For the second year running, ILAC partnered with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to contribute to the annual Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. The Stockholm Forum is co-hosted by SIPRI and the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and promotes interdisciplinary exchanges among global thought-leaders with the aim of influencing key policy and research agendas.
This year’s Forum brought together over 200 experts and policymakers to discuss ‘Sustaining Peace: What Works’ and identify successful peacebuilding tools in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
In keeping with this theme, ILAC joined up with the UNDP Oslo Governance Center to co-lead a session on “How Can the New Deal and SDG 16+ Be Achieved?”
The New Deal is a development standard that focuses on fragile and conflict-affected countries while the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out global aims to be achieved by all countries. The two standards share a new dedication to making development sustainable by mainstreaming peace, governance and justice concerns, including the rule of law. This has raised both opportunities and challenges for both rule of law and development practitioners, who must learn to work more effectively together.
ILAC invited three experts to participate in the session. Two of them came from Tunisia: Ms. Mariem Sassi spoke to the significance of judicial reform to development processes in her capacity as Deputy Prosecutor of the Court of Appeals in Tunis, while Mr. Haykel Ben Mahfoudh, Professor in Public Law and Political Science at the University of Tunis, spoke to the importance of coordinated judicial and security sector reform. The third guest, Mr. Abdirashid Hashi, Executive Director of the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies in Somalia, described in eloquent detail the challenges of development in extremely fragile settings.
ILAC and our guests also supported a SIPRI-led session on “Good practices in security and justice sector reform”, and Senior Legal Expert Rhodri Williams acted as discussant in a further session led by the Swedish NGO Kvinna till kvinna on “Shrinking civic space: addressing the gendered threats to peace building and human rights.”
The Forum also provided an opportunity for ILAC to launch its recent rule of law assessment reports on Syria and the Central African Republican, in a session attended by numerous experts including representatives of the African Union.
