Progress Report on Victim Assistance - Voices From the Ground: Update

Standing Committee on Victim Assistance and Socio-Economic Reintegration

29 May 2009

Delivered by Katleen Maes, Handicap International Belgium

Thank you co-chairs for your interest in Voices from the Ground and for giving us the opportunity to inform the plenary about this inspiring project which Handicap International-Belgium is conducting for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. We would like to thank Austria and Norway, whose continued support has made this project possible.

The Mine Ban Treaty offered the fundamental promise to end the human suffering caused by antipersonnel mines. The Second Review Conference is the time to see how affected states and the international community have, as they committed to in Nairobi, done their utmost to fulfil this promise to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of survivors, their families and communities. Who better to ask than those directly experiencing the human consequences of mines every day?

We hoped to collect responses from 500 survivors in the so-called VA26 countries. This is roughly 25 per country, which at first glance may seem like a small sample. But as we all know, most survivors and their families live in remote areas; have to work hard for their daily sustenance; and many do not even have electricity or access to education to learn to read and write. So, this was not a simple matter of sending an email and waiting for a response.

Dozens of people from the ICBL, the ICRC and its national societies, local NGOs, DPOs, survivor organizations and interested individuals volunteered to go to faraway places to interview survivors in addition to their already busy jobs. We estimate that 500 questionnaires equals about 2,000 hours of volunteer work and survivor participation.

I am very happy but also humbled to say that since March we have collected more than 1,000 questionnaires in 24 of the 26 countries and some more could come in. A more significant message is that some survivors have contacted us directly to ask if they could also complete a questionnaire.

We know that we cannot reach every survivor. But the assessment of progress and recommendations from those at the forefront of implementation should take the center-stage any discussion about ensuring effective and sustainable victim assistance in the future.

Although we will only publish the report on 2 September in Vienna, some suggestions for the development of the Cartagena action plan have emerged.

Survivors want to see a concrete improvement to their lives and that of their families and communities. This is exactly what many people here have also been working towards for years and will continue to do so in the future. But there is a disconnect…

Survivors often responded that they felt that, in the past five years, service provision remained the same and inadequate. Worryingly, many feared that their situation might get worse. A practitioner from an organization, which for the last 20 years has assisted several tens of thousands people per year in just one country similarly noted that coordination had improved but that overall service provision had stayed at the same inadequate level since 2005.

From this we can distil the first and most important line of action for the Cartagena action plan: rendering timely and comprehensive services and rights when and where someone needs them. Topics tackled here apply to all components of victim assistance, such as access, quality, effectiveness, sustainability and victim participation.

We have learnt over the past five years that planning and coordination are required to facilitate implementation. This would be the second line of action addressing, political will, awareness, coordination, transparent monitoring and reporting, sustainability and victim inclusion.

A third line of action could be international cooperation, dealing with the provision of financial and technical support as well as guidelines for supporting agencies.

These main lines of action form the structure of a condensed and simple action plan without long descriptive laundry lists of tasks to be achieved under each component of victim assistance. This approach also allows for synergies with and mutual reinforcement from other legal frameworks more comprehensively describing the full and equal participation of victims in society, such as the UNCRPD.

It almost goes without saying that the action plan needs to be structured in such a way that it is possible to measure progress. Under the lines of action there need to be clear objectives as well as specific, measurable, and timely if not time-bound actions that states commit to take and report progress against.

Let me give an example for the action line of coordination.

One of the objectives could be transparent national victim assistance.
Specific actions to achieve this objective could be:

• in conjunction with the plan, implement, and if needed establish, an accountable mechanism to monitor annual progress under the national plan which reports back to the focal point at regular intervals.
• Action 7: both nationally and internationally, disseminate annual progress reports detailing progress made against SMART objectives in the plan, progress compared to the previous year, challenges and proposed solutions. Progress reports will also be used as a means to share good practices.

The best way to thank the countless people participating in the Voices from the Ground is to focus on implementation, implementation, implementation, so that we can finally move beyond the cliché "progress is being made, but more needs to be done."