commitment and what did states agree to do, donors, et cetera. Other things of note that I think are important when I think especially about the great work we're gonna hear about today. Under something called the grand bargain which is an agreement of major donors and major aid agencies. There's an agreement among those entities anyway to channel 25% of financing to national and local responders as directly as possible by 2020. So I think that's got potentially great and promising implications for national, local, regional women's organizations that are so much a part of the solution here. Numerous commitments by multiple stakeholders to scale up collection and use of sex and age disaggregated data. Really important, right? Not only in terms of who IDPs are, where they are, what their needs are, but also women and girls as well. If you don't have that sex and age disaggregated data, how do you know? And I mean we have all kinds of promises around that but really doing it would be a huge step forward. I'm mindful of my five minutes which I'm sure I've gone over. One other point I wanna make is that, I mean there's a lot of attention on the summits next week. There's the UN summit on refugees and migrants and then there's the president's summit the following day on refugees. I think we all need to be mindful that internal displacement is not part of this, right? So it is not that kind of comprehensive look at displacement is not what's happening next week. And I do think I just wanna read because I think it's very sobering but it should also make sure we recommit to what we need to do. The outcome document that states are gonna consider next week, this is what it says about internal displacement. States recognize the large numbers of internally displaced and the need for reflection on effective strategies to ensure adequate protection and assistance for IDPs. And that's it. So I think that the challenge going forward or multiple one is we really do need the kind of attention on internally displaced that we are at least beginning to see on refugees that is hugely needed full stop but we really have to make sure that there's similar attention to how it is that you do take these things forward in a concrete way for IDPs. I think that as we look at the commitments we have to stay attuned to specifically when they come out what they say which ones offer the best promise how all of us can advocate together to make sure that they're implemented but equally that in our own work we're doing everything we can and do we see other opportunities based on the commitments that are out there to jointly advance our work. So it's kind of mutual accountability to me and I think I will stop there. Okay. Well, very good. Well, thank you. I think that was a great overview for sort of set the stage for our next speaker Rita Manchanda who is the research director of the South Asia Forum for Human Rights and the author of the scoping study which I'm sure many of you picked up on the way in. And I think interestingly also she worked in India's defense ministry think tank the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis. So it brings to this I think an understanding of how that part of the machinery also has an impact on IDPs and on women and just how we look at conflict through that lens as well. So Rita is going to talk about the scoping study. I think particularly interesting probably the impetus, the thought process. I found fascinating it's really the intersection of rule of law women's rights, thinking about IDPs developing stronger political will. And so if you could really help us understand the impetus for the idea and where you see this going. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Let me first emphasize what is it that drove us to in fact even think of launching of South Asia or a regional tribunal on the human rights violations of women in IDP like situations in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. And it is the voices of the women that we heard. WRN or Women's Regional Networks work is very much from the grassroots upwards. We pride ourselves in being able to go into conflict areas to listen to what is it that the women actually are saying and then to connect and to connect to the top levels. I mean, that's what's brought us in fact on this advocacy tour to Washington as well. Now why is it, what does it mean? Joan has given us a fantastic overview of the humanitarian plight, the kind of concerns. But at the grassroots level, what does it mean when in fact a military operation is announced? You, we well know that military operations take weeks in advance to plan, but the affected people who have to flee overnight are told 24 hours, 48 hours, no arrangements are made, no early warning systems are in place, no transport is provided, you're expected to flee. You're expected to run 20 kilometers, 40 kilometers to safety, to whatever that means. And who is running? Sick people, husbands who have asthma, women who are pregnant, carrying little children. I mean, these are women who are running down and they tell you that we passed destroyed houses in which we buried our children. In which, I mean, there are women under a tree who give birth and because there is such a tension to flee, they pick up whatever bundle they thought was a child and they found later on that child left behind. Why, I mean, this kind of callousness, this kind of indifference only happens if in fact you do not regard these people as equal citizens who have rights, who have voices. And particularly if you're a woman in an area which has entrenched gender inequality, then your citizenship becomes even more marginal in an area where already that citizenship is so compromised. Okay, you reach a camp if you're lucky or an informal settlement given the cultural constraints. And this is common right across the board and this is a highly militarized area, multiple armed actors, so often in fact, the security or the place that you're supposed to be settled is protected and yet not protected. Often these are seen as camps which are full of, or which are seen as hotbeds also of other militant groups. So they're regarded with discrimination, with sort of total ad hocism. And then there is no way of even regarding these people as requiring special assistance. It's like the same policy that is used for disaster management, for flood control, is used for this. The fact that these people cannot go back, that it is militarization that is in fact pushing and driving these people to flee and that you're creating conditions, not addressing the root causes, which is, and then once you get there, now you're talking about the importance of sex-disaggregated data. Occasionally you hear of a report, a fantastic officer was there or an international agency that had access and you see an UNFPA report that says 69,000 women are pregnant. In this flood of refugees, say from the Swat region, two million people, a huge flood, 69,000 people, of which in the next month itself, 6,000 are supposed to give birth. 900 will need surgical interventions. Now once you have that data, maybe you can do something, but often you have no such data. And then this whole issue of what happens afterwards, okay, the humanitarian crisis is at its peak for two months, for three months. Usually the policy is after three months, return. It's not a bad policy if you could return. The problem is you often cannot return. So what happens? After six months, the medical doctors that used to visit the food rations that were there start getting cut and suddenly you find everybody disappears. The security forces are withdrawn, you're left on your own. And because it's still a fairly tense situation, you need to find your own way. So in informal settlements, people rent places, they're forgotten. I mean, Rukh Shanda, who is from Pakistan, was telling me social contracts are developed by the government, transferring security, which the state should be in control of, to the people and saying you take collective responsibility. If anything happens, you people are responsible. You have to pay them the fines. We have no policies in, we have ad hoc policies in place. We have discriminatory policies in place. We do not even recognize that the internally displaced exist. They're clubbed as migrants, they're clubbed as refugees. Sometimes they're called temporarily displaced. Partly because the minute you use the word IDPs, then there are guidelines, there are standards, there are conventions that begin to kick in. And our countries, at least speaking for my country, India doesn't even recognize that we have any conflicts. So how can you talk about conflict-affected IDPs? We're arguing that there must be much greater visibility for the whole issue of the forcibly displaced. The importance of taking IDPs seriously is because tomorrow they will be refugees. If you do not address the issue of IDPs today, tomorrow you will be in fact addressing the problem of refugees. We're also arguing that there must be policies put in place so that there is some kind of standards, there is some kind of certainty in terms of levels of protection that it must also be gendered. And now there is enough experience to know how to organize humanitarian responses which are gendered. And yet the gap in terms of implementation. But we're also proposing that a mechanism for drawing attention to this issue and a mechanism that is a combined mechanism, a regional mechanism, is we're proposing a South Asia tribunal focusing on the human rights violations of women in IDP-like situations. Now, of course there are national processes. We have a, in India we have a very sophisticated judiciary. We have human rights institutions, women's commissions, but the problem is there is a felt need. People are asserting their right to full citizenship when they say we want our day in court. We want a public hearing. We want a public platform in which we voice our concerns. We're claiming, we women, who yes, we're poor, we're illiterate, we are the most marginal of the marginal, but we have the right to live with dignity too. And we are claiming our right to be heard, our right to tell our story, to tell our truth, and yes, to pinpoint accountability. To pinpoint accountability on our states, failure to fulfill obligations on our states, failure to exercise due diligence, and we are also calling upon the international community because we feel that our region is an area where the international community has been hugely invested, and therefore they have a responsibility to be involved, to in fact not walk away because the destabilization, the militarization that has happened, and these women are very well aware of it, whether they're blaming Pakistan or they're blaming the international community or our own governments or our own ethnic leaders, they are holding people responsible and they wish to. So the people's tribunal is a very old tradition. I mean, some of you may have heard of the Russell Tribunal. There've been multiple people's tribunal. People's tribunals happen when there is a sense that the national process is not enough. It is not going to deliver. And therefore it is a way of people, as I said, asserting their right to democracy, their right to exercise sovereign authority. Thank you, Rita. And I'm sure we'll have some specific questions from the audience a little bit more about the tribunal and also some of the other issues you raised. So thank you very much. I wanna turn now to my colleague, Kristen Cordell from USAID. Kristen is a senior advisor in the USAID Bureau of Policy Planning and Learning and we work together extensively on Afghanistan. Kristen led major investments that USAID is made in Pakistan and Afghanistan, two of AID's largest programs. So I want if you could to really focus on how USAID is approaching the issue of women IDPs in the larger framework of its work in those countries, what lessons we've learned, the kind of things we should take away that governments can do, donor governments can do, and also how we can work with host governments to strengthen their systems. Great. Thank you, Stephanie. And thank you to the organizers of today's event. I'm so pleased to be here to talk to you about this important issue. And I really enjoyed reading Rita's report and hearing her remarks today. And I also really look forward to hearing from those of you in the audience. I noticed a lot of friendly faces and just a lot of in-depth knowledge and understanding of what's actually going on in the field. And as a policymaker, that's something that's tremendously valuable to myself and my colleagues. So I really look forward to that interactive discussion. What I took away from the report and Rita's comments just now is this is a highly fluid situation. IDPs are a highly fluid environment group of people. They also have a number of intersectional needs, right? In 2010, I actually worked with a group of people who were refugees that had then been further displaced within the community. So when we talk about these issues and we assign these labels to the groups that we're working with, they're often labels for us as policymakers that don't actually apply. Often the groups may not identify themselves as displaced. Often they're actually doubly displaced. In Pakistan, it's well known that groups have moved because of conflict, only to be further displaced by climate. So I just wanted to take a moment to sort of recognize the fluidity and the intersectionality of the groups we're dealing with. And that being said, recognizing the complexity of this issue. And that's why reports like Rita's are so important. At USAID, we really address this issue in two ways. We think about the protection needs for the IDPs and sort of immediate response, including several commitments we recently made along with our State Department colleagues at the World Humanitarian Summit. And we also think about this as an empowerment activity. What can we do to really empower these women, let them make the decisions for themselves on what they want and what they need from the international community. And I think that that's a piece that I'd really like to focus on today. But let me just go over quickly some of our most recent commitments at USAID to this issue. In FY15 alone, our Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance provided around $90 million in protection-related activities, including a substantial subset of that on gender-based violence protection for IDPs. At the World Humanitarian, which Joan mentioned, the U.S. announced an additional $12 million for a program called Safe from the Start that Secretary Kerry launched a couple of years ago. It was already a $40 million activity, so it was just bolstering that commitment. And Safe from the Start is really about helping gender-based violence victims and survivors in the immediate aftermath of conflict or displacement. We found as an international community that there was often a lag from when they were first displaced to when they received assistance. That lag often can also happen on the back end, to which Rita alluded to, and I think that's a very important point. But Safe from the Start was really meant to help close that gap, and I think we've seen some success in that regard. We also advocated at the World Humanitarian Summit for a bolstering of the use of the UN guidelines on integrating gender-based violence and humanitarian operations. These guidelines have been around a long time. They've been updated, and they're really a tool that the international community can use together to speak the same language on these issues and really reinforce the do no harm approach and make sure that the IDPs are getting the assistance they need in a quick and responsive way. The third thing I just wanted to highlight that we committed to was improving the call to action on protection against GBV and emergencies, and this included a new commitment called the Real-Time Accountability Partnership, which paired with UNFPA and other UN agencies to actually provide a mechanism for accountability where donors that are working with displaced communities can actually report real-time what they're spending. And so to really reintroduce or bolster this accountability mechanism, I think is a very valuable action because we really want to make sure that from the beginning, the coordination is there between those and the international community. And so those are some of the commitments we made at the World Humanitarian Summit. I do agree with Joan that next week's activities could include a more robust focus on displaced communities, and I think that's something that I can say that the U.S. government did advocate for, but of course these large multilateral processes are often very unwieldy and we sort of have to think about how we're going to come to the consensus. We need to move that forward and my colleagues at the State Department really led that effort valiantly. But it is an important moment for the advocacy community to say, hey, what about this additional population? And I think groups like Jones and others are doing that to great effect. I also just want to mention one thing that has been tremendously helpful in this space is in 2012, the USAID launched a gender strategy that has completely changed how we've done business. It's responsible for the salaries of gender advisors like myself and others, so that's exciting, and all of our partners. It's really created a huge network of gender professionals in this space, which I don't think people really realize. But one of the other things it did was create a rule that we basically have to have a gender analysis for any project we do. And if you just think about that for a moment, it was sort of suggested before, but now it's completely required. So there's no longer an ability to say this doesn't apply to women. And this simple step has changed the way USAID's done business because it has brought issues to light that we did not see before, that we could not recognize, especially in the IDP communities. This is a community that's traditionally sort of invisible. But this gender analysis has not just made the women in that community more visible, but the entire community more visible to the international community. In 2015 in Pakistan, we were doing a gender analysis for a stability program, a program which had previously kind of slid by and not needing a gender analysis. Like one of those, it's stability, it's hard security. We found that 85% of women in the IDP community did not have ID cards. They were completely invisible to international donors in the international community. And the simple step of giving women ID cards dramatically changed what was going on in that community. It then meant women could access humanitarian assistance, which then went to them and their families. So just in reflection, not only are we sort of doing these quick action protection mechanisms, but we're really focusing on the long-term need to use the tools we have to bring the needs of women to light, even in what is an incredibly fluid and intersectional space. And I'm mindful that we have a tremendous amount of expertise in the room, people who are very knowledgeable about the region, the issues. So I'm going to open it up. We have some mics for one mic, two mics. Oh, OK, great. And when you ask the question, please tell us your name and where you're from. I'm going to take three questions at a time and then we'll pose them to the panel and go from there. If you have a question, please raise your hand. Someone will come to you with a mic. There's a gentleman in the back. There's two people in the back, and then there's someone here in the front. Thank you. Let's go with this gentleman, this woman right here, and then is there someone on this side of the room next? This side of the room, come on, people. OK, we'll let them. Is this mic working? I guess it is. Thank you. My name is Don Kirk. I was kind of concerned about this reference to tribunals. The only tribunals that we hear about are tribunals that operate under Sharia law, which actually are terribly cruel and oppressive toward women. How do you make this distinction? How can you be sure who's on what tribunal and how women can be treated fairly? This is a very broad question, maybe a simplistic question, but I'd appreciate your view on this. My name's Priyanka Vakil. I'm a research associate at the Public International Law and Policy Group. And my question has to do with the UN guidelines for the IDPs. And I know Ms. Manchanda spoke about how important the labels are, and it's scary to even identify or acknowledge that they are IDPs because of potentially not even getting your ID cards. So one of the questions I'm interested in knowing is what would be the role for this tribunal? How would it talk about a lot of different levels and layers about this, but what would be the role to make these IDP guidelines stronger, not just guidelines, things that are recognized, but not just by a small population that happened to be in this room or our little tribe of IDPs? So thank you. Great, OK. And one more. I saw one more hand. Really, there are no one on this side? OK, this woman right here, and thank gosh, this side. Really? Hi, my name is Abhidha. I am from Pakistan. I would like to know that developing nations, there are too much corruption. And I would like to know how policies are being met in this regard for the accountability of the local organizations and the regional organizations, how the accountability of their organizations are being ensured through policy. Great. Thank you. Rita, why don't I start with you and then, because several of the questions, I think really go to the tribunals and then we'll ask Joan and Kristin also weigh in. Thank you so much for your question. I am well aware of the customary processes of arbitration that exactly, as you said, are very anti-women, whether we're talking about the Jirghas, whether we're talking about Kappanchayats that's in my own country. So I'm well aware of this. The tribunal is a far more cosmopolitan, far more modern process. We meaning there is its moral authority rests on who you actually get to be part of your jury, part of your expert panels. There is a huge tradition and a very deep tradition of holding these type of tribunals. I mentioned the Russell Tribunal, which is the 1970s. But since then, I mean, there's something called the People's Permanent Tribunal, Secretariat in Italy. They've hosted 40. There's been tribunals on Afghanistan in which President George Bush was indicted. There have been tribunals on Sri Lanka. There have been tribunals on industrial hazards. There have been multiple tribunals, both national as well as international. The Nobel women had a tribunal on Burma, on human rights violations of women in Burma. So this is very much a secular process. It's very much a modern process. It is a process that is rooted in democracy. It is people claiming their right to truth telling. It's part of, in fact, I suppose it could be positioned much more in terms of the truth and reconciliation type commissions. But this is also a court process. And we're actually envisaging a more hybrid court, one which would have a public platform in terms of truth telling, women telling their testimonies, but also going beyond that to looking at, OK, what is the nature of the violation? Who is the violator? What is the redress? Which is much more a court type process. Now, you'd asked about what kind of laws. So the kind of body of law we would be using would be things like the UN guidelines, the international human rights conventions, international human rights, the humanitarian law, because there is a great body of law out there. And to use this, because what we're also trying to argue is there is need to establish standards. Global standards, I hope, will be set in the Humanitarian Summit next week. But we also need to adapt them to regional standards, which is why the regional mechanism is important for us. And there was somebody who asked about accountability, Pakistan. One of the arguments we're making is that if you leave a vacuum, who is going to step in that vacuum? It's not that that vacuum is going to remain. Extremist faith-based organizations are going to step up. And they already have. Because once there is a vacuum, where are people going to turn if they're going to survive? And so you have a great many. And I'm coming from a region where we have multiple extremist forces, Hindutva forces, Islamic forces. So there's no dearth of them, Christian forces. And they have their own agenda. So if the state leaves a vacuum, if the international community, in terms of accountability mechanisms, leaves that vacuum, there will be people to step in. And then the kind of fears that we have about these becoming hotbeds for extremist forces to gain recruits will become the reality. I think two points. There is, as our questioner said, there are guiding principles for internal displacement. And while there is a refugee convention ratified by countries that governs the treatment and rights of refugees, there's no such thing. There are these guiding principles for internally displaced persons. I think one of the things that got a lot of attention, at least in the processes around the World Humanitarian Summit, was this idea of regional frameworks. And so an example, the African Union, for example, has the Kampala Convention, which is basically a regional framework to take the guiding principles and put them into a regional framework that states would then ratify and endorse. And so it has the force of law in that sense. And during the processes, there were other regions that were talking about trying to do something similar. And I think, again, there's good opportunities to look at what's good about the Kampala Convention and how do you build on that in other regions? What are some of the lessons that were learned about it that could help inform the development of other region's frameworks? Most importantly, how do you take implementation of it forward? And how does it get resourced, et cetera? Where does the support come from for the countries that needed to implement it, and so on? So I think, though, that all of that, the idea of going next to regional frameworks or supporting countries that are willing to take the guiding principles and build them into their national legislation, is part of the kind of activity you really want to see around how you effectively move internal displacement issues forward. And the other thing I wanted to just say, I mean, I totally take your point on accountability of local national organizations. I guess partly I also think that if you especially if you think about humanitarian response, sometimes the bigger issue is, are they even at the table, honestly, to begin with? Because I think we all know that there is the kind of international system that comes in at the start of an emergency. And we all know there are challenges in national and local entities even being able to access that. And so for me, I guess I do find encouraging some of the commitments coming out of the World Humanitarian Summit around better support for national and local organizations and some targets. Because I think it forces us to say, if this is the target, you can't just say, well, sadly they can't access them because of this and that. It might force you to actually say, how are you going to break down those barriers? And so I would just make that point as well, absolutely on accountability, but there's so much to be done on even access in the first place and the support that ought to be there. Yeah, I'll just echo that point. Very well made actually. So I think that building resilience against corruption is not unlike building resilience to displacement or conflicts. We're talking about how to make communities more resilient and to give them access to the critical resources they need. So that means not making decisions for people in those communities. We often assume at the beginning of a crisis that there's not an active civil society in that community. Well, actually there might be. I mean, we need to have the thoughtful analysis that would allow us to really understand what the needs are. And I think that Joan's point is well taken on that. Okay, I'm going to take one more round of questions. And so we have a gentleman in the back. We have someone else in the back. We have two people in the back. On this side, if you could pass the mic to them and then one more question and then we'll pass it over to the panel again. And please introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Michael Roth. I'm with the Senior Advisor for International Disabilities at the State Department. And so you can imagine what my question is, which is, are any of these programs addressing special needs of people with disabilities? And additionally, especially interested in the data breakdown. Are they being included in the data breakdown that you're collecting? Thank you. And then there's someone, a couple down from you. And again, please introduce yourself. Hi, my name's Alexa. I'm here in D.C. on a through fellowship program with the Armenian National Committee of America. This question is directed for Kristen. You talked about gender analysis and how it's required now. I was just wondering if it means, if that includes transgenders now, LGBTQ, if that affects that community, or how does that work for future issues? Great. And any other takers on the question? And one last question right here. You get the last question. Hi, my name's Daniela. I'm a returned Peace School volunteer, but also a grad student over at Georgetown. And I have a question for Ms. Machanda in regards to the tribunals. You'd mentioned Truth and Reconciliation Commissions being part of this hybrid tribunal that you are working towards. Now I was curious, from a restorative justice perspective, how do perpetrators and not just women who have been affected and who are being called to give testimony, how are perpetrators being integrated into this process, if so at all? Thank you. Great, I'm gonna start with Kristen. There's a question directly to you and then Rita and then Joan, you feel free to weigh in as well. Yeah, absolutely. We've been working really hard over the past year or so to make sure that the gender analysis captures the needs of the LGBTI community in areas where we work. It's been a really tricky process, a very important but very tricky process. And not because there's been resistance, but because the capacity of our organization wasn't quite there when we started. And people weren't sure how to capture that data in an appropriate way. So one thing that we've done is actually created a category, a reporting line basically. So all of our missions have to report on how much you're spending on women's projects, how much you're spending on gender projects, how much you're spending on GBV projects. And so we actually created a reporting line which has created an accountability system and now our staff are really very interested in knowing how to address the issue. It's been very tricky. We've done a small pilot program working with LGBT people in the community in Pakistan which has been successful for the most part, but we don't really talk about it. We're not sort of out there talking about who we work with and what we did. So I think that's one thing that makes it tricky to sort of capture what we're learning about this issue, but very important. And I think over the last year, I've really seen the capacity rise and with that a lot of steps forward. Yes, let me just take this whole. The tribunal itself is not a judicial process because unless states, I mean those of you who come from legal backgrounds or political science backgrounds, you would know that unless a state empowers an institution, it has no authority, but it has moral authority. And that moral authority, as I mentioned, does rest in terms of the process being fair, objective, and you must the perpetrate, I mean if you're saying, okay, this is the violation took place, who is the violator? Because you are trying to pinpoint accountability, then you must enable that violator to be present. Now of course, if you say, well, state you are responsible and you ask the state to appear, the state is more than highly unlikely to appear. And particularly, I mean I remember when the tribunal in which President George Bush was being indicted, certainly he didn't appear, but you did have amicus curae, you had experts, you had in fact proxies, proxies which very, very robustly made the case. Because if you do not make a robust case, then your own case itself is ineffective. So there is a process, there is a great deal of experience, but as I said, the very act of these women taking control and coming forth with public testimony is a very, very empowering process. I mean, I think you mentioned just a little while before that we cannot presume that there is no capacity, that there is no civil society agency here. There is usually a great deal. I mean, we've been tracking the stories of women whose families were destroyed in drone attacks, who fled entire family's homes, villages just disappeared and they fled looking for whatever was left of their family. These are women who are 45 years old in Afghanistan. That means you're pretty old. They, in fact, these are women who actually become matriarchs and are members of the Shura. They are part of, in fact, decision-making. I mean, these women who seem to be so destroyed, so traumatized, are rebuilding their lives. I mean, I met women who had been displaced not once, twice, thrice, and yet within three months, after having told me that they were totally devastated, they couldn't do anything when I went back to visit, she was running a small shop. It's resilience, but it's resilience that one needs to also take into context. The kind of high-risk strategies that they are forced to go into, because not, I mean, they're going in for trafficking, they are going in for early marriage, four years old, seven years old, and they tell you, we would never do this, but they're forced to do it. But what is forcing them to do it, is that situation of powerlessness, of militarization, of, in fact, a state that is not responsive to them. And the tribunal is that day for them to speak out of their violations. I'll do disability really quickly. Yes, at the World Humanitarian, well, the answer is there's a huge way to go. At the World Humanitarian Summit, there was a compact on inclusion of persons with disabilities and humanitarian action. And I think over 100 entities signed it and included states, UN agencies, NGOs. One of the things that they committed to do was to develop interagency guidelines on how you include persons with disabilities across humanitarian action. And the idea is that those guidelines would then be endorsed by the committee, it's called the Interagency Standing Committee, but the result of it is those standards and guidelines would exist, and anyone engaged in humanitarian response would be meant to be accountable to doing it. That does, we don't have that right now for disability inclusion. So I'd say that's one concrete way that we'll be able to move this forward. No, there aren't agreed upon interagency standards for disability inclusion. No. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the panel. I came away with this with just really three words that are important to me, visibility and voice and accountability. I think that really captures the conversation, it captures what this is about. And I really, again, I wanna take this opportunity to thank all three of the panelists. Let's give them a very nice round of applause. And thanks to all of you. The next panel will be on legal perspectives. And so again, thank you so much. I wanna invite the next panel up, please. Yes, and you'll be mic'd up here, please. And while we're in this very brief transition, take a moment to tell the person next to you what you are going to do for the peace day challenge. Let's get into action. Take a moment, also just to get to know one another. We thought it was three years ago. We're here soon. And we'll take part in writing. I know. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It was very interesting. Someone call to the board. We have lots of stories to tell you. We're going to do things together. Thank you, and we're ready to begin our second panel. The second panel is on legal perspectives on the way forward, a critical part of making sure this innovation really translates into action. And I'm going to turn the moderation over to our colleague, Najla Ayubi. Please, thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much. I know the previous panel was on humanitarian issues, and you know a lot. And I think we are really lacking the, there are lots of gaps on the policy and legal issues in this particular topic. I would like to, and I have a very high privilege to be among these wonderful women, which I know all of them. And I'm very happy to introduce Roshan Danaz, who is the founder and head of Youn Woman Pakistan, and executive director of Legal Aid Awareness of Pakistan, and very well-known human rights and women's rights activists and civil society activists in Pakistan. And also, Claire Lockhart, director and co-founder of Institute for State Effectiveness, and at the same time, a very, very well-known friends of Afghanistan and the region. And also, I would like to introduce my friend, Bilqis Ahmadie, who is senior program officer at the Asia Center, USAIP, and at the same time, she is also very well-known and highly respected human rights activists in Afghanistan. And also, she was well-known and had very highly high experiences in the rule of law, gender, and civil society. Now, I think it's good to have Roshan Danaz, who conducted our Women's Regional Network Community Conversations in Pakistan. And I would like her to start five minutes her presentation. Thank you. Thank you. But I will take out one second out to thank WRN and UISP for giving me a chance, because I was using a lot of material and reading material from the Institute, but never thought I will be here and talking to all of you. So I think this is an opportunity for me to raise or to share concern of my grassroots level women with you. So why we were conducting community conversation in Pakistan and in India and Afghanistan when a lot of other women, they were part of different diplomacy tracks, like track one, two, and they had opportunity. The one of the reason was because there were a lot of different type of displacement in our region. But we realized that in the conflict affected area, the women displaced from that area, their issues are not recognized, nor at the state level, at the same time at international level. So we were looking into the state responsibility, as well as the international community responsibility towards our grassroots level women in the conflict affected area. Then also we realize there is a disconnect between women voices. So we try to make a connection between the women already connected to the international and the national forum in a mainstream politics, where the grassroots women voices provide an opportunity to have collective voices, where women can raise their issues from elite to the very grassroots level. So this is the community conversations in Pakistan work, the combination of different women as collective voices. And of course, why we want to raise these collective voices to influence international as well as the national state policies and legislative system. Because in the context of Pakistan, we realize many policies were just one and a half page notification, not the proper policies. They were institutional gaps because of lack of policy in this area. And then there was some insensitivity towards women in displacement, and particularly women with the status of widows or single women. No doubt, this displacement in south and north was Iristar created opportunities for women in these areas. For example, the first time, there was a change in the social fabric where the government was recognized 21% women as a head of the household. And that was the big achievement in a very conservative and traditional society where women were recognized as a head of household. So that was another opportunity for us to engage with women and to show their profile. Because the women, and we were also looking the impact of conflict when they were at home and during the displacement. And in a conversation, no doubt, conversations were highly dominated by the humanitarian aid. But there was the reason. Because when I was sitting in one of my community conversation and asked, could you tell me what was the impact? How you dealt with the talbanization in your area of women in that group? She just said one sentence to me, but it was the whole story. She said, do you want me to lose my husband? Because the women were so scared, even in a very protective environment, where they were sitting in a camp. And that camp was known as a TDB camp. So one of the legal gap for us was why these IDPs considered as TDP? Why not IDP? TDP mean Temporary Displaced Persons. So it was one of the legal challenge for us. Because having this term mean, you are not abiding with your international commitment. So this is one of the reason. And earlier, as Rita mentioned in her presentation, I share 11 pages long document for the government when they announced the return policy. So they put collective responsibility on the community. And the community was already paying the cost of collective responsibility where the drone strikes are happening. Because I met with the family. There was a family. And she said, I personally buried 11 person from my family because of the drone strike. Because the strike happened to my next door. And we lost our family as a neighbor. So the women agency, we were also looking into when we talk about IDP, normally people perceive the women IDPs are just in a queue for an aid and queue for other state benefit. But there were women. They struggled a lot during the displacement when the displacement was announced hardly to vacate this area in two hours. And women travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan and Afghanistan to, again, Pakistan because of the institutional gap. Why we are raising this issue of institutional gap? Because the IDP issue is host in a disaster management unit. And the most of the disaster management unit don't have their sub offices in that areas which are legally required. So the resource allocation from the state is also lacking. So these were the key areas. And of course, why we were more focusing on North and South Waziristan women? Because people have their totally different image. They are supporter of Taliban. Or they don't want peace in their area. They want to fight in the name of Sharia. But in across the board, because I try to collect testimony from 154 women. And most of the women, they said, if we got the chance, we will go for peace and education. That was the woman they decided for their role in reconstruction process, which is missing in our legal framework. Because most of the peace jerga, they were happening without inclusion of women. So one of the purpose of collecting these voices were inclusion of voices from the grassroots level with their own women's perspective. Because the women's perspective is entirely missing in our legislative frameworks, policies, and even our humanitarian response. Hopefully I cover the next point. Thank you, Rukh Sandejan. It's very interesting to hear all of those voices and stories from the ground. Now I would like to invite Clara Lockhart. She will talk about the state responsibility in humanitarian accountability and the IDP issues. Thank you. Thank you. And again, I'd like to echo thanks both to the WRN and to USIP and start by recognizing and underscoring the themes of the first panel of the magnitude of the challenge and the extent of need and suffering and the recognition of the issue. And it's so terrific to see such a full room and so many interested people in these issues. But the continued requirement and huge tribute to the work of WRN for really putting the voices of the affected center stage. Because too often, I think, policymakers, and maybe were particularly to blame in Washington DC, start from the policy issue outwards. But we really need to put the citizens and the affected people because they know best what they need. So the community conversation shouldn't just be a one-off, but should be the way that policy gets made. So second, then, to emphasize, to turn to the issues of this panel, to emphasize one particular legal principle is to the responsibility of the state to its citizens, which again, I know these conversations have reiterated. And I think it's just so terribly important that we don't let states off the hook. And they assert sovereignty sometimes to prevent external actors, new humanitarian agencies playing a role. But with the work that I've always done is to, with authority and sovereignty, come responsibility. And what is that responsibility? And it's not just to provide security. It's to meet the needs of their citizens. So I think we need to work towards a different definition of what sovereignty means, especially in this context. And that's why, again, putting the citizen voices so central that the women, the children, the families, they're telling us what they need. Now is time for just immense hard-thinking and creativity about how can states respond. And I think to tease out, is it that the states don't have the capacity? Is it a question of will? Or is it a question of, is it will or capacity? Are they choosing not to or have they got real capacity problems? And I think there's time also for more honesty about what are the real constraints that are preventing, addressing the real needs of real citizens. And I think it's important for a number of reasons, not to let them off the hook. And one of them is that we see around the world the humanitarian agencies are at breaking point. For refugees, rather than IDPs, the recent annual conference of UNHCR said, we've got to now, we're at breaking point. We all need to look at the root causes. And for us, part of the root causes is this breakdown in trust and breakdown in delivery between the citizens and state. And of course, humanitarian actors are needed. And the response is needed. But we all know that's not the optimal mechanism. These are stopgap measures. And I appreciated very much the question from the first panel is that there also needs to be accountability. When humanitarian agencies do step in, we do need greater mechanisms of accountability for how those agencies are using their funding and how they're delivering and to address the real problems in corruption in the humanitarian system as well as the state system. I'll close just with a final reflection on where a state is willing, because I think many of the governments in South Asia around the world say that they are willing. There are many, many civil servants. There are ministers who are working around the clock trying to deliver up against real odds. But where we need a new phase of creativity and social policy that, given the available resources and given that there are tremendous numbers of dedicated civil servants, health workers, teachers, trying to do their best, how do we collectively, how do they, how do we re-sync the way that services get provided? And we heard in the first panel, one example is ID cards. This is an issue that's newly on the agenda and is reflected in the SDG discussions. It's now the right to identity. And a legal identity card seems to be so important rightly to people. But hearing what they need, what are their priorities? Is it health? Is it education? But how can the resources that are there be much, much better used? And then coming back to the theme of putting the social accountability mechanisms and the voice center stage. Thank you. Thank you, Clara. It's very interesting. We all think that the first place the states should be taking their responsibility. Now it's very interesting that at the first panel, our colleagues were talking about if you're not taking the IDPs very seriously, then the IDPs will become refugees later. I would like to invite Bilkes-John Ahmadie. She will talk about the humanitarian laws concerning refugees. Because this is also something that's really related to IDPs and then definitely to refugees. Bilkes-John. Thank you. I think the previous speakers have highlighted in a very nuanced and effective way the current humanitarian crisis that affect millions of both refugees and IDPs around the globe. And I think as we identify this dire problem, we also must look to how we can solve or at least alleviate the impact of the problem. I would like to look at the international instruments that exist and frameworks that exist. And some of these are conventions that were adopted over 50 years ago and that still guide international law. And I think John mentioned the 1951 Convention in the previous panel relating to the status of refugees. That's the main global legal instrument dealing with the status and rights of refugees. But in addition to the 1951 Convention, there are other conventions and declarations that are of particular relevance in certain regions. For example, the Africa Convention that was mentioned previously and then there is one on Latin America and the European Union. There is, in addition to all the specific refugee and IDP related guidelines and conventions and instruments, there is a substantial body of international laws that apply both to refugees and IDPs. So when at the time of its adoption, the 1951 Convention, only covered those who became refugees before January 1951 and only those who came from European countries. So obviously, close to two decades later, the international community realized that that was not going to work. So the 1967 protocol removed those limitations, both the date line as well as the geographic limitation. So now what we refer to as the 1967 protocol extends equal status to all refugees. So that's a good news. Of course, all refugees that are covered by the definition in the 1951 Convention. So there are some issues with the Convention itself. One is that the scope does not include IDPs. It's also inadequate in addressing ethnic violence and gender persecution as reasons for a person to seek asylum in another country. And of course, it's insensitive to security concerns related to organized crimes and terrorism. One of the core principles of the 1951 Convention is the principle of non-reformant. Basically, it means this principle prohibits the returning of a refugee to a territory where his or her life or freedom is threatened. Or put another way, a refugee seeking protection must not be prevented from entering a country. As this would amount to a reformant. It's also a rule of customary international law. This is very important to note, because customary international law applies to those states who have not signed the 1951 Convention. And now this brings me to the situation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Although, like Pakistan, there are many other countries who do not respect the principle of non-reformant. And Pakistan is one of them. While we all understand that Pakistan has not signed the 1951 Convention or the protocol, they are, in fact, bound by the non-reformant principle. And that's what makes Pakistan's current policy to Afghan refugees so troubling. Families are being forced without being given a chance to at least pack and leave. Sometimes they are given less than 48 hours if they are not immediately deported. A UNHCR report came out a few weeks ago and said in July and August, only in two months, 70,000 Afghans were forced to leave Pakistan. And only in the first week of September, 7,700 Afghans were forced or deported from Pakistan. So what does that mean for these refugees? When they return, their identity changes from refugee to returnee when they enter the Pakistan, Afghanistan. Given the security situation in Afghanistan, these returnees are double victims of violence in their communities and societies. For most of them, they have been living in Pakistan for decades, especially the young generation. They live there. They were born there. They are not familiar with the customs and traditions in Afghanistan. They speak with a dialect that's not appreciated or recognized in Afghanistan. And young men, particularly, are at risk of being isolated, marginalized, and also a soft target for violent extremist groups. Because Afghan government, unfortunately, is unable to reintegrate them in society. So now let's shift to the IDPs in because there is a guiding principle on internal displacement. Afghanistan has recognized the guiding principle, as well as the 1951 Convention and the Protocol, and has, in 2014, drafted an IDP policy along with an action plan. So what does that mean? That means equal protection, non-discrimination for IDPs, and access to resources. But given the current status of Afghan government, Afghan government has failed to meet those needs and concerns. And in fact, forced eviction from informal settlements, not only by government but also by private sector, has become a daily concern for many IDPs and refugees. And sometimes these IDPs become displays for second and third time, as Rita just mentioned. So among all, a refugee family or a refugee person, as well as IDP, are both vulnerable. But women are the most vulnerable of all. And I think it was Kofi Annan, who said the most vulnerable of all the human family is IDPs. I don't want to go into the number of IDPs in Syria, in Yemen, and Nigeria, but it's very troubling that 44% of Syrian population are IDPs. And imagine the magnitude of the crisis that these individuals face. The same in Iraq, 36% of the people are living in IDP in displacement. And in Yemen, 3 million of the 24 million population, which makes 13% of the population are IDPs. So there is serious need for serious consideration on how to deal with the IDP situation globally. As Claire just mentioned, states must take responsibility. Otherwise, it's going to be catastrophic. And these IDPs become refugees. Refugees become IDPs. The circle goes on and on. So now, into the regional instruments, the convention governing the specific aspects of refugee problems in Africa, which was adopted in 1969, expanded the definition of refugees. And it offers legal protection to a wider category of people in response to growing a refugee problem. And I think this convention, the Africa Convention, can apply to the situation in many other countries. And in addition to that, I know I only have one minute. So in addition to that, there is the Cartagala Declaration of Refugees in Latin America, which needs to be studied by states who are dealing with IDP communities. When the guidance for IDPs was adopted, there were only 20 million IDPs in 50 countries. 18 years later today, we have 40 million IDPs. The European Union also has a system, which is the EU Common European Asylum System, which is intended to ensure that the rights of refugees under international law are protected in its member states. I don't need to go into details how refugees are treated in some European countries. I'm sure most of the questions from the audience will come. I will leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now we are opening the question to the floor, and I'm sure, wow. First round, we are taking only three questions, and then our panelists will respond to those questions, and we will go, hopefully, with the second round. One at the back with a blue shirt lady, and then there is no discrimination about the guy here, second you, and then you. Hi. Good morning. This is Sheila from Voice of America Afghanistan Service. It was great to hear you, actually, about IDPs and seeing Clara after a long time. I have a question for Wilkes John and you, being an expert in the region. IDPs, as something, has not discussed a lot, but what you're saying that you're looking into these things, how effective are these projects in Afghanistan, giving the fact there is corruption? Do you get some support from locals or government, and some projects have been done, and they have been a success? I want to hear about that, and who has been helped? Because if you look at IDPs, a lot of Afghans are IDPs in different places. So what do you have done some projects? I'm just curious about that. Thank you. And gentlemen, you, please. My name is Abit. I'm from Washington DC. Sorry, Creative Services Washington DC office. I'm from Pakistan. I have a question to Ms. Rakshanda. That during your discussions with the communities in FATA, did you find any impact of Blake Law on women's and IDPs camps or whatsoever? Or you have any comments of Blake Law on, impacts of Blake Law on women in FATA? Thank you. Should I? Wilkes? No, just that third question. Hi, I'm Priyanka Vakil again from PILPG. My question is specifically regarding the sovereignty problem that we face with the IDP guidelines, and how do you have states responsible? So I think in the last week of August, Sri Lanka talked, the Ministry of Rehabilitation incorporated part of their law to have some specific policies for IDPs and how to help resettle them as well as refugees. So I just wanted to know if the panel had any specific legal gaps that they foresee, as far as enforcing the implementation of this, or if there is any role for the international community in helping with this issue. Thank you very much. Thank you. I think first, Wilkes-John, because the question came from to you specifically, and I'm sure Clara will talk about the state accountability and, of course, the sovereignty of what you are. And I think maybe each of you can contribute to others. OK, great. Thank you, Sheila, for your question. So first of all, there are over 1 million IDPs throughout Afghanistan, and majority of them live in urban settings and in informal settlements. For those who live in camps, there are support provided by humanitarian organizations and CSOs, and to some extent by government. But there are a significant number of IDPs who live with their extended family or relatives, which remain unregistered, in most cases. And the burden stays with the families and extended family. OK, thank you. If you are referring Black law relating to the FCR, FCR is Frontier Crime Regulation 1901, because that law was introduced for the tribal area during the British rule in Pakistan. So, of course, there was an impact, because the state response, why there was the gap in the state response, because the area was divided between two administrative unit. One was the administrative unit for the tribal area, and the second administrative unit for the settled area. So when people, the people, they didn't had access to knowledge, and particularly the women, they were not familiar, because you need to remember, from this area, this area is highly conflict affected, and most of the male family member, they move to the Gulf states for jobs and for earning for the family. So women were alone at that time there. So they were not familiar with the institution. So that law, because the area was divided between the two administrative unit under the law, was really problem for women. For example, women, they were not having access to resources, and then they were issue of registration. So these were the basic challenges for women in that area. But on the other hand, because under the FCR, there is another form of elitism were created by the British rule at that time, the Maliks. So the people, the Malik has more access to the resources, and the poor women, particularly, and the common people from that area, they were highly marginalized. So no doubt, because of this black law, people are still suffering for either their IDPs or in a non-IDP status. I certainly think where countries haven't yet adopted the relevant conventions or adopted the relevant legal frameworks into their own laws, legal systems, there's certainly work to be done. But I think just as or potentially more important is one can derive the obligation of states to their citizens regardless of where they live. So they have these obligations to their citizens. So a large part of it I think is about policy implementation and ensuring that states, they have resources, they have in many cases, in most cases, the capacity, but it's really understanding why are these, why are people not accessing services and where are the real constraints? So I would urge attention as much to policy implementation as the law. Thank you. Now the second round. What is happening to that part? At the first panel, there was lots of a question from that part and now, okay, again, you please. And then gentlemen, again, no discrimination in you, young lady. Thank you very much. This was quite informative. My name's Cornelia Weiss. I was looking at the situation of Haiti and the peacekeepers regarding the IDP camps. And I came across a UN audit agency and I don't have the paperwork in front of me, but it might have been the OIOS, where it actually audited the performance of the peacekeeping troops in terms of what they were doing and not doing within the IDP camps, plural, many plural here. And the audit came back as unsatisfactory. So I am wondering if you all have looked at that as a mechanism for having the UN actually go out and conduct audits and hold entities responsible and that is then a public record that performance is unsatisfactory, whether that changes policies and practices, I don't know, but it certainly seems to me that that would be a first step and the particular audit that I looked at, I think it might have been from around, not terribly long ago. A few years ago, thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Wasim. I'm a journalism student at University of Maryland and a journalist from Pakistan. I have a question from Bill Case. I was wondering about your comment about Afghanistan government's inability to integrate refugees returning from Pakistan, considering that a huge amount of aid Afghanistan is receiving over the last decade. So do you think there is a possibility of bad governance or corruption involving these things? So they are unable to accommodate these people because around three million refugees have been in Pakistan and a few millions have returned already. So hopefully corruption has a part to play in this all. Thank you. You. You know about the legal status of the Pakistani women who have married to the Afghan men and now they are being forced to leave the country. Like what could be the legal status of these women in Afghanistan, in Pakistan? Thank you. Now our panelists. Tough questions, though. Who will start? Okay, so let me start with the huge amount of money spent in Afghanistan in the past 10, 15 years and why is the Afghan government unable to meet the needs and concerns of the little needs? Afghanistan is still a country in conflict. Most part of the country is still suffering from insecurity and I'm sure you're all aware about the attacks and incidents on civilian settlements as well as government. So lack of security has a huge impact on the governance. We governance certainly plays a role. Corruption is there. But I think the major issue at this point that the government is unable to perform its obligations and duty is because of insecurity and weak governance. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, there are two issues regarding Pakistan. One, you raised the question of UN audit. The serious issue for us in Pakistan because when we were looking into IDP women issues, so we were looking into the issue of prevention, protection and participation and which is very much relevant to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. And working and naming 1325 in our documents is still an issue of threat for our own state because we were clearly asked not to use this word in our document. So this is one of the area where it's very difficult in our camps to work with this. So I think there is need for UN to look, their partnership with the respective states and negotiate because at some level we realize the UN is on the compromising situation. They compromise with the state for the sake of their own project and existence in that area. And the second, I think the issue of particularly the current displacement is close to the area which is known as a CPAC route, particularly from Balochistan to Khabar Pakhtunkhwa. So I think working in these areas and inviting UN for this is, I think it will be a great challenge for civil society organizations because the civil society organizations are already, the state is pushing back from these areas in the name of no objection certificate. This is the first time in our country for our own area, moving in our own area, we require no objection certificate and the finally legal status because according to the Citizenship Act in Pakistan, the women can't get the nationality for their own spouse. And this is the clear violation of Pakistan own commitment to CEDA section article nine. So I think the status of Pakistani women those are married to Agwan women are really they are facing problem because this is the patriarchal society. Women has to move if her husband not allowed to for a citizenship in this Pakistan. No doubt the federal sharia court has lot of negative impact on women status but they given their verdict in the favor of women nationality but the state is very selective to choose or to implement the law which is for their convenience or non convenience. Thank you. And just quickly on the Haiti example I don't know the particular order you refer to. I do know of a study by the National Academy of Public Administration on the use of aid in Haiti which is a really excellent study and drew attention to many of the problems that the other audit may have done but I think more generally you raise a really important point. This is one example of the type of accountability mechanism. Tribunal is one, audits are another really important type of accountability mechanism and to both audits of government programs but also audits of humanitarian agencies and programs. And I think it's a really important moment at the moment with the World Humanitarian Summit having just taken place and there's now much more of a push for greater accountability and this is one of the best mechanisms and all too often audits do take place and then they don't get published and they don't get published in local languages. So I'd love to see and maybe this is something advocacy groups can take up just building in practices that audits need to be published on time made available in the communities where they're working and maybe even build in, I mean ideally I'd like to see them build in obligating consultations with the communities that they were supposed to be delivering to including the women so that you institutionalize this type of community feedback. Thank you. I think after hearing very wonderful comments and talks in this panel I think few things I found in plus being Afghan and at the same time being using my authority in this chair today I would like to just I would like to just talk about a few things that I found that the panel was emphasizing and I think these are very important for all of us to look at it and see what we can do particularly through the establishment of the Woman Human Rights Tribunal is one of the things that I found based on the discussion that there are so many internal linkages between the not only from cultural perspective but also from legal and from international human humanitarian law lots of what it's called internal linkages between the countries where we have lots of refugees now in India and how if they will be in conflict zones then definitely will have impact on them to be displaced in another place within the India as well as in Pakistan and particularly when it comes to the Woman Human Rights Regional Tribunal I think this is the only place that we can pressurize the government, the states that they have to be accountable and provide the protection for the women for the IDPs particularly for the women and children and at the same time we have to exactly what you were relating to bring accountability or bring up the internationally humanitarian assistance to accountability and plus at the same time we can also identify the best practices of having policies like for instance Pakistan and India they don't have a internal displaced people policies and legal framework there but fortunately Afghanistan have but how we can implement on Afghanistan side how we can support and help the government of Afghanistan to implement it and replicate and duplicate this in the other countries thank you so much and thank you for our panelists and give a round for this one. Can you hear me? Yes, thank you. We have a few final remarks and I'm gonna ask Rita to join us as she is the author and panelist. Thank you very much and I will be very quick I wanna just pick up some of the things that were said in both the first and the second panel and I wanna begin with the whole issue of that the UN summit next week is both an opportunity and a disappointment but it's an opportunity because standards will be settled global standards, global commitments will be made, they will be reiterated and then it's up to us to see how far we can take those with term in terms of advocacy with our own states but those standards hopefully will apply not only to refugees, to migrants but they will apply to all forcibly displaced persons and that will be in a sense our mission to ensure that they are seen across the board as relevant to all forcibly displaced persons. The second thing is something I wanna pick up from what Claire said, which is the magnitude of the problem Bilkis has given us the statistics that's staggering in just one year alone Pakistan had a surge of 46% in IDPs and it's happening, it's continuing in every one of our countries in so many of the regions across the world if we do not address the issues of prevention. States have an obligation and this is in fact, I think, I don't remember which clause in the UN guidelines states have an obligation to prevent the creation of IDPs. They don't just happen, we know the process by which they happen, we know the processes by which in fact our states don't step up to stop them. It is lack of political will, it's lack of priority, it's to do with discrimination, it's to do with the whole issue of the creation of IDPs as a strategy of armed parties including the state. The other thing I wanna pick up on which is someone I think, I don't remember who said this, which is yes, we do need to work with people who are more open to our ideas. While I do talk about the state and I talk about governments as monolithic institutions, as we all know that there are people who are far more open, sympathetic, people of concern, they're like us. So we do need to reach out to them and it's important not to look at institutions in a monolithic way. And the other thing is the whole issue of state capacity. I'm coming from a country that's an ascendant power and frankly the Indian government says we don't need aid. We are in the business of giving aid now. Pakistan has also said we don't need aid in terms of a particular context of IDPs. 16 humanitarian agencies and I think maybe Rukshan that can correct me have been denied that no objection certificate and who are we talking about? We're talking about agencies like Oxfam. So it is also that there are political reasons why in fact our governments don't wish audits to be done monitoring accountability. The Indian government is very clear. Yes, we regard with respect the UN guiding principles but no, we don't need them. We have our own internal mechanisms. The fact is that we discriminate. So the refugees, the people who were displaced because of a pogrom against Muslims, 10 years, more than 16 years, 20 years ago were not even recognized as refugees or recognized as displaced people and it took the Supreme Court, it took our National Human Rights Commission to draw attention to their plight. Yes, we do have internal mechanisms and those are important. So I think when we talk about state capacity here we are not talking about states that do not have the wherewithal. They do have the wherewithal. It's just not a priority. There is discrimination. These are not seen as equal citizens. Finally, the tribunal and I want to just flag this again is a process that would build upon fact finding. It would build upon audits. It's, I mean, after all, how do you build a case? You don't build, I mean, you have to build a case on solid evidence. Fact finding is a huge issue in processes that are internationalized. Yes, and particularly where UN peacekeeping is involved. We're far more and the business of providing peacekeepers than in fact inviting peacekeepers, but still those standards are important standards. We can still hold our governments to it. So these are all enabling mechanisms but they all fold into a process. The whole tribunal idea was this is a way of gaining visibility. This is a way of pinpointing accountability. This is a way of empowering the women who trusted us. Thank you.