university and harley and other team for having us here together again thinking in how to improve justice for free expression and how to democracy a salman rudi once said two things form the bedrock of any open society freedom of expression and rule of law if you don't have those things you don't have a free country although this might sounds pretty obvious and especially for us and even simple to understand it is not all easy to make the freedom of expression word  we know that it was not easy to get the sdg sixteen among the seventeen as the years endorsed by un member states we know that was particularly difficult to include the target related to fundamental freedoms lucy let's start with please everyone will have no more than five minutes to share your thoughts on this first question thanks catalina you know i think the first thing is is clearly political there's a lot of fear around sdg sixteen because it's about empowering people it's about ensuring equality it's about promoting inclusivity and clearly if the benefits of governance to lack of transparency lack of access to information lack of freedom of expression around the implications of of those types of activities nor extractives industry you lose the benefits  that can be accrued from those activities then clearly you would not support an agenda that is about addressing access to information freedom of expression and promoting benefits for people  the other part is about lack of knowledge we don't yet know really what works to promote sdg sixteen partly that's because it's a new agenda you know it's not as well established as for example the so difficult to measure because it's so new and because to be able to know what works you really need different parts of government to come together including with civil society and with business because each and especially in the countries where this work is most needed its most challenging to be able to get that information and to be able to support the development and implementation of effective policy i mean  we take the justice system as an example we know that to be able to reduce impunity you need the police the prosecution the courts the prison service minimum to work together effectively and often in conflict affected countries you know their political allegiances and all kinds of conflict related dynamics which make this very difficult i mean if you have for example the attorney needed so i would say those are the three main things we face at this time one is political pushback one is lack of knowledge on what we can really do a to address that political pushback and to develop and implement effective policies  one is is the lack of the information on what the challenges are what the opportunities are because all the people with that information don't systematically or even often work together thank you  present tense because it is still difficult just the fact that a piece of paper signed in the un especially a non binding document means very little in practice so there is a lot of work ahead  with others such as undp worked very hard during the process to counter resistance now there was for developing countries the group of seventy seven  were fear a fear that this is human rights can conditionality through the backdoor and developing countries don't want to mix aid with other issues right now in the un there's a discussion about sustaining peace and development and developing countries are saying we don't want aid and security coming together so there was that then there was of course fears of national sovereignty national security which lucy has mentioned and also what  this is all about you have development first and then human rights that is the approach taken by many governments at that time however i would also say that there is a deeper problem that we need to acknowledge in civil society now in coming on this panel i'm kind of conflicted because i come from a human rights background but now i'm part of the intergovernmental structure but let us be honest about civil society civil society is divided the human rights movement is not engaged in development debates the the dichotomy between economic and social rights and civil and political rights is very much alive and not so long ago philip alston talked about night ships passing by in the night and so you didn't have a con civil society movement to make these issues clear why the right to information is fundamental to development why an independent judiciary protects not only your right to a fair trial but issue of balance of interests for example an environmental protection issues or equal access to social services and so on that debate if you look at sdg sixteen indicators the target the  inclusion look at the targets it's very much heavily on the side of criminal justice not on the side of fighting discrimination where you would actually need an effective judiciary and independent judiciary for instance so there is still a lot of confusion as to where as dg sixteen is going and that's going to be a real challenge when it comes to reporting and getting governments to report just reporting on homicide figures for example or pre detention figures say very little about whether you know the first thing that they are looking at is all those institutions all those issues that protect rights including know it's you know you can see this in north america you can see this in europe you can be see this you know in all regions the world no i'm not singling out in singling out any particular country and i think that you know you all going to agree with me because this is kind of a friendly audience right for this kind of thing so i mean i don't know those that are watching you over the internet yeah but but so this is why i would say it's so important in historical context and i think that you catalina you did the right you know a good job on that because it is historical and and go sixteen you know we are still celebrating that actually it made it you know in the agenda you know we didn't even believe that you know that could have been possible so the question is now that we cannot leave this opportunity go and we had to put all our efforts to make it happen  and people from society different parts of governments and lucy said you know need to be there you know to make sure that their governments not only implement but also are able to report on what they are doing you know in the public arena friendly loose network with very small secretary in brussels of almost two hundred ngos that work in media training press law reform press freedom issues around the world most of them in countries in the south and when some of us first swim before the negotiation is really started to propose that we get actively engaged in this i don't think would surprise any of you that these are mostly journalists and they thought why would we want to waste our time spending two years in un negotiations which like irene says is going to produce something that's non binding and the governments are going to ignore and like they do already but clearly some of us disagreed and it is my personal belief still my starting point is that the inclusion of sd g is potentially quite profound and the area that we at gfm d have worked on specifically there were ten targets we've worked on the tenth target which is access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms you know could be seen as nothing more than another reiteration or attempt to implement the original pledge of the famous words of article nineteen of the universal declaration that everyone has the right to seek receive and impart information and ideas through any medium and regardless of frontiers and there's some truth to that and like irene said this was in effect it was a backdoor reference to human rights the phrase human rights appears in none of the targets that's why there was a long battle and fundamental freedoms becomes the city of them if you will for that precisely because of that seeing a lot of countries around the world who are taking this quite seriously and trying to prove to their own constituents to their own citizens to their neighbors that they are actually trying a good face to put these things into practice and i think latin america is especially interesting example because as a region that it has been in the vanguard of serious access to information legislation and the implementation of it i mean i i don't know you know y and other things that the mdgs did not but the significant inclusion of what is ultimately human rights and democratic governance the role of law and these fundamental freedoms was the biggest single battle and the negotiation process and the resistance to it i would think it's fair to say still it was on two levels and it's important understand how the un system works in these things there were governments which you could you know name off the top of your heads in you expect who never like this to begin with some of them said this openly and some of them that did not say it but there was also sort of a middle ground of governments that were an uneasy about what they saw as the realm of the unmeasurable you know whereas the premise of the mdgs that these are things that were accountable rates and you know things that have to be public health and education and so forth whereas the whole realm of governance and human rights and freedom of expression is not something that national statistical institutions agencies anywhere including in europe or the united states are typically asked to count or measure and so it was a completely reasonable pushback in a way to say well okay you put out there but how're we gonna track it how we're gonna measure it my group gfm d in response to that formed a coalition with a group of other ngos in the sdg sixteen realm each of us being specialists in one of the ten targets that we created something called the sdg sixteen data initiative which was primarily to demonstrate that not only is this measurable it is in fact being measured it's just not being measured for the most part by governments it's being measured by academics is being measured by civil society organizations and that it is our collective assertion that yes there's gaps in the data and so forth but there's a lot of credible information out there and even a seemingly simple thing is sdg sixteen ten gara will tell you more has been given the task that's the way these things were each these one hundred and sixty nine targets has to have a designated un system agency that is an that is responsible for tracking progress towards that target it and it's a seemingly simple thing it is the number of countries that have passed and implemented access to information legislation and then the other half of it because this is a binary target this is these are connected on fundamental freedoms the measurement there is actually about the attacks including the killings of journalists human rights defenders and labor activists and that's a separate issue we could talk about that separately but on the first part of it even a simple thing of counting the number of countries that have access to information legislation especially that the un system had in any formal way but it's not a difficult thing to do but the second part of it is defining implementation that's where it gets interesting and many of us fought very hard to have that word implement included so it was not just passage and what we are seeing now around the world is that and and again i go back to latin america because i think that's where civil society in the media has been most active both in the passage of this legislation because it's fairly recent and also in the use of the legislation there is the consensus in those countries that you cannot just expect countries governments excuse me to report themselves on how well they're doing and providing access to information you need to have consultation with the users with the citizens with society with the media and that is in fact beginning to happen in countries which are including governments which believe that they should be proud of the fact that they have passed this legislation they wish to demonstrate to their own people that they are taking this seriously and they become models else you can already see i think the impact in africa of what has been happening in latin america which is a lot more pertinent than europe or the united states i mean i would be the first to say is an american journalist that the u s in creative information act is highly highly imperfect on multiple multiple levels and most of the laws passed in latin america in the past ten years not all of them are far superior to the legislation in the united states or in canada now i wouldn't want to exaggerate the fact that the sdgs are a driver of this but i think that they are beginning to be that and if media and civil society in these countries insists because this will be there's going to be a formal reporting for the first time in two thousand and nineteen on progress through this which will be the baseline but this will continue to happen and thirty so this actually gives kind of a toehold for activists in media and civil society and even you know opposition parties and and others in countries to ensure that there is continued progress and i'll stop here to me the best thing about this particular goal in general is that this is not in the normal sort of nouse north south paradigm or you know the old established democracies versus the the ogor version democracies authoritarian countries actually the best actors in this field are an interestingly mixed lot and some of the countries you would expect to be more in the vanguard in europe and as i said in north america actually have a lot of ground to make up in their implementation of this so this is a place where all of us can learn from each other and that was the premise of the sdgs that unlikely yes the mdgs which going back to the aid issue which is us to be kind of a grand bargain between the donor countries and the donor recipient countries are supposed to apply to all countries equally that there are things that all of us can and should be doing in our respective societies and gender environmental preservation the rule of law and in this case press freedom and access to information so i don't want to be media organizations around the world are taking this seriously and holding governments to account thank you bill well thank you nothing much to add to this assessment wh you be prefer to be in a room discussing how to build new schools improving the health system or you'll be preferred to be in a room where the key words are reducing homicides reducing corruption reducing the killing of journalists when i discussed with ministers the importance of freedom of expression or freedom of information they tell me but we already have the law we already have this in the constitution we are not doing anything to prevent that and that's our role and it's very hard to make them understand that for also for those freedoms we need policies which means we need money we need budget the frieda the safety journalism mechanism in columbia as toby said yesterday costs seven million dollars a year so we need an indicator to tell that the freedom of information law in this country the implementation only for the federal level cost seven hundred million dollars a year so i think that going to the ground and i'm not talking about those that are against for political reasons because they really don't want to protect journalists they really don't want to have access to information it's hard for governments to understand that fundamental freedoms i also demand policies as building schools hospitals and i think this is a very important challenge for sd g to show that that we need policies we need to have all those things any policies policy need for this this is one the other thing it's it's harder to control the outcomes when you be the school when you put the students there you say okay i have all those different students and i raise the indicator but even if you do everything to protect journalists you don't have the control to the drug dealer that goes there and kill the guy so it's hard yourself in a very complicated position in accepting those kind of indicators so we also need to understand from the government's perspective the difficult of these so it will make easier to help them to go to two thousand and nineteen  well how can we work together towards improve this agenda acknowledging that is difficult and finally to pick up a point that bill made i think it's very important this the it was approving a freedom of information law and i'm not talking about no complicated auto retiring country i'm talking about the three hundred years democracy so it's hard even for those countries so this is part of the difficulties but it sounds a huge opportunity when we can convince countries that it's not on this agenda it's not only for the dev so called developing world it's for all of us so i think this is as bill said it's great to be here thank you for the invitation you failed to mention my best qualification for this discussion was just having worked for you i hope to not do anything to raise questions about your decision to hire me and what i  say so i'm gonna i'll be brief and i'll try to i think compliment and largely echo what others have said but just to talk a little bit about the context geopolitically in which these conversations are taking place so two thousand and seventeen was the  th straight year of decline in global freedom we are i think very clearly moving toward a multipolar world in which global governance is shared between democratic states and non democratic states a landscape marked particularly by the increasing influence of china the post world war two liberal global order was already under strain and under stress but it's been i think further undermined by an administration in the united states which is to put it mildly deeply ambivalent it would seem about at least some aspects of of that global order authoritarian governments that in the past were satisfied with questioning essentially with playing defense with questioning the universality or the legitimacy of the international human rights regime for example are now challenging this regime more open putting models forward as alternatives with increasing confidence and somewhat to my surprise with with some residents in places where you perhaps wouldn't expect it emerging powers with the even those with strong traditions of democracy and human rights and and rights respecting legal frameworks have not always advocated forcefully for these values at the international level i think this is very clear i think in latin america where i do a lot of work but i think the same could probably be said for countries like india and south africa so if we were ever complacent enough to think that these philosophical and legal battles were won in a definitive way i think the past few years will have disabused us of that notion in in geneva i'm told there is now talk of a post human rights world certainly we are a long way from the end of history these are battles that we will be fighting and refighting in the years to come on a playing field that is not likely to get any easier frankly so having thoroughly depressed you all i will say i think having secured the inclusion of goal sixteen in the end eg in the sdgs in this context it's pretty remarkable i think it's quite an achievement i think it owes a think the good news is having kind of emerged from this very difficult geopolitical context and from a multilateral process that's reflective of the current state of global governance the sdgs i think have a particular legal institutions including with governments and and non state actors that are perhaps less open than the people in this room would be to traditional human rights arguments and i think just to maybe end with was something that irene mentioned it maybe reflects the start of the conversation we need to be having between development and human rights and i think harness is not just the the arguments on universality that all of us can rehearse very well but the empirical evidence which i think is increasingly strong of the linkages between development and human rights and more specifically between institutions and rule of law on the one hand and development poverty reduction and peace both positive and negative on the other hand so i think there's a lot of potential and pretend and and and power there and i would just tip my hat to the work that  you know i'm just realizing now listening to my colleagues here how important it is that we seize that opportunity because although we are in a bit of a dark moment progress is being made and it's so important that had a little one of these illuminated globes and my father would tell me about the journeys he had made in different parts of the ocean and often they you know there would be storms you can imagine in some of these voyages sounds like we're really very hairy and this has also been part of my life to go on ships because my home is on an island it takes eleven hours to get to even from edinburgh now sometimes the sea is really choppy and you know you wanted to sometimes this is boat gonna go over my father always used to say keep your eye on the horizon and that means you won't feel sick because it's the only thing that doesn't move and i think it's so important now to remember that and when you're in countries that have experienced war when most progress is being made things seem to be worse than ever i mean physically the streets when streets are being are being made when city is being shaped up i mean i remember in looked terrible it looked like the war had finished five minutes ago even though it actually finished ten ten years ago because because people were taking action because progress is being made and we know the same is true even when we're doing intensive cleaning  published a sort of a defense i guess of the argument he made in the better angels of our nature and he was when he argued famously that actually the path of peace and progress is assured we are on our way to a better world he also and that we also help to unite those people who strongly believe in creating a better world to such an extent that investing in it often with very low pay often with very difficult conditions often in f of their lives and and irene pointed this out that there's a challenge of course also that even those effectively what would be the advocates for positive change don't stand together and i think there's there's this is part of the work that we do in the global alliance is to support all those drives of change wherever they exist in government in civil society in the private sector to stand together and to work together to achieve greater progress so these ancient concepts are written in two languages and many cultures and it's about this core concept that life is getting better and the dalai lama even said recently without doubt love is increasing on the earth so i want us to hang on to this hope  and to keep working because hope becomes from participation in hopeful actions and if we despair that will be the antidote to hope and it will prevent us taking action to create a better world okay so the under review including ones with very substantial lobbies like on education climb action so altogether there will be more than eighty indicators that governments will be invited to report on so we have to write on sixteen  point ten so i would say if we want to get people to care about stg sixteen sixteen point ten on freedom of expression access to information  would humbly suggest that we also refrain so that we can speak to people who perhaps aren't as passionate about this we need information access to information of freedom expression for implementation of the whole of the two thousand and thirty agenda we know that people must first know about their rights before they claim them they need to know they have a right to vaccination campaigns to  to education you know to not be raped they need to know what their rights are so access to information about your right is necessary for you to claim them and so to achieve all of the goals secondly n described in the beginning you're not going to end up with ineffective government systems to deliver those goods and services which have vindicate all of the rights of all the two thousand and thirty agenda unless the various institutions of government and others can work together i mean we know that's why we have so many people in prisons around the world who have been there years after they've served their sentences or we're never charged with anything because their dockets were lost and no one's really tracking or cases fall between the cracks of the justice system because the police and prosecution aren't really clear about their respective responsibilities for investigating to ensure that the the cases is good enough to go through the courts so we need information systems to connect government institutions so that they can respond i mean you literally need to make sure that a budget reallocation for schoolbooks or vaccination campaigns is transferred down to local level you need to be able to track  that the other thing is that you need freedom of expression to know what to provide i mean you need to know where the schools need to be built where the road was the most relevant to go from which community to which market so to know and then you can help to form policy that responds to their needs so what i'm saying here is that access to information freedom of expression yes they're about the core elements in in article nineteen it's about protecting aspect of the agenda that you need to be able to promote progress and i think if we reframe it in this way that we can help more people to care about this agenda and but it wouldn't be a new thing i mean why in the universal declaration of human rights does article nineteen on freedom of information act freedom expression access to information precede the rights to education health and other services because it we need to have a reality check about about what it is so sg sixteen will be under review in two thousand and nineteen and then there'll be another opportunity in two thousand and twenty three it will be a few days little over a where governments gather to discuss these issues for them to have something to say and for all of us to seize this opportunity we need to invest at country level so human rights defenders rule of law professionals whatever you want to call us is we let governments know what their responsibilities are and point out where they're failing but sometimes it's like starving a child and then criticizing it when it doesn't run well i mean they need help to be able to implement and to and to serve their citizens to meet the expanding circle of human rights for growing populations the good thing is that the society and national private sector to ascertain what are the challenges what are the opportunities what do we need what do we want what kind of country do we want to live in and what would it take to get there so that statistics but i also believe in stories because stories move people and emotion moves people to action so what you can do if you do a good voluntary national review process if governments really do bring the country together to get a sense of where are we as a country what stories do we have to tell about our lives and and and as a country you will end up with a real sense of how life is changing that day turn statistics alone cannot present reflection of of of it's like the last kind of resistance to to assured progress is my view but what we need is to unite people and that's what we're doing in the global alliance of bringing throughout society we need to build empathy and understanding between different constituencies but seen different communities between different sectors between different silos and we do that when we enable people to tell the stories about who they are how their how their lives they live the challenges they face the opportunities available to them and then you will engage them in also trying to create it's a difficult question relations we and the damage that this is doing you know lucy's bringing some you know much a more positive a hopeful view as you know she usually does thank you lucy for that need to nurture and protect is those values those that help us to get to this point in time in history and this is in human rights interested in compromising and also i would say you know since the i mean now we don't have the tools if you wish to solve the conflicts that just let's make sure that we are not infringing on what took us here which is our common you know our common values as you know human kind you know human rights have their autonomy undermined have you noticed a real commitment to change this scenario partic thanks yes sir since i was so grim in my opening remarks let me try to be a little more positive the somebody the america is i think was quite successful ivanka's shoes were fabulous but but maybe more importantly there was a consensus declaration with fifty seven concrete commitments on anti corruption this was everything from prosecutorial cooperation to open government and procurement to transparency of beneficial and political finance to protection of journalists and whistleblowers this is significant not just because of the the substance of the commitments but because the someday the americas had become this sort of paralyzed process that hadn't produced a declaration consensus declaration on anything for a few summits much less something as consequential as as anti corruption something so central to citizen demands in the americas  i don't think this would have happened without precisely the the strong demand signal from citizens and the feeling i think among many governments they needed to to walk away with something to show so i think that's i do think that's significant  now i understand the cynics view which is this is just an aspirational document it's not a self executing plan of action and as you mentioned got the lina the sort of loft goals in this declaration contrast with the reality that we see on the ground in many of the countries that signed up to the declaration so generally speaking in the americas freedom of expression is legally protected but journalists and human rights defenders are still murdered mostly with impunity mexico last year was the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists after syria judiciary's are formally independent but selection process s for judges and prosecutors are often corrupted or captured and corruption itself while illegal is not just widespread but in some cases systemic as we've seen in brazil so clearly we are far from the the effective accountable inclusive institutions envisioned in sdg sixteen and i think there's a couple reasons for that which we can go into but basically you know the first reason is it turns out this is pretty hard constructing you know effective judicial systems is probably the most kind of stubborn a democratic institution building tasks at least in in the latin american countries that democratized in the in the s and s but but there's there's another piece of this which is that the political will to do this to build strong institutions has not always been there and we see this in  in the low tax takes in places like central america we see it in efforts to to politicize judiciary's in rollback investigative tools like plea bargaining we see it nowadays and the pushback from political and economic elites to the the significant progress that that some judicial systems in the region have made against corruption and investigating corruption and you know i've mentioned places like brazil and guatemala and peru and and i think it's is half full i think in many countries in the americas citizens are mobilized around accountability in ways that we haven't seen and i think judicial institutions partly in response to those citizen demands are displaying an impressive degree of independence and technical capacity so i'm tempted to believe that we are at a potential rule of law tipping point but i am quick to acknowledge it's a fragile one and i think the of the arguments we made from the beginning which was frankly as much a tactical as a more lofty strategic argument was that when we first proposed lobbying for the inclusion of an access to information freedom of expression commitment in the sdgs i and others said we fully expect to lose this battle but we think it is a fight worth fighting to make sure there is at least an open discussion about this and with any such negotiation process you know it became clear that if you use the term human rights or freedom of expression you are not going to  succeed access to information however became kind of a more comfortable place for a lot of governments and in our argument which which is not a cynical it's that it was a genuine argument both tactical and strategic was to try to if you will repurpose the way this is commonly seen which is commonly seen first in the human rights dimension but also equally troubling from many governments in the kind of narrow anti corruption purpose of access to prevention legislation to look at public contracts and so forth which of course is is a good thing but our argument was that this was an enabling mechanism for the entire package of  sdgs that is to say that we cannot know if we're succeeding in any of these seventeen goals one hundred and sixty nine targets unless we have access to information about each and every one of them that seems like stating the blindingly obvious but if system you know might have had a hard time off the top of their head naming all eight of them those are only half as many as a seventeen sdgs but what we and the public did know in places they were paying attention that the first of the m s which was to reduce poverty the indicator was to reduce it by fifty percent of what was considered extreme poverty which were people who were said by world bank statistics to be earning less than a dollar twenty five a day and that succeeded now the sdgs and this is really important to keep in mind the first target the first goal is to eradicate extreme poverty that is to say to finish the unfinished business of the sdgs now without getting into the weeds of all the other seventeen goals the fact is that any of these things gender equity rule of law environmental radical diseases all of these are required if your goal is all you know only to eradicate extreme poverty if that's to say that aside from being vulnerable worthwhile goals unto themselves they are also mechanisms by which you achieve the first goal and so i think that if you are trying to if you're a journalist and you're in any country you have to talk about these ways which makes sense and local national realities and i think one thing that i found in looking at access to information legislation i mean as many of you undoubtedly know twenty five years ago there were only a dozen or so countries in the world that had accessed information bills now you have  hundred and twelve one hundred and thirteen that is to say a solid majority of the one hundred and ninety three member states but new by definition this in the last ten to fifteen years and to look at how these are actually being used in most places i think it's fair to say it was pushed f anti corruption transparency disclosed what governments are doing and what they're spending that part of the agenda which is fine but if you look at how ordinary citizens use these laws the ministries that get the highest number of requests fairly consistently that i've looked at in latin american after are the education and health ministries not the finance ministry's are the budget ministries because people want to know about schooling they want to know about health clinics they wanted about things that affect their personal lives and i think that is the way that journalists and civil society people have to think about the sdgs to make them not some lofty un abstraction but things that are actually going to make people's lives better and that it is another mechanism you know though today i was in paris with these people in unesco dealing with this horrible thing called results based management so they're like annoying me with these stupid questions about outputs and outcomes and whatever and they said well training eighty thousand judges and prosecutors is an output is not an outcome and they tell them look you know how hard it is to involve in a conversation someone that didn't want it to be involved it was not paying attention in this issue so of course if we are saying that we are including eighty zero children in a school they are supposed to be included it's part of that if we are buying computers  discussing freedom of expression safety of journalism access to information it's it's really interesting and not for us it's really interesting for the region for dan for creating this network but i would like to tell you t antidotes that it's it's related what toby said yesterday that is thinking a little bit out of the box i mean how we include these people that are not the usual suspects of these conversations diplomats us these are people that normally we don't talk with them so we can really see interesting stuff coming on one judge from an appeals court wrote to me last guy from jail and he wrote but i honestly think he should be in jail but i released him anyway because you told me that i should apply the triple test and apply i should release him so please be sure that you are teaching us the right thing so i think this is a wonderful story that these guys that we own as normally well you all know jokes about judges and how they think they are above god or things like that but even though they are accepting to sit there in in listening to people to tell them how to apply the triple test of united nation or whatever inter american commission so i think the terms of the demand i mean these eighty thousand people they were there and we opened the courses and they wanted to do it we didn't force them we are not paying them we're not giving credits or any university whatever thing they could get and they are not travelling to new york they are doing that online in their houses in bolivia in honduras in nicaragua so i think this one interesting story and the other one is that we need to show those things information for the brazilian air force knowing wanting to know a very simple thing how many human organs were transported by a brazilian air force airplane because you know brazil is a very big country so if you have to transplant an organ you need an airplane to take the work the heart in amazon and take it to bertolli grave six hours flight and this guy discovered with this freedom of because the airplanes were actually reserved for transporting authorities senators judges whatever so of course this headline was a scandal so the president after this issue difference does it make on the ground okay good that's an interesting question because of course we've spent a couple of hours talking about it and why do we need it i think a number of panelists have actually made the point that it is not about freedom of expression in itself yes that's a value in itself but that's not what we're talking about here in the context of the sdgs we're talking about the impact it has on development and that's why as you said sd g which is about gender equality governments to think about systemic change not just about reaching certain figures or outcomes you know how many lives you have saved or how many children go to school but the underlying institutional barriers that prevent progress and how to empower people to demand progress that's what sixteen is about but we've talked a lot about it already so let me move to one point and that is that s g sixteen there is something at the heart of xd sdg sixteen and that is access to justice and access to justice is actually the way in which you can access all your human rights including freedom of expression and i think there isn't enough attention given to the importance of the rule of law which makes everything else work it is really the enabling element there and there are a number of reasons is not fully understood if you were to walk out of this room up into the street and ask someone what is the rule of law they'll give you a blank look it's a very complex idea it's not only about judges it's about the principle of equal protection and equal accountability it's about how fair laws are made and applied now you talked about teaching judges how to understand the value of freedom of expression my so one has to broaden the concept rule of law to understand what are the underpinnings of those principles and if you don't get those principles right you're not going to be able to move other p it makes it extremely complex for bureaucrats to deal with but on the other hand that's what actually makes things happen and i would go further to say that given that sort of fundamental nature of the rule of law there is a big weakness in that the rule of law does not sit easily in an institution there isn't any like if you talk about child rights you have unicef you talk about refugees you have t undp which looks at development and and justice issues you have dp ko that the peacekeeping that look at it from the perspective of policing and and enforcement in conflict affected countries so this sort of actually does have an impact on how the international community is going to use this concept of the rule of law and push it through on the other side every challenge is also an opportunity the opportunity means that we don't have to put all our eggs in one basket need to approach this through different areas we haven't talked about the un human rights council although we have a special rapid her her sitting in the room but let us look at those other machineries there is no reason why one should not talk about sdg sixteen the un human rights council just as there is no reason why one should not talk about human rights no logical reason why one should not talk about human rights in the development domain there are political reasons why it doesn't happen so i think using the going into that lecture hall that it would be extremely difficult to convey to the audience the idea of the rule of law in china that's obvious to anyone who's been investor and dealing with western legal thought but what i realized after i was ga development it's an enabler because it regulates environmental issues it ensures non discrimination in access to discriminations or access to resources services and so on it enables investment and therefore promotes economic growth the chinese don't think of law as an enabler they think of law as a punitive measure because that's how it works in the chinese system policy enables development and policy comes from their executive the courts do not play a role do not play a regulatory role there is no concept of administrative law in the way in which we would understand it in western countries or other legal systems and so you can see how big the challenge is if you even have to you know convey that so it's a very complex idea the rule of law and access to justice yet it is the oil that makes the wheel turn around and i think what we need is much more collaboration collaboration between the human rights community and the development community collaboration between those who are working on sixteen point ten and those who are working on sixteen point three and and so on and together i think we're going to break this we're going to get people to understand you know what the relationship is because on the ground people know what the relationship is now the newspaper editor in my country in bangladesh who has been charged with criminal libel he understands how the rule right so there are many ways in which you undermine the system if you don't get the basic concept of the rule of law embedded in the information laws and you said that it's easy enough to measure the first one you know have they adopted a law and i think that sort of superficially that's true but i i want to push you a little bit on that many of you will know that my organization runs the right to information rating so we have assessed all of the access to information laws in the world and rated them out of a score up to one hundred and fifty and basically if it sort of walks and talks like a duck we stick it on there and we have i think up to a hundred and twenty we're having some problems with the website so not everything's up there yet but but we have i just look now and we have twenty five countries who score is below seventy five so they are failing failing grade and the bottom country austria has a score of twenty two percent okay i'm not even sure if that's a duck but if it's a dock it can't swim you know i don't think it's acceptable for the un to say anything that looks a all like a dot we're going to accept it as a law so the first one i think you know unesco have to have some kind of way of saying that's not good enough even for the first part of it when it comes to the second part implementation you know we all know that's much much more difficult and i would just mention two things that happening in the civil society side one of the hats i wear is as chair of the freedom of information advocates network which is like not a global community of you know access to information advocates and within that we have developed a simple methodology for civil society assessment of implementation it's a simple crude methodology but it gives you some basic information whether the laws being implemented it's designed for civil society but i think it could reasonably easily be adapted for the government side another piece of work that i'm doing my organization is doing in pakistan is we are developing a much more sophisticated kind of all singing all dancing  implementation assessment tool now we're doing it in the context of pakistan but the people were working with there gee i said have much bigger aspirations and we will sort of you know when we finish it we're launched it globally and whatever and you know that is not designed for  society i think you could be good for anyone it will cost some money to apply because it's all singing all dancing but you know i mean there should be money for that and and then i finally you know i don't know bill if you have some comments on that but i have a question which i'm a little bit embarrassed but i have to put it to delivery because this is the only unesco representative there what is unesco doing on this i was at a meeting and bill was there too about a year and a half ago where we discussed all about this i had unesco who's moved on now and some things but i mean are you developing some methodology i mean this is a complicated thing what are you doing about it how about having on question and then we know if someone else okay good so yes thank you and two quick questions one is whether some of you could reflect on whether there is a role for universities in terms of supporting the implementation of sdg sixteen if there is any specific function that you can attribute to universities and then a bigger question related to the nature of global leadership that may be i can respond to that when or someone else in the global context that you have  set for us what kind of leaders do we need and what kind of leadership will allow to manage this difficult time so that we can maybe proceed with a be national law university delhi thank you for what was a very educational session i wanted to push you a little in a direction in in the direction of the conversation we were having yesterday which is that i understand that sdg sixteen of very complex problems but i'm curious about what you think that the age of automation and of businesses controlling information adds to to these problems and from that point of view i'm try to address the very difficult question that you are asking and then you know i think that the short answer you know for that question would be that you know we moment i would say in you know our history where we are looking for leaders that can look well beyond their own constituency their own country you know take responsibility for global governance and obviously you know there are some leaders that need to take more responsibility than others because you know there are more you know countries that are more powerful than others but w certainly a we are at this very moment needing leaders that can take responsibility building countries that can compromise it that can you know a dialogue that you know leaders need to have but i would you know i think they're gonna have to go into more details but you know what we are looking for for right now i would say is the capacity to you know have a dialogue make compromise you know think about you know our you know global community as a whole and this is to tackle you know the most important issues that we are facing like you know from climate change to peace and security i'm very on common values and the common grounds that's really been presented by you know universal declaration of human rights and the growing body of human rights law over the past several decades as we've seen we discussed sometimes this is being rejected on the grounds that it's kind of a western agenda and there's a kind of esta g is a kind of intervention ism but actually the research has been done you know global comparative cultur reflected in the values i think it would be a powerful support to empower our artists to present this common values to present the vision that presented in the body of human rights law and in the two thousand and thirty agenda in a way that engages the heart and the head because i think whilst we do need data and we do need statistics it's so important as i said for evidence based action  there's something about that level of discussion that means that it passes you know the rational mind can kind of come up with a counter argument or another set of statistics and there's something about global citizenship education and culture of peace now i believe that stg four point seven on promoting a culture of peace and global citizenship education is absolutely key we don't give up on the generation of leaders we have now and that will have in the next few years but i think it's really important that we look to the next generation and building their capacity to for example as alejandro said the capacity to dialogue the capacity to empathize the capacity to connect across boundaries of country culture race and religion these are the kind of capabilities i think we need to create a new world and interestingly if we all have those capabilities we wouldn't have the kind of leadership that we've been used to at this point which is more or less i'm surprised the word is coming to mind now but a patriarchal model of looking for our leader whoever that may be male or female typically male maybe the future is about collaborative leadership collective leadership and the future of leadership looks very different from what we used to at this point just to jump right back i mean so be you're right of course i mean anything when i say simple i mean this in un terms where nothing is ever simple what what what is simple about it in the sense of the bureaucratic mechanical part of it is that now there is  effect a requirement for sovereign member states of the one hundred and ninety three to report whether they contend they have an access to information law or not that's the point of departure now clearly it would be great if there was some agreed international standard for what are the minimum requirements for such a law to actually be counted and call such a law but as you know better than anyone there are not nor are there likely to be so the next step is making sure that accompanying that initial reporting point is some kind of systematic reporting process which is not exclusively from the governments themselves which includes information from users experts and others which is again where the phrase implementation comes in and and i think it's important for us to keep in mind that you go back to the goal of the target itself but the target is accessed information of which the passage and implementation of  law is only one part of course because we're talking about do ordinary citizens can they get the information that they need it even with the narrow realm of official information official documents and so forth the proactive disclosure of that information in many countries happens on separate tracks from what the requirements of the law may or may not and then of course you have the additional issue of the digital divide in many societies even if it does exist electronically do people have the ability to see it is it available in the languages that they speak and there's a whole realm of things which are by definition different from one country to the other so i think one aspect of the sdgs which is very relevant here is that these goals and targets and progress towards them need to be defined on a national local level as well as the global level for them to have any real meaning but that requires media and civil society to be involved in charting progress on in every phase on both the national and international just joking i think that there is some things here that first what the custodian agencies needs to do it's it's a very  paragraph assessing the entire world for that annual report so you can see how hard it is to then what we are going to say in this one paragraph this is one of the difficulties but not on all four unesco the entire system t custodian agencies for the different indicators this is one second i think that they what they are trying to do is exactly to identify what is already available in terms like your index but also for instance well this is what is available in unesco can facilitate a more global discussion having in mind what we already already exists this is another third stimulating the shadow reports perceiver society because this is also an important part component of this discussion as as you know very well but finally and i think this is very very important sometimes we mistake the sdg agenda as a un secretar at agenda where this is a member states agenda they signed the declaration and they requested our support as facilitators so when they decided the indicators in the un statistical commission the they're saying this is what we are going to report about so i think the custodian agencies should be really involved in helping member states to produce significant data regarding what they already have decided and finally although we trend the global trend is for access to information is growing but the right to impart information is being restricted so you can see the  now for the two questions one was about the age of automation has is they're thinking of that no i don't think there is any thinking i mean if we move away from the discussion and freedom of expression and look at the goal unemployment there is no understanding of automation that is creating unemployment in in the sdg discussion there hasn't been full understanding of what impact automation is going to have on the unemployment goal so in the same way i think the un is behind and when i the u and i don't mean the secretariat i mean all the governments were discussing this they have still got to grapple with the implications of automation on the one hand they they see the advantage of it in terms of economic growth and education and so on on the other hand they also see the threat to that would come out of transparency and greater accountability and and sometimes they take very stupid actions of shutting down websites and then figure out afterwards this is actually affecting their banking services as much as  their security services so they have to figure out a lot in that area now coming to the point analysis point about the nature of global leadership i have been rather surprised  at how silent we have been about the issue of gender and gender equality and for me that is actually one of those big social forces that's going to change the way we talk about and the growing emerging i think power of young people i think those are going to determine also the nature of global leadership in the future just look at the me movement hash hash tag me too and what it has done wh account and i think that i don't know what how it's going to be i don't know whether women we'll make better leaders than men i don't think so necessarily but i think there are factors that will come onto the table that haven't been there before and that will change the way look i think we're looking for we're looking for leaders with with principals who operate on the basis of the values that are reflected in the universal declaration but also leaders who are pragmatic who are committed to the multilateral system and who are i have the the diplomatic sort of capacity and capital to actually move the the global conversation i think actually if you look at president mccrone speech to congress this week the things that he said about the iran deal and about climate change and a potentially hostile audience i think that that's leadership in my eyes so i think there are there are examples at the same time i you know i think irene and lucy's points about kind of not looking for a savior are important i think the the the kind of diffusion of leadership what moises naim calls the end of power is important and that there's there's leadership in increasingly in you know in civil society and in different in different places that we should we should be looking at and either even within the just the government space i think it's it's important that we not put all our eggs in one or a few baskets and that i mentioned this earlier and i talked a little bit about sort of emerging  least a regional if not global powers and the role that they're playing or failing to play and i'd just wondered if we need to take a fresh look at things like the community of democracies you know some of the multilateral fora that have existed in the past that we're supposed to be a vehicle for you know like minded states that believe in the sorts of things that we're talking about in this session but haven't operated in the way they need to to be able to i think resist some of the challenges that either hundra and others at this seconds thank you all of you i mean this was great and hopeful and wonderful