ECtHR judge hopes for Irish internships
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judge Úna Ní Raifeartaigh wants to set up new internships so that young people from Ireland could get the opportunity to work alongside her in Strasbourg.
“The ECtHR is very short on resources and has a limited internship programme. It’s encouraging us [as judges] to supplement that,” she said during a visit to Blackhall Place on 1 October.
“So I'm hoping to persuade the Law Society, but also maybe the Bar and a couple of the universities, to provide funding to cover students’ accommodation and living expenses.
“Sometimes it may involve going into partnership – for example, a university going into partnership with a law firm to fund one-month, three-month, or six-month internships, and there could be several at the same time.”
Stronger connections
As well as working directly with Judge Ní Raifeartaigh, the interns would get to see how the ECtHR works from the inside.
“I’m completely on my own – there’s no Irish team and I’ve no assistant and no legal researcher – so if I had two or three interns at a time I’d find work for them all,” she said.
This initiative and her visit to Blackhall Place are part of the judge’s efforts to strengthen and deepen connections between the Strasbourg court and the various parts of the legal profession in Ireland – including solicitors, barristers, the judiciary, and academia.
“I started in academia, then was at the bar for 23 years and then in the judiciary. So I have a lot of contacts in all the different branches of the legal profession in Ireland, and this puts me in a very good position to create these links,” she said.
Annual conference
“Part of my role in Strasbourg is outreach. Each of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe has a judge, and the role of each judge is not just decision-making in cases, but to spread information and explain what this case law is about.
“That being so, I thought it would be useful for me to try and build structures that would still be there when I'm gone.”
Aside from the internship idea, the judge is keen for there to be a dedicated annual human-rights conference in Ireland with a big focus on what’s new from Strasbourg in terms of jurisprudence.
She’s also encouraging judges based here to visit the ECtHR. “The court is very good at providing bespoke talks and receptions for judges when they arrive,” she noted.
Case law
For anyone interested in European Convention on Human Rights case law, the judge highlighted the ECtHR knowledge-sharing platform, which was opened to the public in 2022.
“This is a very detailed website, with a whole section dedicated to producing guides to the case law, article by article and topic by topic. It’s extremely well-developed and people don’t necessarily know about it,” she said.
“I’m hoping the Law Society might look at doing a module, which could be supported by this online resource.”