Evaluation; Finland's support to Justice Rapid Response (JRR)

Description What is done in the programme or project and why, what results are pursued, who benefits from the activities and who are involved in the implementation.

Justice Rapid Response (JRR) is an inter-governmental cooperation mechanism, which aims to improve the international community's capacity to ensure accountability for the most serious international crimes and human rights violations. The JRR provides rapidly deployable justice experts to states and NGOs to assist with criminal investigations mostly in fragile societies. Since 2001, Finland has supported the JRR with multi-year funding. In the four-year period from 2021 to 2024, Finland awarded €1.2 million to the JRR Deployment Fund. The evaluation will be used to assess the relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of the awarded funding, in line with Finland’s ‘Evaluation norm 2015’. To assess whether the JRR delivers on its Theory of Change, specifically to assess the agreed project objectives, outcomes and activities through the lens of Theory of Change. As such, the evaluation would focus on how and to what extent the Finland Deployment Fund project objectives have been achieved. The objectives of the evaluation are twofold: firstly, to ensure accountability by enhancing transparency and openness of the use of Finland’s Official Development Assistance, and provide evidence on results, and secondly, facilitate learning as well as provide tools for decision-making and planning both at JRR and in Finland (in terms of future funding). The evaluation results may also be useful for other donors considering funding the JRR.