About SJIP
What is SJIP?
The Syria Justice Innovation Process (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 in Syria.
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 in Switzerland. 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 will in the coming 3 years help develop innovative ideas and approaches to meet the Justice Innovation Goals.
Next steps
SJIP will continue through the setting up of innovation teams – composed of members of the Stakeholder Team and other Syrians as well as international experts – to develop scalable, user friendly solutions that can address these most pressing legal problems selected by the Stakeholder Team.
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.
