International Humanitarian Law Consultant

Role Summary/Purpose: The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) is looking for a term-contract consultant to work as part of an ongoing project with a major institutional donor. The IHL Consultant will revise and examine all SAMS advocacy products that will be produced throughout the project. S/he will provide technical legal revisions and make sure that they comply with IHL and related legal terminology. The IHL Consultant will also provide training to SAMS staff in Turkey and field staff in Syria on the basics of IHL and its practice within the medical and Syrian context. The expected timeframe of this consultancy is 40 days between January 2021 and December 2021. Interested candidates should apply with a CV and cover letter. Shortlisted candidates will be provided with a full TOR and asked to submit a short proposal.

Key Responsibilities:

· Provide legal technical revision to produced advocacy products to comply with IHL

o Throughout this project, SAMS will produce advocacy documents that will support SAMS advocacy messaging on the topics of attacks on health facilities.

o The products could include policy documents, papers, and written testimonies that will treat different aspects of the attacks. These products will be shared and published for the wider humanitarian and justice mechanisms, and will contribute to the collected evidence on the topic of attacks,

o The IHL Consultant will revise and examine all SAMS advocacy products that will be produced throughout the project. S/he will provide technical legal revisions and make sure that they comply with IHL and related legal terminology.

· Examine collected evidence on attacks on health facilities

o Throughout this project, SAMS will work on cleaning and organizing its attacks on health facilities incidents database. After completion of data cleaning, IHL consultant will examine current available data and try to see best ways of using it in later legal processes.

o Identify gaps in the data so that SAMS may try to restore missing information whenever possible.

· Deliver technical training for frontline workers (the service providers) in topics related to human rights (HR)

o Through a mixture of online and in-person teaching modalities, the IHL consultant will deliver trainings to 100 frontline workers in SAMS-supported facilities in various topics related to human rights, as detailed in the attached training plan.

o These trainings will be conducted in Syria and Turkey (or virtually) within the first three months of the project start date.

o It is common to all staff that there is a lack of knowledge and expertise in identification and comprehensive case management for victims of human rights violations, such as torture and detention. Pre-post tests will be conducted before and after all trainings to measure knowledge improvement.

Deliverables:

· Training sessions for 100 participants (5-7 zoom sessions)

· Analysis and recommendation paper for SAMS incidents database, providing information on the legal validity of evidence, gaps, ways to utilize the collected data, and suggestions to develop and improve our evidence and data collections.

· Revised Advocacy report (2)

· Revised policy documents (3)

Qualifications/Requirements:

· Advanced university degree in or related to international humanitarian law (MA, PhD, or JD);

· Excellent knowledge of relevant norms or legislation applicable to war crimes, criminal procedure law and organization and functioning of the judicial systems in Syria;

· Excellent knowledge of jurisprudence of the courts in the region;

· At least 4 years of experience in the above mentioned fields;

· Professional fluency in English; with Arabic strongly preferred

· Computer literate with practical experience in Microsoft packages;

· Ability and willingness to work with people of different cultural backgrounds from the Syrian social fabric;

· Demonstrated gender awareness and sensitivity, as well as the ability to integrate a gender perspective into tasks and activities.

Desired Characteristics:

· Experience working on projects for institutional donors