Senior Protection Assistant

Organizational Context

The Senior Protection Assistant operates within UNHCR, a global organization dedicated to protecting refugees and stateless persons. This role supports the delivery of protection services in El Salvador, ensuring adherence to international standards and contributing to the development of comprehensive protection strategies in collaboration with local authorities and partners.

Job Purpose

The Senior Protection Assistant's primary purpose is to provide essential protection support to persons of concern (PoC) within UNHCR's operations. This involves monitoring protection standards, operational procedures, and practices to align with international norms. The role actively contributes to mainstreaming protection methodologies into operational responses and assists in developing a comprehensive protection strategy. A key aspect is ensuring PoC are involved in decisions affecting them, fostering their rights and facilitating solutions to their challenges. This requires building and maintaining effective relationships with communities, local authorities, and partner organizations to deliver quality and timely protection services, including case management, eligibility assessments, and support for durable solutions.

Responsibilities

The Senior Protection Assistant is responsible for consistently applying International and National Law, along with applicable UN/UNHCR and IASC policies, standards, and codes of conduct. This includes providing direct counseling on protection issues to PoC and liaising with competent authorities to facilitate the issuance of necessary personal documentation. The role supports protection-related activities based on Age, Gender, and Diversity (AGD) programming with implementing partners, conducting preliminary information gathering and interviews for eligibility, status determination, durable solutions, and social needs assessments. Key duties involve contributing to measures to identify, prevent, and reduce statelessness, and participating in the development of country-level child protection and education plans for PoC. The incumbent monitors Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for all protection and solutions activities, participates in individual protection case management (including GBV and child protection), and monitors/reports on protection incidents like refoulement and expulsion. Assisting in identifying durable solutions such as voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement is crucial. The role also involves contributing to the design, implementation, and evaluation of protection programming, drafting reports, managing correspondence, updating databases, and compiling statistics. Enhancing national and local protection capacities, selecting PoC for interviews, and enforcing integrity in protection service delivery by partners are also key responsibilities. Finally, the assistant must manage risks and identify opportunities impacting their area of responsibility, reporting issues to supervisors.

Work Experience

2 years of relevant experience with a High School Diploma, or 1 year of relevant work experience with a Bachelor's degree or equivalent or higher.

Skills

IT-Computer Literacy, PR-Protection-related guidelines, standards and indicators, PR-Refugee Protection Principles and Framework, Information Management, Programme Management, Case Management, Data Analysis, Reporting, Counselling, Legal Compliance, Capacity Building, Risk Management

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