Victims' Rights Advocate

Jane Connors was appointed by the Secretary-General as Victims’ Rights Advocate on 23 August 2017. She took up her function on 18 September 2017. 

As the United Nations Victims’ Rights Advocate, Ms. Connors has a system-wide mandate to support an integrated, strategic response to victim assistance in coordination with United Nations system actors with responsibility for assisting victims. The role of the Victims’ Rights Advocate is to put the rights and dignity of victims, their experiences, and their needs at the forefront of the United Nations’s fight against sexual exploitation and abuse. Victims of such wrongs often suffer severe trauma. The Victims’ Rights Advocate seeks to ensure that this is acknowledged, that support and assistance is provided in line with each victim’s individual needs, as well as to raise the voices of victims who are often forgotten.

The Victims’ Rights Advocate works with all parts of the United Nations system, including agencies, funds and programmes at their headquarters and in the field, Member States, national human rights institutions, civil society, the media and others, to make sure that an integrated response to victim assistance in line with the Secretary-General’s strategy and the UN strategy on assistance and support to victims adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 (A/RES/62/214, Annex) is taken, to build networks of support and to help ensure that the full effect of local laws, including remedies for victims, are brought to bear.

The Victims’ Rights Advocate regularly visits countries with United Nations presences to gain firsthand understanding of how sexual exploitation and abuse are addressed. She connects with victims directly, to hear about their individual needs and learn from them so the design of prevention and response to sexual exploitation and abuse is victim-centered.

Prior to this role, she was International Advocacy Director Law and Policy, at Amnesty International. From 1996 to 2015 she held progressively senior posts in the United Nations, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Earlier, she was a law teacher at universities in Australia and the United Kingdom.