The Permanent Representative of Togo to the United Nations Office and other international Organizations in Geneva, interim Chair of the EIF Board.

Prior to his appointment to Geneva in 2016, Mr Johnson had been serving as Ambassador of Togo to Great Britain since 2014. In 2012 and 2013, he was Minister Counsellor at the Permanent Mission of the Togolese Republic to the UN in New York, as Expert in charge of West African issues and Cross-border crime in Africa. He was Secretary General of the Ministry of Social Action and National Solidarity from 2008 to 2011, and concurrently was President of the National Committee for the Adoption of Children.

Ambassador Johnson has assumed the function of the vice President-Rapporteur of Human Rights Council (Bureau 2020). He is also since 2019 the Chair of the Dispute Settlement Body in the special session (DSB-SS).

He started his career from 1999 to 2011 as a lecturer, including at the University of Law and Political Science of Kara and the Faculty of Law at the University of Lomé, in Togo.

Mr Johnson has a PhD in public law from the University of Auvergne-Clement 1 - France (1998) and a Master in International Relations from the University of Lomé (1989) and many certificates including in the field of social protection policies issued by the World Bank and the ILO.

Julian has for the past two years been working at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) HQ in Stockholm as their Senior Policy Specialist for Trade. At Sida, he was heavily involved in various Aid for Trade-related processes and initiatives, including towards multilateral initiatives such as the EIF, ITC, World Bank and others in Geneva.

Before joining Sida, Julian worked for more than six years at the National Board of Trade Sweden, where he held various roles. The large majority of his time at the Board, he was working with the agency's trade-related development cooperation projects and processes including a secondment to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry/NIU in Liberia to support the country's WTO-accession process. He was also a project manager for a project that supported Zambian universities in developing and building trade policy and sustainable development courses – which was done in close collaboration with the NIU in Zambia. He was moreover a project manager and coordinator of the National Board of Trade's Open Trade Gate team, which deals with export promotion from developing countries. In this role, he worked with a wide range of countries in both Africa and Europe. He has also been working with and participating in a number of technical committees on trade and development issues both at the EU and WTO. He has been involved in various business development processes and has a broad trade network both in a Swedish/EU context as well as a Geneva context.