International Consultant: Regional SOPs for GBV Criminal Justice Responses

About the role

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is seeking an international consultant to develop a comprehensive regional Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) framework for criminal justice responses to gender-based violence and sexual exploitation and abuse (GBVAWG). The work is home-based, runs from 5 November 2026 to 31 March 2027, and is supervised by the Project Manager on GBV and the Regional Representative, in coordination with project managers in ROSAF and UNODC Vienna.

Key responsibilities

• Inception: prepare an inception report and workplan, an annotated outline of the proposed SOP framework, a consultation strategy and stakeholder mapping.
• Desk review and situational analysis: review international, regional and national frameworks and criminal justice guidance, and analyse challenges affecting case progression from case inception to conviction.
• Develop a first-draft SOP covering step-by-step procedures for building prosecutable GBV cases, standardised documentation templates, evidence handling and chain of custody protocols, and expert report and witness procedures; submit the draft to UNODC for technical review.
• Facilitate validation through national and regional workshops, consolidate comments and revise the SOPs.
• Produce final validated SOPs, an implementation roadmap, supporting tools (templates, checklists) and a monitoring and evaluation framework with case quality indicators and conviction trends.

Required profile

• Advanced university degree (Master's or equivalent) in criminal justice, criminology, law, political science, management or social sciences, or a first-level degree plus two years of qualifying experience.
• Minimum of seven years of professional technical experience in international or regional GBV programming and multisectoral criminal justice systems.
• Experience presenting multisectoral information on GBV; experience in international-level drafting, preferably with UN evaluations, is desirable.
• Experience developing SOPs, prosecutorial guidelines or criminal justice manuals is desirable.
• Knowledge of the UN system and UNODC, and of GBV in Southern Africa, is desirable.

Required skills

• Fluency in English; knowledge of another UN official language is an advantage.
• Experience in criminal justice drafting.