Yesterday, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe elected a new judge in respect of Romania, Iulia Motoc. She was elected with an overwhelming majority of 132 out of 149 votes cast. Interestingly, one of the two other candidates was no other than Tudor Pantîru, of both Moldovan and Romanian nationality and who had been a judge in Strasbourg in respect of Moldova between 1998 and 2001 and later served as one of the international judges of both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
Iulia Antoanella Motoc is currently a judge in the Constitutional Court of Romania and professor of international law and human rights and European law at the University of Bucharest. In 2010 she served once as an ad hoc judge at the European Court of Human Rights. She is probably most known through her membership of the United Nations' Human Rights Committee, of which she is currently vice-president. She has also held numerous other academic and UN functions.
Her term of office of nine years will start on 17 December 2013. She will succeed to one of the Court's most experienced judges, Corneliu Bîrsan was has been a judge since 1998 (sic!) and before that had been a member of the European Commission on Human Rights.