Egils Levits

Egils Levits (2012)

Egils Levits (born June 30, 1955 in Riga , Latvian SSR ) is a Latvian politician, diplomat, legal scholar and former judge at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights . He was Latvian Minister of Justice from 1993 to 1994 . He was elected President of Latvia by the Latvian Parliament on May 29, 2019, and his term of office began on July 8, 2019.

education

Levits attended secondary school No. 2 in Riga until 1972, then the Latvian grammar school in Münster until 1973 . In 1982 he completed his law studies at the Faculty of Law and in 1986 his diploma in Political Science at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hamburg . He then worked as a research assistant at the Faculty of Law at the University of Kiel . From 1989 to 1991 Levits worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Research on Germany and Eastern Europe of the Göttingen Working Group . He was also a lawyer at the Schleswig-Holstein Higher Regional Court .

Egils Levits is a member of the Latvian student corporation Fraternitas Lataviensis . He has published numerous articles in the areas of constitutional law , administrative law , legislative reform and EU law .

Career

After Latvia regained independence, he was an advisor to the Latvian Parliament on issues of international law, constitutional law and legislative reform.

From 1993 to 1994 Egils Levits was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice and held duties as Minister for Foreign Affairs, before that he was the first Latvian ambassador to Germany and Switzerland (1992–1993), then to Austria, Switzerland and Hungary (1994–1995 ).

In 1995 Egils Levits was elected Judge at the European Court of Human Rights and re-elected in 1998 and 2001. From 1997 he was an arbitrator at the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration within the OSCE and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (since 2001). On May 11, 2004 Levits was judge at the European Court of Justice (in Luxembourg ); after his election as President of Latvia, he resigned as a judge of the ECJ in June 2019 Egils Levits received an honorary doctorate from the Latvian Academy of Sciences in 2002 for his work . He was elected President of the Republic of Latvia on May 29, 2019. He took up this office on July 8, 2019.

Web links, sources

• Biography (de)
• Biography ( memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (PDF file; 248 kB)
• Article (lv)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gederts Gelzis, Johan Ahlander: Latvian parliament elects former judge Levits president . In: Reuters . May 29, 2019 ( reuters.com [accessed June 19, 2019]).
2. ^ Press office of the European Court of Justice: Resignation of Judge Egils Levits . In: European Court of Justice (Ed.): Press Release No. 74/19 . June 17, 2019 ( curia.europa.eu [PDF]).