Ensuring war crimes are investigated promptly and professionally

Justice Rapid Response (JRR) started as a small initiative, with an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet, but it has evolved into a sophisticated, gender-balanced roster of more than 700 experts from 100 countries. Since its creation, JRR has deployed 434 experts to investigate genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious human rights violations in some of the world’s most violent conflicts.

Under Canada’s Civilian Deployment Platform, a Canadian government official was placed at JRR for 4 years with a focus on supporting JRR’s efforts to strengthen its organizational capacity in 2 key areas: results-based management and resource-mobilization.

Canada’s assistance “… has had a profound impact on the organization,” says Samuel Emonet, JRR’s director of operations Following a restructuring of the organization JRR is ‘...now focused on results rather than processes. These have had in turn an evident effect on the organization’s capacity to speak of its value-addition and results, to build confidence among our donors and to attract new funding.”

This initiative is part of Canada’s commitment to advance the Women, Peace and Security agenda, as it enabled JRR to continue deploying highly specialized experts to end impunity for sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated in conflicts. JRR staff are now able to effectively integrate gender considerations in all deployments and more than half of the experts on JRR’s roster are women.