A human rights practitioner, Christine Evans has worked twenty years with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
She has extensive experience of undertaking human rights and IHL monitoring, legal analysis and report drafting. She has undertaken numerous fact-finding missions for OHCHR field presences and for several Commissions of Inquiry and Special Procedures established by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Having worked in the field in a variety of conflict and post-conflict settings, she has gained insights of the practical complexities of applying human rights standards in such circumstances.
She has considerable first-hand experience working with, and the interviewing of, victims of human rights violations, including in relation to monitoring of arbitrary detentions, extra-judicial executions, torture, SGBV and attacks against human rights defenders.
Her assignments include acting as the Legal Advisor to the UN Sri Lanka investigation, as Investigator for the Syria COI, as Legal Officer in the Civil Parties (victims) Legal Representation unit at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia (ECCC) and as a Human Rights Officer in the monitoring team with OHCHR in Colombia.
She has researched and drafted several UN reports to the General Assembly and to the Human Rights Council on a diverse range of themes, ranging from inter alia human rights defenders, extra-judicial executions, reprisals, human rights & business to the impacts of climate change and conservation. Through work with various Special Procedures’ mandates, she has considerable experience of advocacy action on alleged violations.
She holds an LLM from Lund University and a PhD in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and Social Science. Her book on ‘The Right to Reparation in International Law for Victims of Armed Conflict’ was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She has also published various chapters on human rights mechanisms in books by Oxford University Press and Routledge among others.
She regularly gives lectures, trainings and presentations to various stakeholders, including parliamentarians, judges, academics, masters’ students, representatives of CSOs and indigenous organisations, UN Agencies and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In 2022, Christine Evans was selected for a UN sabbatical programme and is undertaking research at RWI. Her current research focuses on how the failure to respect Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge links to human rights violations.