Irishman Michael O’Flaherty was elected the Council of Europe’s new commissioner for human rights on Wednesday during a plenary session of the organisation’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) meeting in Strasbourg.
This 64-year-old lawyer, human rights specialist, was elected for a six-year term in the second round, receiving 104 votes against former Bulgarian minister Meglena Kuneva (70 votes) and Austrian Manfred Nowak (37), indicates in a statement from PACE, the parliamentary body of the Council of Europe.
She succeeds the Bosnian Dunja Mijatovic, elected in January 2018 and whose mandate was particularly marked by the war waged by Russia against its Ukrainian neighbor.
In her latest annual report presented to PACE this week, Mijatovic called for “a collective and resolute effort to regain lost ground and advance human rights.”
A former director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, O’Flaherty was also a professor of human rights and director of the Irish National University Centre, chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and a member of the Committee for human rights of the United Nations, recalls PACE.
A function created in 1999, the Human Rights Commissioner “is a non-judicial, independent and impartial institution to promote awareness and respect for human rights in the 46 member states” of the Council of Europe, which is based in Strasbourg.
2024-01-25 00:31:34
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