LAST UPDATE | 16 Apr

ÚNA NÍ RAIFEARTAIGH has been elected as Ireland’s new judge at the European Court of Human Rights. 

The assembly elected her with 164 votes, while fellows candidates judge Fergal Gaynor and Professor Colm Ó Cinnéide received nine and four votes respectively. 

Ní Raifeartaigh has previously served as a judge at the Irish High Court and the Court of Appeal, while also acting as a senior counsel barrister, and a legal academic, with expertise in criminal law and the law of evidence.

She gained her law degree at University College Dublin, and became a barrister in 1993. 

Ní Raifeartaigh has been involved in numerous high profile cases – she acted as prosecution counsel in the Omagh bomb trial and in the trials of two former Anglo Irish Bank executives. 

She has also been outspoken at times about legal reform, such as the need for sentencing guidelines in rape cases.

Ní Raifeartaigh served as Ireland’s High Court Judge from 2016 to 2019, and then in the Court of Appeal for four years.

Before becoming a judge, she was a barrister for 23 years with a focus on criminal cases and cases involving issues of constitutional and human rights law.

Ní Raifeartaigh was the favourite to win as she was recommended to the Assembly by the Committee on the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights.

The committee held meetings in Paris on 4 and 5 April, at which they also assessed the lists of candidates to the Court for Latvia, Liechtenstein, Austria, and Monaco.

In a statement this evening, Tánaiste Micheál Martin said he is “confident that Ms Justice Úna Ní Raifeartaigh will perform her functions as a judge, in the words of the declaration which she will make before taking up office, ‘honourably, independently, and impartially’”.

“Ireland is firmly committed to the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights,” Martin said. 

“The European Court of Human Rights plays a fundamental role in ensuring the observance of those rights and freedoms by the parties to the Convention,” he said. 

“The authority of the Court, which is tasked with interpreting and applying the Convention, rests on the calibre of its judges.”

The ECtHR is an international court set up in 1959 to rule on individual or state applications alleging violations of the civil and political rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights. 

Its judgments are binding on the 46 Council of Europe member states that have ratified the Convention.

Ní Raifeartaigh will replace Síofra O’Leary, who worked as a judge at the court since 2015 and served as its president since 2022.

She was the first woman to hold the position of president.

With reporting by Hayley Halpin