The Court of Appeal’s Judge Úna Ní Raifeartaigh has been selected as Ireland’s representative on the European Court of Human Rights. The selection took place on Tuesday, with the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voting for Judge Ní Raifeartaigh to join the Strasbourg-based court. She was elected over two other potential candidates, Judge Fergal Gaynor – an international judge for The Hague’s Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and Professor Colm Ó Cinnéide – a Constitutional and Human Rights Law professor at University College London.
Judge Ní Raifeartaigh, succeeding Justice Síofra O’Leary on the ECHR, emerged victorious with a significant majority of 164 votes, against Judge Gaynor’s nine and Prof Ó Cinnéide’s four. Justice O’Leary has been serving on the ECHR since 2015 and was elected as the first female president of the court in 2022. Her term is slated to end in July this year.
The candidates were handpicked via a public selection process by an expert panel, including Attorney General Rossa Fanning, former Chief Justice Frank Clarke, and Dr Suzanne Egan, an Associate Professor at the Sutherland School of Law at University College Dublin.
These nominations were put forth to the parliamentary assembly in February, after government approval in November.
Judge Ní Raifeartaigh, who trained as a barrister after studying at UCD and King’s Inns, and was appointed High Court judge in 2016 and moved to the Court of Appeal in 2019. She has been actively involved in both the civil and criminal divisions of the court and is known for penning around 150 judgments on various legal themes encompassing criminal law, constitutional law, immigration and asylum, EU law, probate, public law, administrative law and judicial review. She was the preferred choice for the ECHR role, as recommended by the committee on the election of judges earlier this month.
As a legal professional, her caseload was primarily focused on severe offences, incorporating murder, sexual misconduct, as well as instances involving constitutional legislation and the applicability of the European Human Rights Convention. She had a considerable role in the legal proceedings against several board members of the Anglo-Irish Bank, following the economy’s downfall in 2008.
Moreover, she served in an investigation wherein Dean Lyons, an individual of proven vulnerability, made a false confession to the 1997 dual homicide in Grangegorman, with the case ultimately leading to the successful conviction of another, Mark Nash, founded on DNA proof in 2015. Nash was a resident of Prussia Street and Clonliffe Road in Dublin at the time of his conviction.
The presiding magistrate believes this case stimulated her curiosity in the notion of susceptible populations, and their proneness to being “impressionable” when subjected to questioning while in police detention.
In her role as a barrister, she contributed to numerous specific public probes. She defended the Oireachtas in their evaluation of Judge Brian Curtin post his criminal trial for a child pornography accusation, which concluded in a not-guilty verdict. This was further followed by a constitutional objection lodged by Judge Curtin to declare impeachment procedures as invalid, however the impeachment motion was suspended owing to the Judge’s resignation in 2006 due to poor health.
She advocated for Ireland in the Irish judiciary system and also at the ECHR. Additional duties encompassed participation in committee structures instituted to oversee the care of persons detained by the police and the creation of directives for Garda’s interviewing vulnerable witnesses during criminal inquiries.