A Cypriot lawyer alleged on Tuesday that the procedure to select a Cyprus judge for the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is tainted and should be repeated from scratch to ensure it is transparent and free of political meddling.

Attorney Christos Clerides, representing two of the Cypriot candidates for the post, has written to the president asking him to scrap the current procedure and start anew.

Clerides said the national selection process has already “failed twice” after the Council of Europe returned to Cyprus the list of candidates it submitted.

“Up until now,” he added, “the procedure has been marked by lack of transparency, political interventions and conflicts of interest, and as a result capable and worthy candidates have been disqualified, while a judge of the [Cyprus] Supreme Court was forced to withdraw her candidacy under protest after political meddling occurring during the process at the Council of Europe.”

Clerides also claims there is an issue with verifying the academic qualifications of candidates.

For this reason, he suggests that the list of candidates and their CVs be published in Cyprus before being sent to the Council of Europe.

“Unfortunately, this has not happened.”

The lawyer went on to warn that “we could be led to one of the most serious institutional scandals in the history of the Council of Europe, undermining the prestige of not only the Republic of Cyprus, but also of the Council of Europe and the ECtHR itself.”

Without going into detail, Clerides claimed “outside interference” was brought to bear on the Committee on the Election of Judges to the ECtHR.

This committee is part of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace).

The ECtHR is an international tribunal established for enforcement of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is an organ of the Council of Europe and judges are elected to the court by the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly in respect of each member state. However, they do not represent the state, as they hear cases as individuals.

The Cyprus Mail could not reach Clerides for a comment on Tuesday.

The Cypriot judge at the ECtHR is Georgios Serghides. Appointed in April 2016, his term ended in April this year. Judges serve for a single term of nine years.

But Clerides also made allegations about Petra Bayr, an Austrian politician who chairs the Pace committee that assesses the lists of candidates for ECtHR judges.

According to Clerides, Bayr “concealed from her colleagues in Pace the reasons for the withdrawal of the Cypriot candidate (political interventions)…”

Here, Clerides is referring to the Supreme Court judge who withdrew her candidacy.

The attorney further alleged that Bayr “made inappropriate remarks about this candidate”.

There are two phases to the election process for ECtHR judges – firstly, a national selection procedure, where each state party chooses a list of three qualified candidates, and secondly the election procedure undertaken by Pace, in which a special parliamentary committee assesses the qualifications of the three candidates, as well as the fairness of the national selection procedure, before Pace proceeds with the election.

Pace – consisting of 306 parliamentarians – votes on the candidates in a secret ballot, held during plenary sessions, in the light of the committee’s recommendations.