About SJIP
Watch the video Stories of Change: the Syria Justice Innovation Process
What is SJIP?
In response to the Syrian’s need for practical solutions to solve their most pressing daily justice problems, The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) convened and facilitated the Syria Justice Innovation Process (SJIP) between 2018 and 2022. SJIP gathers knowledge on everyday legal problems facing the people of Syria and brings together people who are committed to addressing them. SJIP aims to produce practical, innovative tools, partnerships, knowledge platforms, financing models, and empowered and networked actors who can use these innovations to address Syrians’ everyday legal problems.
The process
The process is led by a Stakeholder Team of 32 Syrians of different perspectives, backgrounds, areas of expertise, ages and gender. The Stakeholder Team has met through four rounds of technical dialogues between November 2018 and July 2019. As a first step and based on research over two years, the group assessed everyday legal problems of Syrians. On that basis, it developed a set of six Justice Innovation Goals and targets. With that as a foundation, the Stakeholder Team developed user-friendly solutions to meet the Justice Innovation Goals “Reducing violence and discrimination against women” and “Safe and effective access to personal documentation”.
Next steps
The Syrian Stakeholder team & the SJIP secretariat continue the efforts to work on other justice innovation goals and help more Syrians solve their most pressing justice problems.
Justice Innovation Goals
The Stakeholder Team assessed a list of 16 categories of everyday legal problems faced by Syrians, and among them chose six areas to focus on. The selection was based on an assessment by the Stakeholder Team that:
- they can be most feasibly influenced in the coming 3 years
- they are prevalent inside Syria, and
- they most affect vulnerable groups including women and children.
These goals and respective targets provide a focus for innovation efforts and the design of solutions. They convey a selection of everyday legal needs of Syrians around which the Stakeholder Team now sees potential for innovation. They also comprise an outline of an evidence and needs-based innovation agenda to contribute to and invest in. They do not comprise a proclamation of the most important justice goals which affect Syrians.
Currently we have funding available to move forward with innovation efforts on two of the six goals, selected by the Stakeholder Team based on the same assessment criteria. The two initial goals selected are “Syrians have safe and effective access to personal documents” as well as “reducing violence and discrimination against women”.
Stakeholder Team
The Stakeholder Team is composed of leading actors from the justice field in Syria, broadly defined. They are respected professionals in their domains of work, who participate in this initiative in their individual capacity and not as representatives of institutions or constituencies. They contributed to the outputs with their knowledge and opinions, based on their vast experience. The Stakeholder Team does not represent a declaration nor a consensus on implicit policy recommendations, but simply the people themselves – a group of diverse, committed, and caring professionals who worked together in the hope that this output might contribute to advancing the everyday justice needs of Syrian people. The outputs do not reflect the individual opinions of Stakeholder Team members nor of their institutions, but are a reflection of their collective creation out of the first two years of SJIP.
Some of the stakeholders who are part of the SJIP Stakeholder Team:
Ahmad Abdelaziz
Alaa Younes
Amera Malek
Ammar Kahf
Anwar Majanni
Aref al Shaal
Bassel Kaghadou
Etidal Mohsen
Khaled Alhlou
Lara Shahin
Mohamad Hasan
Rawia Harb
Roula Obeid
Rudaina Jarkas
Saleem Najjar
Samer al Deyaei
Sawsan Zakzak
Seve Aydin Izouli
Talal Hallak
