Former ECHR judge Shevchuk elected Ukrainian Constitutional Court head
KYIV. Feb 21 (Interfax) - Stanyslav Shevchuk was elected the chairman of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court on Wednesday.
The relevant decision was adopted at a special plenary session of the Constitutional Court, its press service said.
Shevchuk, born in 1969, holds the doctorate of law and is a professor and an associate fellow of the Ukrainian National Academy of Legal Sciences. He was Ukraine's ad hoc judge at the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) in 2009-2012.
The Verkhovna Rada appointed him a judge of the Constitutional Court in March 2014.
On March 18, 2017, the Constitutional Court failed to elect its head. The court explained that in accordance with the law on the Constitutional Court and the court's regulations, the candidate who gets more than half of the votes of the court's judges is considered the elected head of the court. If no more than two candidates were nominated and none of them was elected, or if the head of the Constitutional Court was not elected in a second vote, new elections take place
The election of the head of the Constitutional Court was disrupted several times because of the absence of nominees among other reasons.
On March 19, 2017, Yuriy Baulin's the three-year term of office as the head of the Constitutional Court expired. The post of the court chairman was vacant since then.