BACKGROUND

One in six children globally live in areas affected by armed conflicts. Despite their magnitude, frequency and devastating impact, violations and crimes affecting children have not received comprehensive attention from international, regional and national investigative bodies and courts. This results in weakened accountability system to child victims and contributes to impunity for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. The European Union is supporting Save the Children to conduct a series of activities relating to strengthening accountability for grave violations affecting children, through a 20-month grant. This project aims to work with a wide range of actors to ensure that humanitarian sector-led initiatives to monitor and report grave violations of children’s rights in conflict are complemented and reinforced by coordinated approaches to strengthen judicial and non-judicial accountability mechanisms for children. The Action has a global reach, supported by practical applications on the African continent. Save the Children will deploy a comprehensive and participatory approach to reinforce child-focused monitoring, investigation and prosecution of crimes and violations. This will be achieved through collaborative improvement of methodologies in use by existing judicial and non-judicial accountability mechanisms, and tailored capacity building of their human resources. Evidence of child-centered best practices and lessons learnt will be harnessed and widely disseminated to promote and influence further investment towards closing the accountability gap. As part of these ECHO-funded activities, Save the Children organised a private Experts Roundtable, A new path towards accountability for crimes and violations affecting children in armed conflict, on March 8-9 2023. The main objective was to convene key experts in the field of accountability to seek their feedback on a follow-up engagement strategy in high-level fora on the recommendations of the Advancing Justice for Children: Innovations to strengthen accountability for violations and crimes affecting children report (“Advancing Justice for Children”), a joint publication by Save the Children and Oxford University. Experts were expected to identity the pillars of a framework for policy change with a view to finalise a draft Statement of Commitment for key stakeholders, agree on content of a draft Guiding Framework aimed at identifying the tenets of accountability strengthening for crimes and violations affecting children in armed conflict. Save the Children seeks to contract a consultant with relevant expertise to support the consolidation of policy documents into final versions. The consultant will report to Aurélie Lamazière, Senior Programme Manager at Save the Children. Several colleagues at Save the Children will be involved in reviewing the final version

DELIVERABLES

• Consolidate the draft Guiding Framework, notably by integrating all feedback received and in line with the discussion with the project lead. The Guiding Framework should be in its final version, a document of similar length (not change of format). The edits relating to the content should be taken into account.
• Consolidating the draft Statement of Commitment, notably by integrating all feedback received and in line with discussion with the project lead (slight change of format).
• All the language added or edited will be reviewed and validated by the project team and lead.

TIMELINE

The candidate will work within the months of August and September and finalise the documents at the latest by 30^th of October (timeframe can be discussed, earlier finalisation is preferrable). The revision works will represent up to 20 days of work.

 QUALIFICATIONS

 Technical expertise on international criminal and human rights investigations and national investigations of core international crimes affecting children;

• Ability to analyse information and clearly present results and ideas
• Proven experience of drafting policy and advocacy reports
• Excellent written communication skills with the ability to communicate with a wide range of audiences
• Fluency in English is required.

The consultant can be based in Geneva or home-based.

APPLICATION PROCESS

The applicant should send a CV/resume, with a letter outlining similar work, suitability and availability. Furthermore, they should indicate their daily rate. Kindly fill the expression of interest form (download the form here). Please send your application, outlining your qualification to the following email address: esaro.procurement@savethechildren.org

Only short-listed candidates will be contacted. Interviews will be conducted in August 2023 due to summer leave.  The deadline for applications is 30^th of July 2023.