 Welcome, Saïd as well, our colleagues from the dance team. Okay, I'll say, Paula, perhaps we can start just with the, at least with some of the introductions as colleagues keep, you know, joining us today. And so my name is Martina, Caterina for those who don't know me yet. I'm the co-chair of the dance team on law and policy under the global protection cluster, together with my colleague Fernando from the Norwegian Refugee Council. And today, we are here as part of this webinar, of course, as you all know, on legal aid to protect the right to legal identity. This webinar is part of a series of webinars that we are organizing and a project of the task team on law and policy on legal aid in humanitarian settings. And you will see now in the chat, my colleague Mariana will actually share the link to the web page of the project where you can also find the other tools that we have developed over the past year and a half under this project, the legal aid analysis framework that comes a company with another couple of documents, a conceptual framework, as well as an analysis guide. These are tools that we have developed and we talked about it in different webinars and some of you are actually some of you who are here today, like the colleagues in Iraq are currently using them. And so this is ongoing work that we welcome and we're always there to support you if it's something that you want to explore or something that you may need support with. On that page, you will also find the findings of a survey that we run a couple of years ago between one thing and the other. And that survey actually the results of these surveys around the challenges and lessons learned that you are facing in the field when looking at legal aid in humanitarian settings. This is really what also informed this learning initiative, this series of webinars and which really aims at collecting good practices in some key areas and will have the chance to hear from Paula and colleagues what these key areas are. I will not repeat them now but we will soon get to it. Some of you might have seen already from the concept note that we have shared. And I just wanted also to flag before we start that we have already had, you know, the first webinar of the series looking at legal aid in reparation context. And now Mariana will also share the link specifically for the recording of that webinar in case it is something that in case you missed it and it is something that you're also interested in. So I'd say without taking any any more time from from my side, I would like to introduce Paula Basanti. She is the consultant who's been working very closely with us on this project for the past year and a half, and she will take it from here. So thanks again everyone for joining us and looking forward to the discussion. Thank you. And on that note, I'll take advantage just to say please or great if you could all meet yourself. I think we're going to be a good number of people. So that would be fantastic. Thanks so much and Paula to you. Thank you. Thank you, Martina. And thank you everybody for making it today. Since we will not have time to do a tour de table to introduce ourselves, let me just welcome all of you. Today, the event brings together as the other webinar back in February, a variety of experts, I would say, and practitioners on access to justice and legal aid in humanitarian settings from a variety of organizations, the colders and sectors. We have among us representatives from UN agencies and international organizations such as UNDP, UNITER, IOM, DC, the High Commission for Human Rights and others. Colleagues, we have a representative from INGO specialized on protection and legal aid and access to justice such as I can see definitely colleagues from DRC, NRC, IRC, IED law and others. We have members of the national legal aid civil society around the globe and representative from academia and research institutes. We also welcome representative from government and donors who are supporting this initiative of legal aid in humanitarian setting project within the task team on law and policy and other donors who are joining us today that are usually financing or providing technical and political support to legal aid and access to justice programs. So to all of you, welcome and good morning and good afternoon for the colleagues on the other side. The objective of the webinar today, as Martina mentioned, is learning. So listening and hearing from our fantastic panelists and speakers, but also exchange on good practices and lessons learned on legal aid program to protect legal identity. As you all know, legal identity is the key to exist before the law, but also to access and enjoy rights to prove a family lineage and also to prevent a risk of statelessness. Normally, in crisis and humanitarian settings, civil registration system become poorly operational, state duty bearer face challenges in ensuring that all the residents in their territories actually are recognized as individuals before the law and can access justice. In particular, displaced population face a number of a variety of obstacles to renew, update, recover, safeguard their legal and civil documentation and credentials. Obstacles we will hear from the panelists are very between country but can include cost discrimination, social practices, bureaucratic obstacles, but also lack of information and awareness on procedures and requirement to renew and recover legal and civil documentation that have been maybe lost or damaged. During the conflict or the disaster. Legal aid and access to justice program are normally put in place by international and national civil society and other actors to support state obligation to register all people residing in their territories, but also to support directly displaced population or people in need to approach institutions and register their vital events. Today we are going to hear from colleagues working in Myanmar and Syria. As we did in the first webinar back in February, thanks to the field colleagues, we discussed and chose two countries. In the first webinar we had chosen Colombia and Ukraine as yet very different from each other. They presented some similarities in terms of being laboratory for transitional justice measures to restore the rights of those who suffered the human rights violation during conflict. Today colleagues from the field and the task team on law and policy experts suggested to have Syria and Myanmar as a country case study as they present similar again every country and every context is special, but they present some similar characteristic in terms of challenges faced by displaced population in accessing their rights to legal identity. Among other restricted access to population in need, a risk of statelessness for some categories and limited ability to work with legal aid, national actors, being duty bearers or national civil society. The panelists today will give us then for an overview of the challenges they face, but most importantly they're going to share with us some innovative practices that they put in place together in their country context to overcome those challenges. We hope that while listening to our speakers we can all reflect among each other on similar challenges that are faced in the country you're working on and maybe share other experiences or ask follow up questions to our panelists. As mentioned the idea is to learn and exchange so don't be shy and feel free to ask follow up questions either in the chat or during the section on question and answer. As you can see from the slide, thank you Mariana. We have representative from UNITR, from UNDP and from International Legal Foundation that will present on Myanmar case study and we will have representative from UNDP, UNITR and regional refugee council that will present on the Syria case study. We will have at the end of the presentation a space for question and answer. I will just before starting the discussion with the panelists, I will ask you please if you could mute your microphone especially when the speakers are presenting so that they can focus the attention on their presentation. Feel free to write questions in the chat directly and we will then open up the floor for more exchange. And to the panelists a special thanks because on top of their responsibilities and their hard workload they actually put effort in presenting their intervention and complimenting each other during this presentation so thanks in advance for all the work done on this. We are very grateful. So the topic is very clear and now we're going to look at the topic of protect legal identity through three lenses that you can see on the screen. These three aspects have been again the result of a broad consultation with protection and legal aid practitioners from around the world through the survey that Martina mentioned. And these are the three aspects on which they asked to share good practices and lessons learned on coordination, partnership and strategies to respond to population hard to reach. So without further delay, I will ask the first question to both country case study representative, starting from Myanmar, so I will give the floor to Masha first. So the question is about coordination. And in particular, if you if you want Mariana, you can keep the slides on the question. So maybe that's clear for participants. The first question is as units are and then Jose, as UNDP, how have humanitarian development, human rights and peace actor coordinated their efforts to implement more effective and collaborative legal aid and access to justice intervention to secure legal identity of displaced population in Myanmar. Thank you, Marcia. Hello, colleagues. My name is Maria Voloshkiewicz and I am statelessness officer with UNHCR based in Yangon. I'm very pleased to be part of this event today and wishing us all a very fruitful discussion. Myanmar is facing one of the most complex and longest standing humanitarian crisis in Southeast Asia. We continue to witness intensified conflict involving a multitude of actors and diminishing humanitarian space. In addition to almost 2 million people displaced due to conflict, Myanmar hosts one of the largest stateless populations in the world. There are over 600,000 stateless Rohingya in addition to over 11 million people who have no proof of legal identity in the country. Historically, the issues of citizenship, ethnicity and political affiliation are closely interlinked in this country. And systemic discrimination of ethnic and religious minorities in laws and practices is a root cause of exclusion of large group of population from rights and opportunities. In addition with systemic corruption and common practices of extortion, this makes these populations particularly vulnerable. The issues of citizenship are highly politicized and sensitive and the legal aid is also increasingly politicized, putting at risk the safety of service providers. This leaves us with very limited number of organizations and people willing and able to work in this area. So to ensure there is a link and some sort connection between these existing legal aid organizations working towards improving access to legal identity in different parts of the country. UNHCR jointly with Norwegian Refugee Council launched a citizenship network to offer a platform for relevant service providers to exchange information, experiences and lessons learned to coordinate activities, harmonize awareness raising messages and advocacy, conduct capacity building of networks members and joint planning on advancing activities towards addressing statelessness. Another successful example of cooperation is with UNICEF last year in Rakhine State, which is a home to stateless Rohingya population. UNHCR jointly with UNICEF conducted a series of consultations with humanitarian and development actors with the name to develop a joint strategy and an operational work plan on improving access to birth registration. Since there are many limitations to what can be practically achieved within this complex and sensitive environment, we aimed to develop a working plan that is visible and realistically achievable within a short period of time, because planning for a long term is very difficult. So the work plan for this year includes activities aimed at raising awareness on the importance of obtaining citizenship and civil documentation, enhancing people's understanding on the procedures and processes to file applications for birth registration and citizenship, and also aims at harmonization of data collection on documentation among relevant stakeholders and synchronization of advocacy messages. And here let me pass word to my colleague Steph, who is based in Rakhine State, who has been able to join the session despite severe crash on the Rakhine region by the extremely severe cyclone last weekend. Steph, over to you. And Masha, I'm just going to quickly switch on my camera. I'm Steph, I'm the protection officer here in Central Rakhine State, and just building, I'm just going to switch off the camera now because of the bandwidth. Just building on what Masha has said and just reflecting back to the stateless population and how Rakhine has one of the largest stateless population here in stateless population in the world. In terms from a protection cluster and looking at synergies and coordination. We try to look at synergies and try to look at providing support in the context of legal identity through coordination mechanisms, and one of it is in thematic areas looking at detention and also irregular movement. Now, because this population, especially the Rohingya, they are subjected to discrimination and they do not have proper identification or legal identity. Many of them get charged, many of them get arrested, many of them get detained under the Immigration Act and also the Registration Act. In 2022 itself, we recorded about 3,000 Rohingyas who have been detained for irregular movement and 2,000 of them were actually sentenced. Out of the 2,000 that were sentenced, 400 were actually children and looking at detention and irregular movement. Initiatives and referral pathways were one of the priorities for the protection cluster to ensure that identification and response are actually given to these individuals who are detained because they do not have legal documentation. Now the protection cluster continues to work on an SOP, which is coordinated through different UN agencies, including UNICEF, UNFPA, UNHCR. And it is also coordinated with ICRC and other protection cluster partners who are also legal and non-legal protection cluster partners. This is with the intent to look at a holistic sort of referral pathway and services. And part of recognising that we have very limited services here in Rakhine but we try to see how we can actually capitalise on legal services on the ground, restoring family links and any material support that partners are actually able to give. Now linked to lack of civil documentation and freedom of movement comes and Marsha has already touched upon this is extortion. Many of Rohingyas are subjected to extortion and through protection cluster tools like protection incident monitoring systems, through general monitoring and as well as through monitoring framework exercise that the cluster has rolled out, we have come to see that 80% of the victims of extortion here in Rakhine are actually Rohingyas. And there are victims of extortion due to perpetrated by legal actors, non-legal actors and a lot of it is also linked to access to civil documentation, part of access to services and civil documentation. So the cluster that through evidence-based exercise, they have developed a counter extortion strategy and also harmonise advocacy messaging as it relates to access to civil documentation. And these messaging have been endorsed through the ICCG and it's been used through the protection cluster members as well. In terms of another actor and Marsha's touch upon with UNICEF and maybe this would segue into Jose's part as well, is coordination through with UNDP and this is very much to create an enabling framework here in Rakhine because it's not just legal identity in name but also creating a sense of belonging and ensuring that there is a cohesion between displaced population, Rohingya displaced population, non-displaced population and with host communities. This is done through the triple nexus initiative and particularly in central Rakhine. We are looking at joint needs assessments to be done on an area-based approach and trying to look at livelihoods and development initiatives through this needs assessment. This is very much still underway and another area where we coordinate quite closely with UNDP is also to provide information and awareness on issues related to housing, land and property. And this of course is part of a durable solutions, a long-term sort of solutions where it comes to Rohingya IDPs because many of them have lost their land and have been encamped in very, very dire conditions. So I'm going to hand it over to Jose as this would nicely link into UNDP's presentation as well. Yes, thank you very much. It is indeed a very difficult situation and we want to follow Antonio Gramsci's words to be pessimistic in the intellect but optimist in the will. And we want to find ways forward to cooperate, to coordinate, to make the best of this very catastrophic situation. I had the lack of working for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Myanmar before UNDP. So I was present in the beginnings of the Citizenship Network with UNHCR and it was actually a very good initiative that came up with very interesting reports such as the gender analysis on the rights to a nationality in Myanmar that I posted in the website. And also there was cooperation with many local actors such as the Smile Foundation and other small group of NGOs that were working for vulnerable groups in accessing civil documentation. But I think it's important to understand that all previous problems that were present in Myanmar before the coup, not only for Rohingya populations but for everybody else and especially ethnic minority impoverished communities are still there. So every single problem that we had before February 2021 is still present and the conflict and the coup has exacerbated these problems and has created new ones. For example, having two million displaced persons, we have many people who seek temporary household lists, for example, because people are living in the houses of relatives in their displacement and then they face these night checks. So you have the village administrator together with the police, they are checking in the middle of the night, really know who is sleeping where and then they are checking this documentation that is important to have. So our CSO partners, and I will talk more about it in the second part, are helping people, updating this household list. There is a huge issue of course in the legitimacy of the administrative bodies, the administrative bodies including of course the immigration department are very much paralyzed and more dysfunctional than before to put it in some way. And civil society organizations are, as a norm, not willing to deal with them directly unless it is clearly beneficial for the claimant or there is a prior relation with the official, etc. So we are navigating a very difficult environment where I will talk more about it later because this question is more about coordination but of an interim protection strategy, you know, having how do we work in the interim while we have the institutions captured by the military. In, apart from the citizenship network, I will mention also initiatives in Kachin to develop a joint action plan for what is being called the transitional solution sites, so that we have of course all the main UN agencies including UNHCR and civil society organizations trying to coordinate to see, okay, in which sites are we going to work, are our civil society partners providing legal aid in these areas, can we increase assistance, etc. And I think in terms of coordination, I will just mention our communities of practice and just the activity of doing communities of practice in general. I think it's a very good way to improve communication between UN agencies, INGOs, civil society organizations to build up also confidence to discuss these difficult strategies and to move forward. So I hand back to you, Martina. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much and very, very interesting point and reference to coordinated initiative. I will then pass the floor to Gabrielle and Shaza from UNHCR and Hala from UNDP to share their experiences in Syria. I know being at the facilitator is not always easy. I will kindly ask you to try to be straight to the point on the good practices because otherwise we will not arrive to the section on question and answer, which I think is very enriching and we give the opportunity to the audience to ask follow up questions. So please bear the time limit if you can. Thank you. Okay. I think I can start. Good morning everyone. My name is Gabrielle Olive and senior legal officer for the country office in Syria. And I'm here with my colleague Shaza Hajjali, associate legal officer as well and I would say the historical memory of our legal aid program here in Syria. We thought within the three or four minutes which has been given to us to try to give a bit of a background on the situation and why UNHCR has decided to develop a quite large legal aid program within the country. So in 2011 when the crisis started in the following years, UNHCR and along with other actors were able to identify in the lack of documentation and like identity documentation, one of the major challenges encountered by Syrian citizens in their displacement cycle. Just to mention some aspects of civil documentation is a prerequisite not only to access basic services in Syria, but also including government subsidies, but also to is a prerequisite to access HLP rights for example. During the first few years of the crisis about 27% of the judicial infrastructure and the cadastral department were fully destroyed and about 50% of the civil registries department were either destroyed, burned or looted. And also due to quite large internal displacement, at the moment we have about 6 million internal displacement in Syria, there was a limited ability to reach the civil affairs offices. There was also fear from the IDPs to reach these civil registry offices and also there was a limited financial capacity to apply for and secure documentation. In addition, there was also limited knowledge on the importance of these documentation order to access these rights. So when it comes to coordination to respond to all these challenges, UNHCR started in close coordination with all other UN agencies through the protection sector and also meeting donor to discuss and secure the needed support. In 2011, for the first time in collaboration with other UN agency and of course the Syrian with the authorization of Syrian authorities, we succeeded to include the legal response in the humanitarian response plan and to obtain all the approvals from the authorities in order to start our legal aid problem. The legal aid program initially started with several national and international geo, like Syrian Women Union, DRC, SSD and others, and they were mostly cooperating and assisting and providing legal aid in relation to documentation and of course we were free of charge. At the UN level, I would say that few technical working groups were created. One was specifically technical working group on civil documentation because of course this was considered was an issue. At the moment I have to say that this working group is a bit dormant but we still have the technical working group on HLP which has been recently revamped and I have to say which is quite closely linked to the issue we are discussing today. The last point in terms of coordination, I have to say that since 2015, the major implementing partner for our legal aid program are two NGOs which are Syria Trust and SARC and I have to say that unfortunately after 2018 these were the only two national NGO which were authorized to provide legal aid. So this is a quick response to the first point over to Hala. Thank you, Gabrielle. Allow me also to provide you with more kind of insights about the challenges that we are facing in the Syrian context, mainly on HLP housing lands and property rights. In Syria, historically we were, let's say, having facing inequalities in HLP contributing as a driver for the conflict and it was also a result of the conflict. And mass HLP loss and destruction almost half of the country displaced and estimated around 27% of homes damaged and destroyed. This is even before the earthquake that early year hit Syria. So the HLP needs are massive. And as we know that HLP rights are essential component for rule of law and but the problem that we have a limited space for UN agencies to work on on providing such support is limited. Thanks to the European Union UNDP UNHCR UN Habitat FAO and NRC contributed to support the Syrians first of all to better understand their HLP rights and to know how we can operate within this very complicated situation. And we have a we have start managing to see, let's say, seeking more to understand the situation and the magnitude of the problem within the degrees of HLP landscape. Although this is the operational space is very restricted for for us the partners. Managed to come together to build a cohesive approach to HLP problems and to develop a partnership among each other, building onto one another added value and areas of expertise in a joint program. We have better understanding of the situation but also we managed to identify windows for opportunities to develop intervention and, most importantly, how we can support the HLP people. We managed to position ourselves in it and to maintain a linkage with the key partners and we have also instrumental in developing innovative ways to work within the limited space. It is important for us to capitalize on such efforts coordination and must this type of efforts must be maintained and fostered to having not only to respond in a humanitarian context but rather than to contribute to longer term objectives. And we need to keep our eye on the context that we are working on it to allow us how we can reflect it into our program. As for the kind of the partnership with the National Actors, I will return back to Gabrielle so we can talking more about the National Actors over to you Gabrielle. Thank you. Thank you, Hala. And thank you Gabrielle for exploring the challenges with us and also giving us a little bit of overview of the key initiative put in place in terms of coordination. We will now take the opportunity to reflect upon another aspect of legal aid in crisis settings when protecting legal identity, which is the aspect of partnership. The partnership with the legal aid actors, both duty bearers and the National Civil Society, which we have heard already from our speaker in some context is very sensitive, is politicized and not easy. The key and aspect of protection of the operational space of civil society is actually key to ensure sustainable legal aid and access to justice intervention. So I will leave the floor again to Miamar colleagues to talk a bit about their challenges related to partnership and over to you, Jose. Yes, thank you very much. I mean, I think as in Syria, we can see that civil society is a target, really. It's very much in the focus of the facto authorities and who have taken a variety of actions to restrict the civic space. And probably the most important one is the registration law that was recently enacted and which basically expands to a very much unacceptable degree, the discretion and the arbitrariness of the authorities in deciding who is a lawful, registered organization and who is not. And then it has a series of penalties that are absolutely disproportionate and which have put the civil society organizations in a dilemma because some of them, they keep their former registration, their former registration is still valid, but many are facing the question, do I register under this regime or do I not? And both decisions have implications, and of course it has implications also for the international community because financing a non-registered organization is also sanctioned and then there is a series of organizations that are banned by the junta and which can also give rise to criminal penalties. So what have we done in this situation and what we could call a best practice in some way is for us, for UN agencies, donors, European Union, Australia and many others to get together and to discuss what can we do as a strategy to ensure that we do not harm to civil society organizations, to protect the civil space, to fund non-registered organizations, to identify new forms of associations and registrations that are very often very small, you know, but that are doing important work, especially in areas where humanitarian and international actors cannot reach. And in terms of legal identity, UNDP is supporting 20 civil society partners, half of them are on housing land and property rights, which is also a massive problem as you can imagine. We have 50,000 houses destroyed. We have punitive land confiscations against opposition members. We have all kinds of problems related to housing land and property. And of course civil documentation is essential. So what we are doing with them is I will say that ensuring their survival, you know, so the strategy more than being a legalized strategy, which it also is, because we have to work on how to support beneficiaries indirectly with less contact with the junta authorities. But it's also a strategy to protect the civil space. And that means reducing funding requirements, reporting requirements, having a duty of care angle on civil society, being as much as nice as we can be to build their confidence and to, you know, build their trust that we are behind them. We are going to share risks with them, et cetera, et cetera. And I think just to end this point, we are incredibly surprised by the ability of our civil society partners to actually deliver in this context, because they actually come back and say, yeah, we've helped this person or these persons get their birth certificate. Because we've managed to circumvent the restrictions or we've helped all of these people get some form of land registration or village administrators to deal with the household list when there is a possibility to deal with. And then there is another issue, which we haven't mentioned, which is the institutions of the ethnic organizations and the people defense forces, which is another, another area to explore, because of course they control almost half of the country, and they are also justice providers. But I stop here so not to cut others' time. Thank you. Marcia and Elisa, I don't know if you want to compliment on the aspect of partnership, UNDP intervention, or shall we pass to serious speakers on this topic? Yeah, Paula, maybe I could share a little bit in terms of our good practice, because this would lend nicely for Shikha's presentation later. So in terms of, no worries, in terms of sustainable partnership and national legal aid actors, as you know, it's a very challenging environment. There is literally no rule of law here in Myanmar, and accessing partnership through justice actors through de facto authorities is non-existent. So very much when we started to operationalize protection here in UNHCF, one of our key priorities was access to civil documentation. And in 2021, we conducted a focus group discussion ensuring that it is a community approach and looking at a community participation in developing legal programming per se. And this was done in several locations, looking at a holistic Rakhine approach. We didn't just look at the Rohingya community. We looked at Rohingya, we look at commands, and we also look at the Rakhine IDPs, because there's always a perception that UNHCR supports only the Rohingyas. There's no support for Rakhines who were actually affected by conflict, by armed conflict. So it was very important that we looked at a whole of Rakhine approach, and this was also a way where we could access our stakeholders, our legal stakeholders, to see how they had capacity to actually provide legal awareness and legal aid to displaced and non-displaced communities. The challenge I think with partners in capacity is more of the sensitivities of this area as well, the 1982 law. And also because it's been under a military rule, the sensitivities were very, very grave. I think partners found it a bit challenging and at first a bit hesitant on how to approach this. Looking at the precarious protection environment, we've mentioned extortion, how to navigate extortion, how to have zero tolerance and policy in terms when it comes to extortion incidents. It was very, very, very challenging. So we had to work very closely with partners as well to develop a bit more of a protection-sensitive approach and how to give proper legal aid, legal awareness and case management for Rohingyas as well. I won't go into depth of that because Shika will very nicely share with you the challenges that they had to go through. But I think from UNHCR's perspective and what would be key to actually share here was more of UNHCR's moral and ethical dilemma when providing access to civil documentation and legal aid programming was that the 1982 citizenship law effectively puts in discriminatory measures which denies Rohingyas the ability to self-identify. They have to go through a process which they have to accept being identified as Bengali, number one. And even if they're successfully obtained documentation as a prerequisite process to obtaining a civil documentation recognized by Myanmar law, it is always having a lesser status. So in Myanmar, there's three different types of citizenship status and the Rohingyas are presented with naturalized status which really gives them a lesser right. So it was really a legal ethical challenge for us here in UNHCR because are we promoting a system that is ineffectively discriminatory? But I think what really came out through the community participation assessments that we did was that Rohingyas still wanted to understand why it is important to obtain civil documentation one. How does it support them too? And also just wanted to know process and procedures to enable them to make an informed approach. And you will see here, it's a success that we started very small and ILF has been very, very amazing in how they have sort of gone through barriers and challenges. But really communities just want to know what their rights are, how they can approach certain things and even if it's challenging, make an informed decision. And that was a right that we gave to the communities and that's how we overcome that moral and ethical dilemma. And just very, very quickly, just speaking, I always speak about enabling environments because it's very important to have a sense of belonging. We also work again on social cohesion initiatives with another partner called ACTED. And what ACTED does is actually work with youths on different activities with different youths, Rohingyas, commands, Hindus, just different communities. IDPs and non-IDPs, what they do is they do soft activities like recreational activities, cleaning campaigns, volunteering, interfaith dialogues, and also livelihood initiatives just to ensure that there is the sense of belonging as well that complements access to civil documentation. So just that, from UNHSA's perspective, in terms of a good practice and how we actually sort of build our engagement with local partners and how we look at it more holistically. Over to back to you. Thank you. Thank you. That was very interesting and thank you for these inputs on partnership. And I'll pass the floor to the Syria case study. So please, Gabriele and Shaza, over to you on Syria. Thanks. No, thank you. Thank you very much. So Syria, UNHSA implemented in 2012, it's a legal aid program for Syrian citizens. It used to be, the situation has developed during the year, it used to be a legal program for refugees and then it turned in 2012 mostly for IDPs. Of course, also with refugees, but now our refugee population is really shrink compared to the past. So it's mostly focusing on Syrian citizens, IDPs in particular, and it's composed, if I may, of three pillars. So the first pillar is the legal aid program. We have, the legal aid program is implemented through our main, two main implementing partners at the moment, which are the Syrian trust. And I have to say that since 2018, with the legal aid ban in Syria, these are the only two legal aid providers who are authorized to operate in the country. The program is quite large. Through this NGO operates about 260 lawyers and about 150 legal outreach volunteers, covering the 14, about 14 governments. And they provide counseling, our session, but also intervention before administrative bodies as well as court intervention. The second pillar is the capacity building activities or rehabilitation activities. So of course it's quite relevant in relation to the legal identity, the civil registry offices and the cadastral department. So since 2017, about 35 civil registry offices and some cadastral department has been supported with minor rehabilitation activities. We also support in terms of solarization and also some equipment, technical equipment and other items. The third pillar, if I may say, is the advocacy for legal reform. And in particular, UNICEF during the year was quite successful in having the government passing some legislative decree, which with the aim of waiving the fees and fines for delaying the registration of civil events. There were at least six of them which were passed, which actually had a good impact on the population in particular for the IDPs to access documentation. Particular mention is on legislative decree 13 of 2021, which was amending the civil affair law and instituting something which is called one Syria civil registry office, which is basically putting together all the database of which civil registry and so the IDPs and every citizen in reality can register and vital events in every part of the country, regardless of their own initial record. And at the same time, they can obstruct civil documentation wherever they are located in the country. I've put here just one slide of what I consider to be some good practices. Of course, the number that we reach yearly to our legal assistance, which is quite high. And through this program, you see the number of people who have managed to obtain ID card. This is directly through our legal intervention, so quite large number in terms of ID, family booklets and marriage certificates. The second one is kind of also in terms of capacity building as a result of this rehabilitation office about 1,790,000 documentation were issued by the civil registry. Of course, not all of this was because of the unitary rehabilitation support, but we have seen that in there, an increase of this documentation been issued by the civil registry once the civil registry offices were rehabilitated and able to operate again. One of the good practices, which I put it here, is about the mobile unit, civil registry mobile unit, which was donated by the units to the Minister of Interior after many years actually because it was quite complicated to put together this mobile unit and to have all the clearances. But now has been donated to the Ministry of Interior and currently deployed in hard to reach location. Finally, also a good practice as I say in relation to good result in terms of legal reform, in particular with one of the latest legislative decree, which was in 24 of 2022. This was a sort of amnesty which allowed more than 200,000 people to benefit from this amnesty and have documentation being issued. I spoke before about this one, civil registry offices. Of course, we have some challenges which are still there if we can move to the next slide and we are trying to address and it's about the needs which are indeed larger than our legal aid capacity, especially now after the earthquake which has hit the north of the country. One challenge is again the ban on legal aid provider. Units are there only to authorize. We are still trying to not advocating to expand the number of national international NGO who could not return to conduct these legal activities. So this is indeed a challenge and of course there are there are some red lines from in relation to institutional support from the donors. We and different agencies have to say that they have different, if I may say so, different red line. When it comes, for example, to rehabilitation of certain civil registry versus or cadastral department, we sometimes find the donors they are not completely in line and not willing to fund certain project. And of course, we have limited access to certain area and especially in the northeast, in northeast Syria, we have quite a complicated legal system, which even the lawyer have kind of struggling to understand, which is the applicable at the moment. So this is it for the time being from Syria. Let's show as I want to compliment on something. Thank you so much, Gabrielle. Hello colleagues. I just want to elaborate a couple of points to it in addition to what was mentioned by Gabrielle. But before that, I just want to say hello to Huda Shalshul, because I've just seen her name and it's been ages since we talked. So I just want to say hello to Huda, who was the best supervisor ever with Mr. Syria. And going back to the, and of course, Stephanie, she's here, I didn't see her name. I just want to say concerning partnership with the government and the issues that was already been mentioned by Gabrielle. I just want to say that our partnership with the civil affairs and immigration and others, other institution helped us to reach out to more beneficiaries to disseminate information on the laws, legal reforms as mentioned by Gabrielle. All the legal reforms that happened for the interest of our beneficiaries IDPs and attorneys. It was because of the close working relation with the relevant public institution. We were also as well familiar with the impact by getting regular statistics. We are able to reach out through the mobile teams. It's not only the mobile unit that we recently established the civil affairs, but we're also able to convince civil affairs to delegate their mobile teams to go to the areas where IDPs were displaced or where returnees were helped to return, let's say, in collective shelters, et cetera, until they managed to go back to their original places. So this partnership and the close collaboration helped and had different dimensions that had a very positive impact on Syrian citizens. That's all from my side. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Shaza and Gabrielle. I think it's very informing and thank you so much for also reflecting with us on the remaining challenges. I think a webinar on good practices in such difficult context could not actually just focus on how we best work, but we best try to work in a different and very complex setting. Over to Hala, who will also share with us a good practice in terms of partnership with Bar Association before then looking at the third aspect. I will just ask you again to bear with the time to make sure that we have enough time for discussion. Thank you, Hala. Thank you. I will just explain that again. The space for providing legal aid in Syria is very limited. And as mentioned by Gabrielle in 2018, NGOs were notified to suspend all legal activities conducted in Syria. So within the challenges of providing such support and mechanism for people and with the restriction, we need to look for more innovative ways to address such a challenge. So therefore, we try to expand this space by launching an online legal platform. It is one of the first virtual platform that is conducted by the Bar Association. And the challenge by itself that the restriction doesn't apply on the Bar Association, which give us the room to provide these services. And we worked on having, let's say, providing legal services to all Syrian with different measures, regardless whether they are inside Syria or even outside Syria. Our platform called the Mustasharaq al-Qamuni, and it is provide more kind of information on national legislation, rights, allows beneficiaries to connect to the legal professionals and to know more information about the services and also what we've done, the kind of establishing kind of reference services to other partners. So to ensure that the beneficiary will get the whole side of services. We've done, it is private, it is confidential, so people feel more secure about whenever they wanted to talk about their issues. And it is also gender sensitive. So with the composition of the lawyers that are providing these services, we made sure that is also we have a female lawyer. Another, let's say, expanding the partnership we work with the university, with the Faculty of Law. And we have trained the fresh graduate lawyers with the more kind of new issues that has emerged during the crisis. And they've been the one who are being connected with the communities and having kind of awareness sessions for the affected communities, mainly in around 5,000 awareness sessions being conducted. Finally, also we worked with the establishing or supporting rehabilitation of civil service centers, where we can provide the civil documentation for the communities. It is mainly conducted with local authorities, with the administrative, with the municipalities to assure that even the affected areas, they have access to their, let's say, basic documentation. And by doing this, we try to expand, let's say, the borders of such kind of restriction working in Syria. Over to you, Pam. Thank you. Thank you, Ali, and thank you for diversifying for offering an overview of the diversification of the partnership strategy. I think that's very useful and maybe other representatives from other countries can also reflect upon these opportunities with university bar association. So going directly to the third topic of the webinar today, which is the population hard to reach in Syria and in Myanmar, even just the definition of hard to reach is different. I will kindly ask the two speakers to give us an overview of their challenges in designing and implementing strategies, aim at tackling legal aid needs of hard to reach populations, but before also giving us a little bit of context related to who are the hard to reach and what are their vulnerabilities and risk and how the strategy we're putting place to overcome those challenges. So for Myanmar, first, we have Sika from International Legal Foundation. Thank you, Sika. Thanks, Paolo, and thanks for this opportunity. My name is Sika, I'm Asia program director of the International Legal Foundation. I'm here presenting on behalf of my team in Rakhine who are still grappling with the after effects of the cyclone. In terms of, so I'll just briefly introduce what we do and then the communities follow. And most of it has already been referred by staff in our presentations. What you talked about, the community, the IDBs and various ethnic minorities and that those communities is what we consider the hard to reach communities. So I'm going to just touch upon our interventions and how we have been working with these communities. So ILF is a legal aid organization and it was established in Myanmar in 2017 with the goal of providing quality holistic legal representation to people who are accused of crime. So our team of lawyers and social workers reach out to the most marginalized communities who are often criminalized as a result of lack of proof of their identity or status. And one such community is Rohingya community who are often prosecuted and sentenced with imprisonment for irregular movement. Our goal as a public defender office is creating, is providing quality legal aid which is guided by performance standards for legal aid providers. And when we are talking about enabling environment to access justice and legal identity, we believe that having a committed legal aid office is the first steps towards that. And this was particularly significant in the context of Myanmar because in Myanmar legal aid law was enacted only in the year 2016. And the criminal justice system was still status quoist far being from fair or independent considering the long political history of dictatorship. And unfortunately, as Jose has already mentioned, we are back to that situation and under the current military regime. And in fact, most of, in fact, in 2021 legal aid law was amended and stateless community has been removed from the law as people who are eligible for legal aid. And that is why it is so important to stress on the need of legal aid and legal aid public defenders. So building strong legal aid system is a systemic process and it starts with changing the mindset of the lawyers by creating space for brainstorming progressive legal strategies, providing support resources and training to cause lawyers. And through our work, what we have learned is that persistent and relentless advocacy with justice sector actors is a step towards systemic change. And I want to explain this with two examples that would also highlight on the good practice challenges and how we have been overcoming it. So so far, I love has represented more than 500 Rohingya men women and children who are prosecuted for illegal movement. Now, this comprises a staggering number of 59% of women and 35% of children, which shows that the pattern of trafficking amongst this community. In the courts, we challenge prosecution and conviction on the grounds like victims of trafficking cannot be prosecuted children should not be held responsible for not obtaining civil documents, blatant fair trial and due process violations lack of access to lawyers lack of translators. And we raise these grounds starting from the lowest point and we take them strategically to the high court and even the Supreme Court. Recently, I'll file one of the first motions in the Union Supreme Court on behalf of 70 Rohingya clients for violation of the Resident Registration Act. After thoroughly listening to the arguments presented by the lawyer on numerous procedural and legal violations, the judge simply responded that this is a political issue and the case was suddenly dismissed. Now, as we know that in human rights litigation legal victories will be scarce. But the importance of this litigation is to create awareness among justice sector actors to document these violations to present the challenges the community is facing before the courts and different forums. And the fact that this case was not dismissed on legal grounds also gives us a hope to continue litigating and challenging the legal process. The other example I wanted to give was from our Holistic Legal Aid Initiative, which we run in Rakhine in support of UNHCR, where we provide support to the Rohingya and other IDP communities to obtain birth certificates and other civil documents and registration documents. As already explained by Jose, Steph and Maria, that corruption is very pervasive within the administrative authorities in Myanmar. But what we are learning through our project is that persistent advocacy to oppose current practices can also lead to change of mindsets. So in this example, the local health official had without any legal basis announced that children born prior to 2019 will not receive birth certificates in the year 2022. Now, these official orders were accepted widely as a norm, but it was not on any legal basis. So our team decided that they are going to challenge this at multiple administrative levels. So our lawyer in charge in Rakhine, she is a trained specialized juvenile justice lawyer. She took copies of the Child Rights Law to the Health Department and advocated that the law does not create any exception for children to obtain their right to birth certificates and birth registration documents. Then after this, another official blamed the parents that they are lying and this is what the stereotyping they are lying. They don't be, they haven't tried birth certificates, but they just want registration here. Then a team insisted that the department should verify and check the record to see if the birth certificate has been has been issued or not. And in the alternative, they also gave a counter that if you do not trust the community, they are ready to give an affidavit attested saying that they have not received birth certificate yet. Now, after overcoming this barrier, the child was not never issued a vaccine certificate. In Myanmar, vaccine certificate is the basis on which now we can get birth certificates because vaccine certificate act as a record that the child was born in the IDP camp. And then we had to go back again and rummaging through the records with the local nurse. It was found that the child was administered vaccine. And then there was another level of advocacy done by a team to get vaccine certificate by advocating how important this document is for the child to be able to apply for birth certificates. After seven months of advocacy, we finally obtain birth certificate. And then after the birth certificate, we obtained vaccine certificate. And after vaccine certificate, we received birth certificate. But what is remarkable is remarkable achievement that the health worker informed us that now they are open to provide birth certificates to all children who are fully vaccinated. Which means the early embargo of 2019 did not hold to anymore, and by way of which it was a far-reaching impact on all the children who were born in the camp. So, as an extension of a strategic litigation, as already mentioned by Jose, we also cut up community of practice with other legal organizations and CSOs, wherein we share experiences, discuss challenges and find solutions collectively. Because as lawyers, it's legal practice, we have to learn from each other and conducting communities of practice is another core part of our work to learn from each other. Now, I just wanted to also touch upon how we are doing this work in such challenging legal and political environment. Now, considering that there's a great risk of legal aid being politicized in Myanmar, we have strategically maintained a very low profile. We do not talk, we do not mention about our work in social media and how we publicize a service. We conduct direct outreach to the IDV communities by sharing flyers, our team of lawyers. They visit courts every day and to identify detainees who do not have lawyers and connect them with service providers. We get information about mass arrests of Rohingya community on social media or through our local community networks and our lawyers immediately move to the police station to address that. So that's how we have been doing our publicizing our service on very ground level without talking about much on social media. And we have distance ourselves from the political discourse in the country to not be identified with any political group. Secondly, we provide second strategy we have adopted is and also this is our goal that we will provide quality digital representation in every case for every client for every community. And we do not work for any one particular community. So we are not a community, we are not an organization that provides legal aid only to throwing a comment. They are part one of our clients to and this helps us to avoid being targeted or stereotyped. And this is also rooted in our belief that if you want to bring a systemic change, we have to push for progressive practices in every case. So what happens is that the judges in the court are so familiar with ILF, lawyers, activism, because they argue a theft case as a political case and this gives a legitimacy to legal aid organizations in such a challenging environment. Lastly, I just want to briefly touch on the challenges. I think everybody has mentioned challenges are more or less the same, how to deal with the administration is very difficult and it takes a lot of long discussions in advocacy. But I wanted to highlight that the role of legal aid in conflict affected areas seems to be very underestimated. Humanitarian assistance should also include support to legal aid services, particularly for vulnerable populations. And in Myanmar during the military coup and political crisis, we have seen how important the role of lawyers are because lawyers were acting as a resource for identification and documentation of human rights violations. They were the ones who had access to victims and detainees, handling material support by connecting people in conflict with the law in with social service providers. In fact, the military was so adamant that they did not even give access to ICRC inside the prison. And that is where these lawyers were performing such an important role, but their role has not has been that it is not recognized as much in conflict affected areas. Secondly, as Osiris also mentioned that legal aid across Myanmar needs more support and special in the light of the new organization registration law. And donors should be able to find a way to support legal efforts and initiative to ensure most hard to reach communities cannot cannot be reached out until these organizations are supported. And so so making a requirement that registration documents should be should be that it will is very impractical would be impractical and it will not be able to support most of the legal aid organizing Myanmar and there has to be an alternative for that. And lastly, I that any support that is given to any initiative should be from a point of a long term goal, instead of because the impact cannot be seen immediately. So that's all from my side and thank you. I think I exceed the time. Thank you. Thank you. She was really very enriching. I hope for for the entire audience. Definitely you brought us directly into the core of the legal aid and access to justice program to to serve the need of the one more. Hard to reach. So thank you. Thank you so much for that. And without further delay over to you, Laura from NRC on Syria. Thanks. Thank you, Paula. And good morning. Good afternoon to you all. Laura, I work with NRC on the city crisis, but I'm sitting in our regional office, although I had the pleasure to work inside Syria for many years. But my perspective today is going to be a bit more holistic and more from a crisis regional point of view rather than necessarily inside Syria. And I will touch upon three things from my side. First of all, a few words on the legal aid ban and the consequences and then really looking at what are in our perspective the most vulnerable group and really the hard to reach group. And then certainly some experience and some lessons learned and good practice from from NRC work in the region. And so going back to the legal aid ban and our colleagues from UNCR and UNDP already highlighted some of the challenges and the consequences that that we seen by such a restricted number of legal aid provider inside Syria. NRC is not working fully fledged and we don't have our traditional information council legal assistance program or ICLA program because we also don't have authorization. But this is I really would like to underscore something that is lacking also for many very good and strong Syrian civil society organization that we're providing very much needed legal aid on issue related to GBV housing and property rights and legal identity. Pre-2018 and of course the legal aid ban creates pockets of population that remain hard to reach because with only two partners being able to provide legal assistance. Of course you can appreciate the demand in a country like Syria and therefore it's just not sufficient to be able to respond to that. And it really limits the environmental of legal aid in the country and also in general the rule of law and strengthening access to justice which as we know from our experience in NRC in other countries really can be strengthened when you have a plurality of legal actors international, national UN, whatever you that are really coming in with technical legal services that are being provided to address the various issues. So really underscoring again the need to continue to advocate for increasing the number of legal aid provider in Syria or finding other ways to really strengthen a rule of law and access to justice. Now looking at the hard to reach group and vulnerability as I already said there is a group there as a consequences of the legal aid ban but more from a regional perspective and really looking at the Syria crisis as a protracted displacement where we have now Syrian displaced in all the continent across the world and we're accessing to civil documentation shouldn't be seen just as an individual need. For many documents you need to prove family lineage, you need to have permission from family members and when family members are scattered across the Middle East as well as Europe and other countries this becomes very very challenging. So really that's the perspective now in terms of the how to reach and of course the first group and we heard quite extensively on the challenges related to dealing with status population by our colleagues in Myanmar. We should also not remember that there is a stateless population in Syria and we are dealing with a stateless or at least becoming stateless population also in the refugee response. So we have stateless Kurds currently residing in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and the majority of them is originally from North Syria, which is as Gabriele said also complicated in terms of legal pluralism. And so really to reemphasize the fact that the lack of Syrian civil document remain a huge challenge for them also one abroad and also again really to reemphasize the fact that the status of being stateless is being passed to the next generation also in the case of this stateless Kurds community in KRI. Now the second group really of how to reach a vulnerable individual are Syrian family with missing family members. We are dealing now with a very vulnerable group with very specific increase in legal protection issue. And this is evident when our legal team in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq are approached by widow or a female head of household who are dealing with the stigma of having a male family member missing in their family and are trying to cope with their life and obtain the civil documentation that they need to move on with their life. So for instance women that want to get remarried and are not in a position to prove that their husband died because they are missing and the process of declaring somebody missing has to start inside Syria. Or that are struggling to obtain full custody of their children again because of the lack of these documentation that prove the status of being missing or a declaration of death in absentia which can be obtained but is a very complex and expensive process. And then also not able to deal with inheritance and other obtaining other civil documentation and also vulnerable children that are not able to prove the connection with their father, the legal connection with their father and therefore are also at risk of becoming statelessness or in general for sure of remaining undocumented at the place of displacement. And of course here you can appreciate really the gender perspective and how sensitive these cases are and how you know there is a need to work across legal pathways between the host country as well as Syria so these are really complex legal procedure. And then the third group is the group of family that are confronted with the challenges of registering death. And here I'm referring to people who have died in Syria during the war and were not properly registered so for which we have no proof of death and death registration or those who are dying in the host country. And I think access to civil documentation and in particular access to death registration is very much interlinked with housing, land and property rights. And I think this came quite strongly across many of the presentation today but I was in Jordan last week where again I had always the opportunity to meet some of our beneficiary and met this widow from the south of Syria who would like to start an inheritance process for her home. Back in Syria and of course she needs to have a number of civil documents first of all she needs to be able to prove who she is so a legal identity and ID card. She must have a marriage certificate to prove that she was legally married and then more importantly the death certificate for her late husband. So only after she has secured these three civil documents she can start an inheritance process again with family members this place in over four countries in her case. So you can appreciate the number of power of attorney and other legal very complex procedure that has to be put in place just for her to start a process of determining who can inherit the house that they left behind in Dara in the south of Syria. So when you're dealing with these three just alone groups of hard to reach and vulnerable individual and a traditional legal aid program cannot respond. You know it's not sufficient to deal with the complexity of the cases and procedure as I said that span across minimum two to three country and are quite complicated quite expensive and time consuming. I think in NRC we're very fortunate that we have the largest legal aid provider in Jordan level in Iraq and when it comes to legal identity for a few G are our own programming. So we are able to build on that. But of course we really had to put measure in place that span across different country and really ensure collaboration between lawyers who are sitting across the border. So in terms of best practice very briefly of course first of all they need to carry out legal analysis that really looks at any new law promulgated by the Syrian government and how these law apply to Syrian wherever they find themselves. Not just in Syria but also in the refugee hosting country and see how much we can leverage opportunity or where new law can directly or indirectly continue to limit access to legal identity documentation for Syrian. And so for instance some of these waiver that have been mentioned as a success from our colleagues in Syria which indeed were removing fees and fine for late registration in some cases also apply to Syrian outside of the country. So to Syrian abroad but we really saw that there was no success there because unfortunately there is still quite a lot of fear of approaching Syrian authority the embassy or even simply standing documentation back in Syria to family members. And so we also saw really that Syrian outside of the country were not able to benefit from this waiver and also some of these waiver only related to civil documentation fees and fine. Whereas for instance just approaching the Syrian embassy in a man or in Beirut require a minimum $50 registration fee per individual which you can appreciate is something completely and unaffordable to the average Syrian now in that we are dealing with. But then also really looking at developing what we have called a regional common scenario matrix so understanding what are some of these group of vulnerability and what are the different vulnerability and how can we address them. So this is very much really a legal counseling and a legal assistant tool how we can address them by operating across the country where we have our colleagues in Damascus our lawyer in Damascus backing up. No Syrian lawyer in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq that are providing legal advice and really supporting refugee who have family member or have other means to access the documentation that they need in Syria and really working as I said across legal pathways in more than one country. And this is really all done with the main effort to ensure that Syrian continue to access the documentation that they need. They don't remain undocumented but more importantly they don't resort to obtaining fraudulent document or forged document which by the way we are seen as a massive problem and as an increasing risk when Syrian are not able to obtain the document. And they're not able really to to work through the legal avenues to obtain this document. But let me stop here and very much looking forward to the Q&A. Thank you and over to you Paula. Thank you. Thank you Laura. Thank you Shikha and thank you for the other panelists who have really put a lot of effort in preparing their interventions today. I hope you can all join me in thanking them because the richness of their contribution was really remarkable. So I would open now the floor to the questions and answers. So please if you want to raise your hand that would facilitate organizing the question don't be shy. And if you don't have any follow up questions for the speakers on Syria and Myanmar you are very also welcome to share eventually good practices to tackle common challenges that we discussed today among other access to population in need politicization of legal aid difficult partnership with civil society actors given the their restricted operational space and others like legal aid ban and rehabilitation of infrastructure. There is a question already in the chat to the Syria panelist I would say the one that are more focused on the inside Syria operation. So the question is Syria was able to fund the partnership with local administration for legal aid services like civil registration. And I would refer back to Gabrielle Shaza and Hala whoever wants to elaborate a little bit more on the partnership with the local administration Shaza. I can see your hand is raised so please over to you to respond to this question. Thanks. Thank you so much. I just want to say that civil affairs registries they work under the umbrella of Minister of Interior. While the cadastral work under the administrative Mola like so. Yes we managed to fund our projects with the civil affairs offices but not like if we can say not funding but it's about supporting projects that aim to restore the capacities of those public institutions aiming to facilitate civil documents issuance for Syrian citizens particularly of course IDPs and attorneys. So there was some memorandum of understanding where we agreed to provide that support conditioned that they will also from their side issue more flexible procedures more maybe lower reform legal reforms to ensure that access is better procedures are easier etc. So and of course condition that they provide statistics on the impact of that support so we regularly receive from civil affairs statistics on number of individuals who were. For example who were granted ID card family booklet but registration by certificates etc. So yes we managed to get that support but it's not funding but we implement those projects either direct implementation or through some implementing partners national or international NGOs who do the capacity restoration. I hope I answered the question over. Just sorry if I if I may just to compliment and also we also will also try to make sure that the institution is absolutely of a civilian character. There's has to be no link whatsoever with the with the security branches I would say or the or the army. So that's that's kind of our red line. That's why I would say that we were a bit skeptical when we receive requests to rehabilitate certain courts for example. So we are looking to for example to certain Sharia courts but yeah we are still debating about the necessity or the opportunity to do so. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you Gabrielle and Shaza and thank you to also make the link to the I would say ethical moral dilemma that's also the colleagues from Myanmar were were underlined. I think we again we are talking about good practices but we should not. Of course forget that we're working in very difficult environment where each and every decision. It's it's it's difficult. It's very well thought and that's consequences on our staff and also on more importantly on the beneficiaries that we serve. Thank you so much for for highlighting that Gabrielle and Shaza over to you on I guess the same point on the partnership with the civil administration. Thank you. Thank you Paula just for addition to what mentioned by Gabrielle. We are working with the as I mentioned the municipality to establish civil service center where these it's a not for the civil registration rather than for obtaining let's say the documentation wherever the people are. So more increasing accessibility for the civil documentation. So this is where we we are complimenting what UNHCR are providing by expanding the outreach for for communities and for vulnerable groups for highlight over. And thank you. That's very great and it also brings together the point that the both Laura and the colleagues from from your mother in particular she was suggesting about the whole of population approach either to combat and fight discrimination or to make sure that services are offered to Syrians wherever they are. So independently of where the family members are placed. I think that's another I would say good practices that emerge from this difficult context when we have government and non-government control areas. I can see there is a question in the chat again for the for the Syrian colleagues is about Syrians residing in the north and the east Syria. Do they have the ability to obtain civil documentation which also includes of course family booklet and identity card. I maybe ask Laura to comment on this point. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Well the situation is fluid of course but that's that doesn't come as a surprise I'm sure because of course we know that in the northeast some government of Syria official civil registry are functioning. But then of course some of the population is also present in area that is under the control of the autonomous administration the self administration. So again fluidity I would say is the answer in terms of which document can be accessed and where really whether these are government of Syria official document or also some document issued by the de facto authority. And so that's from my side. Thank you. Thank you very much Laura. And I think you bring about also a topic that for the sake of the time we will not have the opportunity to explore further but it could be the topic of another webinar. We had discussed that opportunity already with Martina and the colleagues of the task team which is the challenges faced by those who are actually issued the government. Sorry documents that are not issued by government official government but de facto authorities with different different nature. So that of course brings about issues of the legitimacy and risks for those population of who are maybe willing to return to their country of origin with the documents that are not recognized. So thank you for stressing that aspect. Shaza if you want to complement on that point I will then pass to the to the other question from Fernando. Thank you Shaza. Thank you so much. I'll just be quick because myself Gabrielle and David we went to Kamashli and we saw the situation there on the ground. So even if the citizens there are not residing in government controlled area they can easily reach the civil affairs of course if they have no protection concern. So whoever has no protection concern they are capable to reach civil affairs offices and they are granted of course family booklet ID cards and they are registering their civil events as well. And this is also confirmed and reported through our lawyers. Of course there are always some challenges here and there difficulties complications. When it comes to the practice the war the workload et cetera accessibility for the people residing in camps et cetera. So but in principle yes as explained there are some unofficial documents issued by the goods however people who are able and feel comfortable to reach they can they can they are able to obtain their civil documents the government ones that are recognized. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Shaza for this insight. I will then pass to the next question from Fernando and I and it's both for Syria and Myanmar so I would call on the Myanmar colleagues just to have an alternative in speaking in speakers. So do the government in Syria and Myanmar are they considering using new technologies in their identification and civil registration system for example these different forms of digital identity biometrics et cetera. And if yes do this place person another vulnerable population have access to this technology or do they risk to be excluded. I don't know if colleagues from Myanmar want to comment on that or is that not relevant for that context. And otherwise Syria colleagues yes Jose over to you. Yes I think it's a it's a very relevant point because Myanmar just before the coup had pursued the digitalization of its identification systems and actually it almost it was very close to getting support from the Austrian government and the World Bank. You know but then fortunately due to the discriminatory nature of the framework that a never never came and however after the coup the fact authorities have retaken this idea of digitalizing the system for the citizenship scrutiny cards. And I think it is an it is an important issue because it really falls within a global trend towards introducing digital idea or digital legal identification systems in developing countries and in many cases there is a real risk of risk of involution no we saw that in Afghanistan there is of course Myanmar but there's also Sudan there's other context where you introduce a technology that is can be very risky for human rights and then an involution a coup or or any form of a liberal regime comes no and it's also an issue in relation to the data of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. So yeah very very important question at the moment I don't think this digitalization project is really going anywhere but it's something to keep an eye on over to Syria. Are there any panellists that want to comment on digitalization. Yes. Over to you. Thanks. Yeah just for the clarification working for us as a UN agencies with Syria we are more working on on the local legal aid support. So support for the government and for the national institution and unfortunately this is under the red lines that we cannot provide. So previously previous crisis. Yes we were in a process of digital having more kind of support for court digitalization and as a main component for access to justice. But currently within the current situation even if the government have the let's say the willing and plan for it. Unfortunately for us it is within the red line that we cannot support. Why it is expand let's say the people who can get the benefits. Over to Shiza. Thank you so much my dear. Concerning your CR and according to of course to our information civil affairs has already started the digitalization even prior to the war. However during the war of course they faced lots of obstacles and afterwards because of the war and the consequences losing lots of records they resumed the digitalization and it's still ongoing. I assume most of the governments today are records of course are digitalized. However we have of course some lost records maybe from the past prior to the crisis and there are still some government that government areas non government controlled areas that still need additional work concerning digitalization. So the process started prior to the crisis and then it continued and today as we hear from civil affairs registry. It's mostly done except some areas where there is no proper control by the government concerning ID cards etc. There was some projects in the past to introduce a new version of ID cards with more security features. However as mentioned by Hela due to the limited financial capacity of the government they suspended that project and kept it in two hours until further notice over. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Maybe just before passing the floor to you Laura and just to say that our colleague from the United Nations legal identity agenda are here with us and yesterday you organized a very interesting webinar on digitalization of legal identity with colleagues from the field. Three country case studies were presenting their best practices. So we will try to make sure to actually share the recordings if possible of that meeting because I think it speaks to our conversation today. Laura over to you. Yes thank you Paul and very briefly again the perspective from inside outside Syria and the government launched I believe last year some digital platform that can be used to register for applying for passport one for whether inside Syria or outside Syria. The uptake of course passport for Syrian abroad is the most important document because it's the document that is being used to travel internationally. So we heard quite a lot of rumor within the refugee community. However, payment can be made only by credit card which again means that the vast majority of refugee were not able to benefit from this. And then more importantly the cost of the passport for Syrian abroad is very high for an expedite passport. The fee is eight hundred dollars. The Syrian passport for Syrian abroad remain the most expensive passport in the world and for male Syrian in age of military conscription. It also has the shortest duration two years. So we see still that Syrian refugee who are again refugee regional perspective trying to obtain the passport are sending family members or are using taxi or other brokers who are trying to apply for passport for them inside Syria and then bring the passport outside because this is cheaper and seems to function better than some of these other digital initiative. Thank you. Thanks Laura and thanks for bringing the perspective of the Syrian abroad. We have a few questions in the chat. I will start from in the interest of this time. I will start from the third set of questions which bring to us a bit of a reflection about the role that other actor can play to respond to the challenges that we discussed today. So how can academia and donor community farther support legal aid programs to protect legal identity. And I think the link to that is quite interesting if you could reflect upon what are the knowledge gaps that you encounter in your current practice which again speaks to the partnership. The partnership with academia and how can we further explore and how can donor actually support eventually these linkages between analysis knowledge and implementation of program. Who is from the panelist. Happy to to reflect upon these questions. Please raise your hand over to you. Yeah I think it kind of goes back to the to the question of coordination and I think it's coordination. We should think about it in a broader you know not not only this coordination meeting that we have in in the countries etc. But but actually having the networks that include academia that include civil society abroad as well. And also to to cooperate with academia in finding the right questions right. What what kind of what kind of legal aid support can we provide under a military coup with EEO EEO is also controlling territory etc etc. Those are very good questions for for academics and it will give for very interesting research over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Jose. I think it's really interesting the point that you make about the needs to diversify the even the definition of coordination which very often relates to the in country coordination. Of course there are countries and contexts such as the one in Syria where coordination outside inside become even more difficult and maybe there. I don't know if Syria panelists want to reflect upon the ask to donor given that Gabriele also has underlined you know the difficulties of working between and among red lines. So thank you so much. But before giving the floor to Syria on this hot potato as we say in an Italian question. Maybe Maria over to you on this aspect of a partnership and coordination with academia and donor. Thank you, Maria. Yeah, I will try to be very brief. Engagement with academia is very sensitive now especially on issues related to access to legal identity because the citizenship issues are already sensitive. Again, there are many restrictions on civil society organizations and I think that also. And covers academia on engagement with international community with international organizations which would may put them at risk. So it's not easy to organize public events as we used to do in the past bringing the academia students for big forum and discussed issues in public. Although what we try to do we still keep in touch with some professors and. At. We engage academia to work on analysis of young more national legal framework to compare it with with international legal framework and to work on a draft model. Citizenship law. Of course, we cannot use that model citizenship law right now as high level advocacy with the the fact officials is not possible at the moment. But we want to have it ready when the situation is conducive for this advocacy. Also, at Rakhine level, our colleagues engage very actively with students union. We conduct sessions awareness raising amongst students also training sessions on various protection topics, including access to citizenship and civil documentation. And we see the students interest in this matters and hope they will take these issues further when they graduate. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Maria for this for this input. And I can see Adam from the audience would like to contribute on this matter. So please the floor is your. Thank you. Paul and colleagues. This is high thumb from UCR Eman operation. And I just wanted to to share some of our good experience in engaging academia. We have a strategic partnership with a law center that sits within a government university in the capital center university that we rely on for protection analysis legal analysis capacity building for the authorities as well as advocacy. You know that we are in a context similar to Syria. So sometimes having the analysis also in the research is not enough to do good advocacy and to be here by the authorities. So having a renowned law professors, a government institution that enjoys to some extent an autonomy and social and standing in the community makes whatever they say here. And it resonates with it with the government with the communities. So we rely on them also to pass this advocacy messages to the authorities where where the legitimacy of these messages will not be questioned. So this is one of the good practices that we are doing to engage academia. And also we are engaging technical registration civil status documentation staff in house that work within registration authorities of registration authority in Yemen to develop research and analysis and access to documentation. Now the aim of this is to also build the ownership of the of the results of such mapping and research so that such that the mandatory authority to issue documentation would take ownership of the findings that they reach with our guidance because this is a joint exercise that we are doing with them. So I think those are good practices that that can can can reach good results in a in a politically security sensitive situation over. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing good practices from from Yemen on the linkages between academia and the legal aid programming. I think the point you you you mentioned are very relevant for I imagine in Yemen and Syria and other contexts where the the issue of citizenship and of recognition of the legal and civil documentation is key. I can see Shaza from from Syria case study on the on this topic and then again Jose. Thank you Shaza. Thank you so much my dear. I just want to emphasize on what was mentioned by our colleague in Yemen about academia and their role in building capacity for staff in public institution. But I want to go back to the donor community and what can be done to make things better. I would say it would be good to encourage the donor community to pay more visits to the field where your CR and other agencies of course are serving to be close to the ground to see the real problems on the ground and to see the services provided because as we all know always donors community have many red lines that they impose on us and since they have the budget that they need to give. We need them to be close to us to see the reality and what extent we are able to make a difference and have an impact on the people's life. So also having donor community more close visiting more as I said the field their presence as well in the countries where the humanitarian agencies are functioning would help in our advocacy effort with the governments when they pay visit. They can also contribute to the advocacy efforts the the agencies are putting to improve the people's life and as well we need to encourage them or being close will reduce the if we can say not to politicize the the the budgeting and donations they give so when they are close they will be less politicized in their approaches. I know we are not living in the ideal world but I think close and better coordination and being close to the field and to the people they will help them to be less politicized and less with red lines if we can say that over. Thank you. Thank you Shaza. I think your your call is very much at the heart of all of those work on legal aid and access to justice and in general on in humanitarian settings. Please Jose over to you. Yes, I just wanted to add in terms of coordination and broadening broadening collaboration. In this context that we also have to look at digital safety you know digital digital awareness and digital safety capacity building for for our CSO partners is very important you know because even today. For example I shared these teams link with many organizations and many they are not they are just not used to to this particular platform and maybe they are used to zoom or to others and of course there's no no translation no no which also is a barrier no for for localization and then in terms of city citizenship and academia that's an interesting project by the Institute on statelessness and inclusion that I posted on on the chat imagining the social contract and they have actually managed to do research in Myanmar you know they had a webinar last week on on this topic and and I think that is you know very remarkable. And I was just thinking you know on the issue of best practices in this type of context, maybe, maybe what we can, what we could do is move from the idea of identifying best practices. To identify best strategies know because what we need is is really is really strategies to deal with this and to deal with this problem over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Jose, and it also helps reflecting upon the results of this webinar actually in the framework of the project and this I maybe should have said it at the beginning we would like to produce a report over or a series of collection of reflection I would say on good strategy as you just suggested, maybe the title of the of the report. Of course, it's, it's a pleasure to engage in this webinar now that the COVID taught us how to do it in different countries sitting in different offices, but I think it would be good to to to reflect together how to make sure that this knowledge stays and also, as you suggest, this office actually reached the one that are maybe hard to reach in terms of civil society organizations and practitioners that are not either invited or cannot reach this community of practice and exchanges. So thank you so much for this reflection and I will be very happy to engage further with the panelists and with the audience on ways in which the GPC task team on law and policy can actually follow up on all this material and reflection and make sure to to to reach the one more in need also in terms of practitioners. So thank you so much. I'm very aware of the time. And I can see that there has been already quite an exchange in in the chat with colleagues sharing sharing good practices from Ethiopia and with colleagues from units here and protection cluster in north west Syria so thank you so much for joining and also for sharing the experience from from the field. And I would suggest that we stop here. I don't know, Martina, if you want to to add some closing remarks also on the follow up to this event and to this series of learning seminar. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Paula and all the speakers today really like a brilliant session that I'm very, I'm very happy and I know that this is just the beginning of our conversation we can still there are some remaining questions in the chat. Maybe, you know, like Chica said earlier, like the idea that legal aid in conflict setting seems to be underestimated. I think this is this was the idea behind the project overall really to to bring out to give the visibility to this work that it deserves because it is absolutely central in the settings that you're all working with as you have had today, how how essential it is so I think that this is something that we will continue. Take forward as a testing, please do reach out to us. You can include my email in the chat or you can find it on our website of the testing page under the coach. You know, please reach out if there is any conversation that you would like to follow up with us on, you know, whether request that you may have in this area or other experiences that you'd like to share we remain there to hear from you. We will decide the topics of the next webinar as well to always trying to look at different contexts, different practices so very much looking forward to hear from all of you. And thanks again for joining us today and and I think that this is it. So thanks again to all the speakers and we will stay in touch. Okay, have a great day and a great rest of the week. Thank you again. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All the best. Thank you. Thank you. The recording will be available. We'll make it available on our website as well. Thanks. Paula maybe I'll leave as well and I just call you but but but Mariana you need to stop the recording. I think to make sure that it is safe. Probably. I will call you in a minute. Martina. Yeah, just a second. Yeah.