JRR Strengthens its Strategic Partnership with OHCHR

Samuel Emonet, Executive Director of JRR, and Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

GENEVA, 10 June 2026 – Justice Rapid Response (JRR) concluded a new agreement with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to strengthen its collaboration with the UN entity and bolster its impact.

JRR has taken concrete steps to strengthen its collaboration with the OHCHR to better respond to an increasingly challenging environment for the protection of human rights, in a context marked by declining support for justice and accountability efforts related to serious human rights violations.

Through a new Exchange of Letters, JRR is consolidating more than 15 years of collaboration with the OHCHR by laying out streamlined procedures, enabling it to rapidly deploy its justice and human rights experts to the OHCHR and Human Rights Council (HRC)-mandated investigations.

The aim of this renewed partnership is to optimize the use by the OHCHR of JRR’s highly flexible, agile and rapid expert deployment mechanism that can provide the right expertise at the right time to support human rights and justice actors at crucial stages of investigative work. This includes the gender expertise available on the JRR Roster of experts – managed and deployed in collaboration with UN Women – to ensure that gender-responsive approaches are embedded from the outset of human rights investigative processes.

This new Exchange of Letters also formalizes and expands JRR’s ability to support the OHCHR in policy development and knowledge sharing in the human rights and accountability sector. It provides a framework to ensure that the wealth of expertise and experience that encompasses the JRR Roster effectively benefits the broader human rights community.

Key partnerships such as those between the OHCHR and JRR are more critical than ever in these challenging times. JRR is looking forward to scaling up its impact through this renewed partnership with the OHCHR and promote the rights of victims and survivors of international crimes and grave human rights violations.