By Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou and Gennady Esakov

On 23 November 2020, the Russian Ministry of Justice announced the long list of candidates for the position of the judge of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) elected on behalf of Russia. The new Russian judge will replace judge Dmitry Dedov whose term will expire on the New Year’s Eve of 2022. Judge Dedov was elected in 2011 and the national selection back then was not the best example of a transparent, meritorious and competitive procedure. Among the main problems in 2011 was that the competition was not widely announced and that the selection procedure was not entirely clear. It seems that the current competition is more transparent and the rules are somewhat more predictable but it is not without challenges either. We will briefly unpack the key challenges in this short contribution.

By Dr. Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou (University of Liverpool)

I have already written two blog posts on the issue of election of judges of the European Court of Human Rights in Ukraine here and here. To sum up, the election of the new Ukrainian judge meant to take place in December 2018, but the Ukrainian authorities have only opened the national completion in March 2019 which meant that the whole process is way behind the schedule. I was quite critical of the then proposed design of the competition as it did not comply with the recommendations of the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. Since then the Ukrainian authorities have completely reloaded this competition, changed the rules of the game and reached the pinnacle of the national selection – interviews of the candidates. Recent presidential elections and changes in personnel in presidential administration were perhaps the key reasons why the previous competition was stopped and a completely new procedure was designed. Apart from that, academic criticism and litigation initiated by leading Ukrainian lawyers helped to bury the old competition. The new procedure was promising but its practical application puts the legitimacy and fairness of the whole process in some doubt. Continue reading →

By Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou (University of Liverpool)

As I have predicted in my previous blog post on this issue, the campaign for election of a judge in Ukraine has already proved to be a good case study illustrating the challenges that the Council of Europe institutions have to confront. These challenges now mainly result from poor national practices which might lead to suboptimal lists of nominees which in turn have to be rejected by the Council of Europe. These rejections always lead to delays in appointment of new judges for the Court. Luckily, the ECHR does not have the rule that the judge whose term is over cannot sit on the bench. Otherwise, these delays could have been effective in sabotaging the work of the Court. In any event, it is already fair to say that the Ukrainian national selection procedure reflects very bad national practices. On 4 March 2019 the president of Ukraine established an ad hoc selection committee; last week (week commencing on 22 April 2019) it announced the competition. The details of these announcements suggest that the Ukrainian authorities aim to limit the possible pool of candidates as much as possible in order to avoid real competition. Continue reading →

By Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou (University of Liverpool)

Election of judges is crucially important for the legitimacy, reputation and authoritativeness of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The Court needs leading academics and practitioners not only to come up with well-drafted and reasoned judgments but also to ensure that these judgments are then embedded into the national legal systems of the Contracting Parties to the Convention. The role of the national judge therefore includes education and dissemination of the core principles and values of the Convention in their home countries. When these principles are presented by a well-respected professional, their weight increases exponentially. In order to choose the best candidates the selection procedure should be clear, transparent and based on merits of the candidates. This post is the first one of a series of posts, spread over the coming months, which will be looking at the selection procedure that commenced last week in Ukraine. In these posts, I will try to use the developments in Ukraine to illustrate the challenges that the Council of Europe and its Member States face in that regard. Continue reading →