Yesterday and today, the Parliamentary Assembly elected five new judges to the European Court of Human Rights. Yesterday, the new Swedish judge was elected: Helena Jäderblom. She is currently a Justice at the Supreme Administrative Court. Today, the four others were elected. For the United Kingdom, Paul Mahoney was elected, currently a member of the board of appeals of the European Space Agency, but much more known probably as one of the European Court of Human Rights’ former registrars (2001-2005). For the Netherlands Johannes Silvis was elected, Advocate-General at the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. In respect of the Czech Republic, the new judge will be Aleš Pejchal, a lawyer who represented several applicants before the Court and is currently the vice-president of the Czech Bar Association. Finally, the new Polish judge will be Krzysztof Wojtyczek, professor at Jagiellonian University and senior legal advisor at the Constitutional Court of Poland. Congratulations to all!
One may note from the voting results that some judges were elected by extremely small margins of just one or two votes (in the cases of Poland and the Netherlands respectively). More notable is that elections in respect of several other countries have been delayed. As a progress report of the Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of last Monday shows, the procedures for Bosnia and Herzegovina and for the Russian Federation were suspended after one candidate for each withdrew. The authorities of both countries were invited to nominate a new third candidate. Furthermore, the sub-committee of the Assembly responsible for interviewing the candidates rejected the list of candidates for Croatia. It is not clear from the progress report on which basis this happened. To be continued!
