Members
Blanka Jamnišek, M.A,. graduated in psychology (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, 1982), specialised in international relations – Diplomatic Academy (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, 1999) and completed her MA in international politics (CERIS, Bruxelles and Faculté Jean Monet, Université de Paris XI, 2001).
In 2020 she completed training to become a certified mediator (Zavod Rakmo, Ljubljana). In 1991, she worked for the Slovenian Government at the Ministry of Information, later Public Relations Office. She held the post of Head of the Public Relations Office at the Ministry of Defence from 1994 to 1996. In 1996, she joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as desk officer for bilateral relations with the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland. From 1998 to 2003, she was posted to the Permanent Mission of Slovenia to NATO and WEU in Brussels as a diplomatic counsellor. From 2004- to 2011, she was a member of diplomatic teams for chairing the OSCE (2005) and the Council of Europe (2008). She also led the Department of OSCE and the Council of Europe.
From 2011 to 2015, she served in Austria as an Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Republic of Slovenia to the United Nations, the OSCE and other international organisations in Vienna.
Blanka introduced promotion of human rights education into Slovenian foreign policy in 2005 during the Slovenian Chairmanship of the OSCE. She founded a new human rights education project for children and co-authored the publication ”OUR RIGHTS”. This human rights education tool for children was operationalised as a pilot project in a variety of countries and is still ongoing.
In 2015, she was appointed by the Government of Slovenia as the National Contact Point for Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and currently serves as a member of the Steering Group within the Global R2P Focal Points Network. Her efforts are focused on awareness-raising and prevention of processes that could lead to mass atrocities, as R2P is one of Slovenia’s foreign affairs priorities.
Blanka is also the Deputy Head of the Slovenian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which promotes education, research and remembrance. Human rights education and R2P were adopted by the Parliament and the Government as foreign affairs priorities and are included in both the Declaration and the Strategy of Slovenian Foreign Policy.