It gives me great pleasure to introduce Ervin Greco from GPP in Berlin.
And Ervin has just finished a study for the British government, CFD, professional development, a desktop review on what works in technology,
and he's going to do a bit about that, but also about monitoring the impact of of privacy protection.
Urban comes with fantastic practical experience with the ICRC.
Things work with the ICRC for many years in the poor Cote d'Ivoire,
Afghanistan and DRC most recently, and will say with some spells from October last year and the new.
So we're very lucky to have you here with us on your whistle stop tour to England and
also to have someone who not only has thought about this theoretically and academically,
but he has done it practically at Operation in seven.
Welcome back. Thank you. Just to add a few words to present myself and I'm working with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin,
which is a small think tank, and they joined the GPI last year, about a year ago.
And before that I've been working mostly with the International Committee of the Red Cross a little bit with Belgium and with the European Commission.
So they everywhere and we started off in the path of Afghanistan could be why and then and
last missions were in Colombia and in DRC now for the Global Public Policy Institute as well.
Just that. I started working on a study commissioned by a different on I would say impact measurement and protection.
And I would like to present you and discuss with you some of our findings we made.
And we just presented this survey last week at the different office in London.
Not to start with a few words on the background of the study.
As you probably know, during the 1990s,
development organisations and humanitarian actors started introducing so-called
results based management to show where to measure the effects of their work.
And this is sometimes called the accountability revolution, although some people would question whether this was really a revolution.
Now, what is important is that initially this accountability revolution was limited to humanitarian assistance for the delivery of relief supplies,
medicines, water, etc. And it took quite some time until this revolution spilled over into protection a couple of years.
And actually the first guidebook on protection,
which specifically talks about our monitoring and indeed monitoring and evaluation challenges in protection,
came out in 2500, was published by IMF and ODI, written by Ludo and Andrew Petit, following from Oslo.
And. So this was in 2005. And since then, many humanitarian agencies developed their own guidance.
And I think we've become much better in terms of measuring the impact of protection work.
But there is a general agreement that measuring impacts still remains a big challenge.
And this is why against this background and this, it asked us to do this scoping study, which was a small study,
and we only had 55 days, three people working on the project and we reviewed some 170 documents.
I would say roughly one third was academic literature, research articles, monographs on protection and impact and protection.
One third were evaluation reports, and another third how to document policy guidance, operational guidance, etc.
So this is what we're going to talk. I would like to present to you, as I said, a few findings of this study.
These are the main questions I would like to address.
And we have about 40 minutes on what is humanity and protection and human rights protection and as you probably know,
is some confusion as to what it means and what is the difference between humanitarian or human rights protection and protection, military protection.
What are the main protection trends? How is success defined for different protection projects or approaches and how is success being measured?
I would like to start with the guideline, the global protection architecture.
So as you know, there are many actors who try to protect civilians from violence and harm in situations.
Obama Violence and natural disaster.
I would say the primary responsibility to protect, protect civilians rests with national authorities, the police, the army, judicial institutions.
If national authorities are unwilling or unable to protect civilians under their jurisdiction,
international actors who have a role to step in, peacekeeping missions, regional organisations.
And this is at the heart of. Be the so-called occupier, the responsibility to protect non non-state authorities.
There are also important prevention actors, although it is disputed whether they have a legal obligation to protect civilians
instead of parties to international conventions such as the Geneva Conventions.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't want to go into detail, but I know that many live in the room.
And I just want to say that according to some actors, such as the ICRC.
non-State authorities do have an obligation to respect certain humanitarian principles,
such as the need to distinguish between combatants and civilians under customary international law.
I should also say that some non-state actors, such as the Free Syrian Army and pledge to support and to respect ISIL.
And I think you had a talk a few weeks ago by Elisabeth from Geneva.
And so, you know, that many non-state armed groups, they signed on to specific deeds.
For instance, on the ban to ban landmines, other actors that are part of this global protection architecture.
Diplomatic representations. Donors, international justice institutions.
The ICC, the International Criminal Court, as a as a mixed tribunal.
And then now we're coming to the topic this of our research, focus and humanity and all the organisations and human rights organisations.
Now, these two protection actors have one thing in common they cannot physically protect civilians.
What they do, what they try to do is to convince others, primarily 50 bears, state and all state authorities, to protect civilians.
They do. They do this through various forms of private and public advocacy.
She maintain organisation, do many other activities beyond advocacy and we will get back to that in a second.
Now what I would like to do is to talk a little bit about main trends.
How has this architecture changed, let's say, during the last ten or 20 years?
And first of all, we have a multiplication of protection actions.
And as you know, there are more and more UN peacekeeping missions or other international military missions
that have a specific protection mandate that was given to them by the U.N. Security Council.
Another important change. They are more and more human rights organisations working in conflict environments.
You all know the work of Human Rights Watch, and it's probably the most best known example.
But there are other human and human rights organisations working in conflict.
This was not necessarily the case 20 years ago.
You also have more and more humanitarian organisations that have integrated a protection perspective into their mission statement.
So more and more active.
Another change would be changes of the shift in focus from primary duty bearers, states and non-state authorities to affected communities.
So humanitarian organisations what they do and they try to support communities to deal with specific protection risk.
And that is also a major change. And we come back to that later on in the presentation.
So multiplication of actors, if we're still talking about change, shift from duty bearers, bears to affected communities.
And lastly, the broadening of the of the context, the contextual scope.
In the past, the protection problems were believed to arise only in situations of armed conflict warfare.
Now, today, there is an agreement, a really acknowledged acknowledgement that protection concerns also arise in natural disaster settings.
A few words on evaluation trends and you probably know the Alma and Active Learning Network and Accountability and Policy Performance Partnership.
Thank you. We'll check that. Oh, you're right.
I'm sure you're right. Okay. About maintains the database, the evaluated reports database, which is, I think the biggest database,
which includes evaluation lessons, learned papers, program reviews in the humanitarian sector.
And now what you see there have a total of 100, 1100 documents.
And what you see here are some documents included in this database that are related to protection.
Let me start from 1992 until 2012. There's about 170.
Now, what is interesting, what I found interesting is to see that the not a lot of evaluations were evaluated.
Reports peaked in 2000 with 19 works published.
And then it decreased. I actually expected it to become larger at the end, but this is not the case.
So there seems to be a decline in interest somehow in at least in evaluations that are related to protection in terms of the thematic focus.
There's also an interesting shift, I would say, until 2005.
Most of the evaluations or a large share of them they focus on in refugees,
asylum and many interviews with we spoke who have been cited we we reviewed 170 documents and we also interviewed 40 protection experts.
Now, many said that the issue of asylum and refugees pushed to the margin and that your data focuses more on gender based violence,
child protection, protection, natural disasters, protection, mainstreaming.
I would like to conclude the discussion on trends with a few charts on, well, financial trends.
Now what you see here is protection funding between 2020 12 in million US dollars.
But this data only includes funding in countries where you do have the common APM or flagship,
you know, increase from 25 million in 2000 to the peak was, I think 250 million in 2010.
What is interesting, if you compare it with total humanitarian funding in billion dollars and you can see that the evolution is roughly the same,
but here we talk about billions, though it increased the total funding increase from 1 million to about 7 billion.
Why am I showing this? Just to to remind you that we are talking about very little money.
So the large money still goes into food project, medical aid, etc.
Protection only represents between 2.5 and the 3.5 of overall funding.
This data comes from the financial tracking services, which is a set of questions regarding the trends or regarding the protection architecture.
Actually, I had gone through this in terms of the evaluations.
It may be there are less evaluations and maybe there are less playing time because of the nature of routines.
Absolutely. You're right. So many organisations were not published data because of confidentiality issues.
ICAC is a case in point. But still it doesn't explain as wide as decreasing.
But you're right, maybe that's another constraint.
Many organisations will not publish their evaluations, and the problem is that if a donor nowadays is a donor and commissions an evaluation,
they would always posted on their website, which is troubling for many humanitarian organisations in terms of neutrality,
no question about the equal protection architecture.
You have civilian at the Corps and then affected communities.
What difference do you make? Do you do you mean that some civilians are just not affected?
Well, thank you for having me back. And actually, first of all, I should say that our study was limited to protection of civilians,
the defence study, and it should actually say civilians and prisoners that are also protected.
So part of I mean what humanitarian organisations do is visiting and security detainees or prisoners of war.
So this is the first thing. And then I believe that this affected communities to show that communities are seen together.
Many humanitarian organisations we spoke to say that they're no longer just talking to states, the non-state authorities.
They try to reinforce the capacity of communities to deal with protection.
And so their One Protection Act, which is how to between civilians affected civilians and state and on state authorities of the question.
Good so defining protection. We have to talk a little bit about definition, but I will try to do that as quickly as possible.
During the 1990s, between 1996 and 2001, the ICRC in Geneva convened a number of workshops.
And I think the objective, I guess you would then of of the objective was to define professional standards for protection.
Most relevant actors were present the UN agencies, including the OSCE,
its ARE and most humanitarian NGOs and the ICRC, the Red Cross movement, obviously.
Now, these, these the participants of these workshops, they agreed to the following definition, which was later adopted by the IFC,
the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Committee of the U.N. But it is now the official U.N. definition,
and the face protection refers to all activities and obtaining full respect for the rights
of the individual in accordance with the letter and spirit of relevant bodies of law,
relevant authorities of law into human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law.
Now, this is where many problems start with confusion comes from.
So this definition is considered both too broad, Antoinette Narrow.
It is too broad because any human brain activity can be linked to human rights law.
For instance, if you distribute fufu to civilians in situations of natural disaster,
our hopefully you are helping those who enjoy the right to adequate food which is enshrined in international human rights law.
And this is actually the reason why some organisations such as the UNHCR and they label almost everything they do as protection.
Now the definition is at the same time too narrow because you may soon have to
implement a number of non-lethal activities which do not fall under this definition.
And let me give you one example. For instance, the main action, as you may know, mine action is one thematic area of the global protection cluster.
I think there are 13 thematic areas.
Now, mine action can include activities to convince states states to sign on to the ultimate treaty on the landmines, which is a bigger concern.
But it also includes other activities such as mindless awareness to help communities to deal with them again, talking about communities,
to help communities, to deal with the risks emanating from unexploded ordinance, which is not a legal activity as such.
So this is a source of confusion, I would say not so much in headquarters, but at the field level.
And in order to bring clarity into the debate, many organisations and donors have developed what I would call activity based definitions.
So normally the notion of protection refers to activities aimed at protecting civilians from violence and other patterns of harm,
such as sexual exploitation, discrimination, separation of family links.
And it also includes efforts to facilitate access to.
Specialised care and reparation for victims of past violence and hope.
Now, what we try to do in this life is study.
You try to regroup or to group the difference or the different protection activities.
We came up with the following division or typology, and we have developed three approaches.
The first one is remedial action. The second one adaptation.
And the third one prevention.
Remedial action refers to remedy, providing remedy to refer to individual victims of harm and medical assistance to relevant victims.
For instance, psychosocial counselling, counselling services to civilians, traumatised by violence,
family reunification, tracing activities, and also legal support to victims of reparation.
As you know, in many conflicts, the main protection concern for civilians is access to land titles.
And you have a number of organisations such as.
The NRC, the Region Refugee Council, which provides legal aid to civilians seeking, for instance, to receive land titles.
Adaptation is about reducing risk exposure.
This includes so-called protection mainstreaming activities.
The classical example of protection, mainstreaming higher firewood distributions inside the camps to ensure that women women don't
have to collect firewood in surrounding areas where the risk of rape may be particularly high.
And so this is about good programming, if not about promoting the law.
Another example is the installation of adequate lightning inside IDP camps to ensure that women to reduce the risk of rape at Night-Time.
Community based protection. We mentioned mine risk awareness.
This was one example.
As I said, this is important because more and more humanitarian actors and seek to strengthen communities to help them to deal with protection lives.
Let me give you one other example from my own experience.
When I was working with the ICRC in Colombia,
we observed that indigenous communities had had the coping mechanism to regroup in specific houses when fighting erupted in surrounding areas.
Now, what the ICRC did well, I should say that they removed the community houses which were built of traditional material,
wooden planks, wooden panels, which didn't provide a good protection.
So what the ICRC did there? They reinforced these community houses.
They built brick walls to provide greater protection against stray bullets and other explosive weapons.
Now, this is another example of a of an activity which is not of a legal nature.
It's more about engineering, I would say. Let's move on.
Prevention, promoting respect for and compliance with international humanitarian law, international human rights law.
And now this is about convincing major forces in Afghanistan to stop their reliance or to reduce their reliance on air bombardments.
It's about convincing non-state armed groups to not recruit child soldiers.
And this is done through public and private advocacy.
Prevention also includes legal training with police, security forces, armed groups, militias.
I should say that this is becoming more and more complicated in certain contexts.
And as you know, you have counterterrorism legislations in many donor countries.
So it is not so easy nowadays to carry out the need training with an armed group
that is listed as a terrorist organisation such as the Taliban or al-Shabab.
Technical support for the implementation of ISIL, for the for the incorporation of ISIL international law.
This also falls under the third approach. Now, why why is this distinction important?
I think, first of all, the scale of the mission behind each approach varies considerably.
So what you're trying to do here,
remedial action is essentially responsive to trying to help victims to cope with the after effects of war adaptations about,
as we say, helping people to live with risks. If only the third approach is about addressing the deeper causes of violence
against civilians rooted in under and under unlawful and how harmful behaviour.
So this is important. Secondly, I would say that success is defined differently for each approach and you can be very
effective in terms of providing remedial action to help the communities to deal with risk.
But at the same time, you can fail to address the deeper causes of violence against civilians.
I think this is important because sometimes you will hear critics say we have failed to protect civilians,
but in most cases and reference is then made to the third approach, not so much for the first two ones.
And I also think this is the third reason why this distinction is important,
because the challenges and they were coming to an end solving the challenges in terms of measuring impact are very different for each approach.
But before we talk about measurement challenges,
I would like to conclude this discussion and illustrate the links and the distinction at the same time between assistance and protection.
As you know, normally we say that you have an excellent action as to two dimensions persistence and protection.
Persistence is about ensuring minimal minimum material conditions that are essential for the survival of the civilian population.
It's about water, sanitation, health care, nutrition, etc.
That food security and emergency shelter.
Texans about ensuring the physical safety of the civilian population and in a more broader sense, ensuring respect for the relevant law.
The Classical Protection Activities of Public Advocacy confidential.
Maintaining the confidential dialogue, for instance, to gain them into an accident.
Talk about specific violations of international humanitarian law, prison visits,
legal training and resolve as we as we said, and legal support for the implementation of HL.
Now in the middle we have these other activities which just allow in between remedial action and therapy for medical assistance,
family tracing services, protection, AIDS screening and community based protection.
Before we talk about measurement challenges, do you have any does this make sense and do you have any comments regarding this typology?
Have you have you looked at security and safety, security and ocean safety, security,
and whether you need simple protection and some people would define it as a protection for you.
And none of those were. You mean armed protection, protecting civilians?
Yeah. The more sort of concrete security. See?
Yes. And this is obviously very relevant.
But as we said before, when we talked about this protection architecture, our focus is is on humanitarian and human rights protection.
So humanitarian and human rights organisations don't have the means to physically provide physical harm protection by presence.
So. And yes, you could say that the protective presence, as is sometimes called,
but it's not about it's not about protecting them directly from physical violence.
No other questions.
This is all to one of the measurement challenges.
Now, when you ask people why is it difficult to measure impact and protection?
And again, we talk about human rights and dignity and protection. This is the normal answer you get.
People will tell you that. And protection outcomes are less amenable to quantification than outcomes related to humanitarian assistance.
So for instance, if you have a nutrition project,
it is relatively easy to measure the way the body mass index of children prior to treatment, during treatment and afterwards.
And you can say whether you have an impact. Now, this is obviously much more complicated.
If we talk about an advocacy campaign, for instance, to to ban anti-personnel mines.
Now, I'm saying this is the standard answer. This is not to say that it's not correct.
But if we're honest, I mean, the same challenges apply to other interventions.
The programs, for instance, complex development interventions to promote rule of law.
In a specific country, you will have the same measurement challenges.
I think we have to be we have to be a bit more specific.
And what I want to do now is to talk about measurement challenges for each of the three approaches we've discussed before.
And I will go through this quickly because this is taking longer than I thought.
Remedial action, providing remedy to individual victims of harm and providing the path of violence and harm.
And you're successful if your activities help to reduce the or restore authority, or at least enhance the dignity and well-being of civilian victims.
Now, it is obviously very difficult to quantify individual well-being and dignity.
What you have to do normally, you have to to ask beneficiaries so whether whether they benefited.
So you have to ask beneficiaries to assess the service you are providing. Let me give you one example of psychosocial counselling.
MSF is one that signs off on here is one organisation providing psychosocial counselling in situations of armed conflict and natural disaster.
Now, as a standard practice, MSF asked people after their treatment whether they have been satisfied.
I've spoken to one MSF member and he said the problem is that if they go back,
if they go back to the people they have assisted after, say, a couple of three or four months or for half a year,
they noted that even people who said that the service they received were very
useful and they easily relapse into pathological behaviour after or afterwards.
So what does it mean? It means that even if people are satisfied with your services,
the impact may actually be quite low in terms of helping individuals to return to a normal life.
Let me give you one other example. As we said before, family tracing and reunifying children with their parents is part of remedial action.
Now, you might think that reunifying children with the parents is always a bad thing, but it is not that straightforward.
Many times when you when you when you look at the parents of a of a child of a boy or girl, you ask them, do you want to return to your parents?
They would say, yes. I mean, this the following thing. They would say yes.
Now you bring them back to their parents. And then after a couple of weeks or a couple of months, actually,
they are unhappy because they want to return to their tutors because they've grown attached to them.
Sometimes they don't even know their parents. They've been growing up with with tutors for years.
So what you have to do, you really have to go back to beneficiaries, in this case children.
After a couple of months, after a year or so. But this is a problem because in most countries you don't have this opportunity.
As you know, humanitarian projects are short, 12 month, 18 months.
So we have to broaden the timeframe if we want to measure impact and reducing risk exposure.
If successful, different risk mitigating measures reduce the the incidence of violence and harm among beneficiaries.
Let's go back to the example we mentioned before distribution of firewood inside IDP
camps to ensure that women don't have to go outside where the risk of rape is greater.
Now, what is the problem here? Sexual violence in developing countries and in the UK is a sensitive issue
and it can be difficult to measure the incidence of sexual violence directly.
You cannot go through women who receive firewood in Africa.
So have you been less exposed to. Sexual violence. This is not possible.
Now you have to recall it and look to identify proxy measures.
And what examples are patterns of movement?
And is it actually one to say that, for example, there are more and more humanitarian organisations have been very innovative in this regard.
And let me give you one example of a WFP project in some areas like Kenya.
What WFP did with the project project that started last year,
and they distributed fuel efficient stoves to women in refugee camps along the border with Somalia,
and they don't ask women whether they are less subject or exposed to sexual violence.
They ask them whether they've reduced the time they spent outside that IDP to their their IDP camp.
Then they compare this with a group of women that have not received fuel efficient and fuel efficient fuel stoves.
So looking at patterns of movement is the one possibility to get around this.
And together, that's a very sensitive issue. Does this clear this example?
Okay, now we're coming to the third approach prevention for women, living,
respectful and compliant with humanitarian principles and relevant international law.
This is about changing policy and changing behaviour.
The changing harmful policies and behaviour of primary duty bearers takes years and in some cases it takes the cake.
So then you have a real problem if you are if your objective is to to convince non-state armed groups such as,
let's say, Eastern Congo Lord's Resistance Army, to not use child soldiers, you will not have an impact within a year.
So you need much longer timeframes. And even then you need to be able to what you need to assess the impact.
Then you need to have longitudinal data on protection trends and you really have to
think of anything companies and future marriage reasons from programming cycles,
a high turnover of humanitarian staff. So we're often in most cases,
we're lacking data on trends to assess the impact of activities aimed at changing behaviour and changing on foreign policy.
Now the third problem even if that final trends is available, attributing positive change to a particular programme can be very difficult.
Get back to the example we mentioned before.
And if your objective is to reduce child recruitment in Eastern Congo and you're working on you're engaging with the Lord's Lord's Resistance Army,
but at some point you know that child recruitment are going down.
It is very difficult to explain whether this was due to your successful advocacy effort or
maybe it was simply due to the successful military campaign carried out by U.N. forces.
By the moment, maybe you have been just pushing LRA into a neighbouring country and this is the
reason why the number of child and child recruitment decreases in a specific area.
So you always have an attribution problem if we're talking about the third approach, prevention.
Now if you agree, I would like to for me, these are the most difficult challenges to deal with and establishing that the UN protection or gathering
data on protection trends and attribution attributing attributing effects of specific interventions.
And I would like to go a bit more into detail and.
Let us take a step back. How do you maintain actors and human rights actors collect information on trends normally to have a very pragmatic approach.
You will try to gather information from as many sources as possible.
You will carry out face to face debriefing with victims and their family members, with other diary witnesses, with community representatives.
You will review national and international media so you can use hospital statistics.
For instance, if you're looking at rape incidence, you can use official visual evidence,
satellite imagery, vigils, etc. In most cases, you will not find a sampling plan.
He maintains a very pragmatic about gathering that. So it's not based on a scientific, you might say.
Still, such a pragmatic approach can work in certain contexts.
And I would like to talk a little bit about Afghanistan.
As you know, in 2006, the conflicts in Afghanistan, the current conflict in Afghanistan started to intensify.
And what the UN that the UNAMA mission or more specifically, the human rights unit within the United Mission in Afghanistan,
they started to systematically collect data on civilian death and violent conflict related deaths.
And what you see here is death rate between the number of deaths from 2007 to 2012.
It steadily increased until 2011, and it's for the first time with a decrease in 2012, I think, by 16%.
The report just came out a couple of weeks ago. You're not willing to step further and say disaggregated data by parties to the conflict.
What you see here is civilian deaths and injuries linked to anti-government elements.
This is the official then. And the notion for for for the Taliban and other groups.
Now, this is the dark red or the orange fire.
Pro-government forces, international forces and national forces, militia groups and others, I think,
are those that cannot be linked to any specific armed groups, to any party, to the conflict.
So, you know, an even a step further and they collect the data for different types of military operations here.
What you see is civilian deaths and injuries caused by air attacks between 2010 and 2012 and death
injuries and total the total numbers now these of this obviously are linked to have mostly linked
to international or here the civilian deaths and injuries are caused by international forces because
they are the only ones carrying out until recently or at least carrying out air and air strikes.
Afghanistan is an exception. You will not find such detailed data in other contexts.
I think what you've done, I think in this pragmatic way and I hadn't mentioned that before, there was no I mean,
how did they collect this data was from person personal network in talking to the staff members in different field offices,
talking to the families, talking to the police, talking to journalists, etc.,
as I said, gathering as much information as you can in a very pragmatic manner.
Now, this data proved to be very useful because it's instigated debate and it received international and national media coverage.
Even the Taliban refer to this data and you have some kind of discussion.
And I should say then if we talk about civilian deaths caused by air strikes and air and air strikes and they freeze since 2007,
and you might say that this was useless because it didn't have any impact.
But those who collected the data and I think they're right,
they say that the overall increase in civilian casualties was much lower than the increase in air strikes.
So it hasn't it had a positive impact. Now, there are there are clear limitations to such kind of data collection.
I think it worked in Afghanistan, but it is not suited to collect or to document less visible protection problems.
Sexual violence, torture are examples.
It is not suitable to establish trends,
protection trends in areas where the presence of humanitarian and human rights actors is weak and subject to fluctuations.
I will explain what I mean by that, and I'm just picking randomly another example, DRC.
I've worked there. So in the DRC, as you know, very few.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the biggest humanitarian crises that we know very, very little about trends.
You have a serious problem of sexual violence, display, forced displacement.
And we really we still don't know. We cannot make any clear.
We cannot we don't have enough information on on trends over time.
So I would say if Afghanistan is a good example and or best practice,
DRC is probably a worst practice example of why not only because humanitarian and human rights actors are doing a bad job.
Simply because of of of the context. DRC is as big as Western Europe.
You don't really know how many people there live.
The estimates vary between 60 and 80 million and it is very difficult to gather data and in a systematic manner.
You don't know what's happening in the provinces. When I was there in 2010, there was a problem because humanitarians left certain areas.
So if you look at protection change, then you had less incidents reported.
You had a decrease, for instance, in IDP rights once they returned to certain areas.
But that there was that this obviously is not you cannot use this information to assess impact.
What are the solutions? I think in countries like DRC, it's necessary to extrapolate from smaller samples of the population.
The problem is using survey, for instance.
The problem is that there is very little experience within the humanitarian community in terms of sampling and using survey methods.
There are few exceptions and I see that sorry, Oxfam is carrying out what are the Equal Protection Survey,
for instance, I assume has been working with mortality surveys,
but by and large there's very little experience using more scientific methods are more common in other areas, such as humanitarian assistance.
But in prevention, we're not using such methods. So what we recommended to different is to carry out additional research,
to gather best practices, and to look at other related fields such as development,
and to see whether we can use methods in other areas and then apply them to to the protection sector.
I think it would also be relevant to to see whether some academic or whether we can learn from
academia and simplify some of the methods you might be using and use them for protection.
So this is one recommendation we made so different.
Any questions so far? Before I turn to the latest, the last section.
No attribution.
We said that attribution and establishing trends is a main problem.
And the second problem is attributing success.
I want to give you another example from Colombia, the so-called false positives scandal.
In 2000 through when the new Areva government was elected,
the Colombian army announced a very large military campaign in an attempt to regain control over areas that have been controlled by.
Korea forces and other non-state armed groups.
Not, in my view, is allowed to witness the increase of extra judicial killings.
And I should say this information is out there in the public domain.
And so what happened in Colombia, the army, they arrested people from marginalised groups, urban dwellers, peasants,
dressed them up and guerrilla fighters shot them and then presented them as killed people killed in combat.
And you can see everybody in the army has to produce results, as you can imagine.
Now, this was a huge problem and you had many in Colombia, at least you had many national NGOs, human rights organisations,
the media, but also international organisations that documented these cases of extrajudicial killings.
And this led to a government investigation in 2009.
And as a consequence, 28 military officers were fired, including the the commander general of the Colombian army.
Now, this example of the case of the fascist positivos in Colombia is, I would say, a very rare example of a well documented,
successful protection campaign aimed at promoting or eliminating and preventing
violence against civilians through the promotion of behavioural change.
Now, who was responsible for success? The OSCE, which are the authors for the High Commissioner of Human Rights, the origin,
and the former head of the Research Office in Colombia, and Cristian Salazar, former.
He wrote an article which came out last year where he claimed success.
The OSCE that I was working on on this on the file, on the case of extra judicial killings.
But you have the ICRC as a much longer and larger presence in Colombia.
You have national human rights organisations that are very active in Colombia.
There is the US administration, as you know, the US is a major donor to that in terms of military aid.
And this is reasonable to to believe that the US administration or U.S. officials
had an interest in convincing the Colombian army to put an end to this practice.
The political opposition parties and all of this happened one year before the presidential elections.
And lastly, you have the International Criminal Court.
Colombia became a state state party to the the ICC, I think, in 2002,
but the Colombian government said that it would not accept the jurisdiction of the court for seven years of amnesty.
I think it was seven years. Now, this period, though, this deadline expired at the end of 2009.
So, again,
it is reasonable to to believe that the Colombian government had no interest in a criminal investigation by the ICC prior to the election campaign.
So who is responsible for success? I don't think I cannot give you an answer.
I don't think there is a statistical answer solution to the problem.
Maybe some of you know more about statistics would argue otherwise.
But I think we have to be very modest about attribution.
All we can do is explain how the foreign actors contributed to success.
But we also I think it's necessary to go one step further and we should take examples such as the.
The case of extrajudicial killings then in Colombia and trying to isolate external factors that contributed to success in this specific case.
And I think we can go even one step further and try to isolate or get a better understanding of external
factors that enhance the limited success of different prevention interventions across different contexts.
This is actually the second recommendation we made to him.
Just provide me with a list of potentially relevant external factors military dynamics, domestic political dynamics,
international political dynamics, for instance, in political negotiations to end the conflict.
This may end the way and prove, for instance, the are willing to engage with humanitarian actors, economic factors over share of a national budget,
but overall share of a national budget, UN peacekeeping missions and as we said before, activities of the International Criminal Court.
So in conclusion, I think what we need to do to get a better understanding of what works and protection specifically we talk about
activities aimed at changing policy and behaviour is to get events we need to carry out the larger research project.
This cannot be done through an evaluation within a couple of weeks,
but investigating to try to understand under which circumstances particular interventions can work.
I would like to contribute here. I'm sorry I was a bit too long. Maybe with a final remark.
I know that this has been a bit technical and it was about impact measurement and I
kind of avoided more related questions and this was to keep the focus of the debate.
But I think normative questions are very relevant, and I don't think it's possible to quantify everything we do.
I don't think it's it's even necessary to put the number on everything we do.
I think you had a presentation a few weeks ago last week, and by morning I started from the ICRC explaining what ICRC does in the prisons.
And I think it's not it's not possible to it's often very difficult to assess the impact of such activity.
But may give you a last example.
When I when I worked with the ICRC again in 28 in southern Colombia, if I were going to someone who was facing hunger,
we what we did is we did we organised phone calls between family members and detainees in Guantanamo.
So families came to our office in Kandahar and we called them their sons or in Guantanamo.
And this was of the telephone conferences.
Now, for many families, this was the first time in several years that they've been able to speak to their son.
And I don't think it is possible or necessary to to assess the impact.
I don't think it is it doesn't make any sense to ask family members after this phone call whether we have answer.
Well, and then simply by a little bit. But I think it's just morally important, something that is I mean,
it's morally important that families can talk to their sons, even if they are defending the Taliban.
So I want to conclude with that. Very. I think the normative questions are important.
And you want to talk about them now. I avoided them because I was already too long.
And it was that would have made it much more complicated. Thank you.