Human Rights in the Baltic Countries: Accomplishments and Challenges

Alina Žvinklienė - Dr. habil. Alina Žvinklienė is a chief researcher at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Research (Lietuvos socialinių tyrimų centras-LSTS). She defended the thesis “A young family: expectations and reality” and obtained her PhD (candidate of philosophical sciences) in sociology from the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1988 and passed a post-doctoral habilitation procedure in social sciences with the thesis,  “Women’s Cultural Citizenship in Lithuania”, at the Institute for Social Research in 2006.
Her main research fields are democratisation and social development in Central and Eastern European countries, identities, human rights and citizenship in multicultural societies from a gender perspective. She develops the special interest to women’s rights, reproductive rights and gender equality politics, including gender mainstreaming, since the early 1990s.

Egidijus Kūris - Lithuanian judge, professor and PhD in law. He is the former President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania and current representative justice for Lithuania to the European Court of Human Rights.
He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Vilnius University in 1984, where he continued to work as a lecturer until 1994. He defended his doctoral thesis in 1988 at Moscow State University.
After Lithuania regained independence, Mr. Kūris worked on the preparation of the Constitution of Lithuania, which was adopted in 1992 after the referendum. During the same year, Mr. Kūris became the Director of the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University.
From 1993 until 1997 he also worked as an Assistant to the President of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania. Mr. Kūris became a Justice of the Constitutional Court in 1999 and the President of the Constitutional Court in 2002. He served in this position until 2008.
Since 2013, Mr. Kūris is currently serving as a Judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Mikael Rask Madsen - Professor of European Law and Integration at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, and the founder and director of iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts.Trained as both a lawyer and a sociologist, he has pioneered the sociology of international courts and law, as well as made key contributions to both theory and methodology of international socio-legal studies. His research interests include the globalization of law and the legal profession and its effects on new forms of institutions such as international courts.Recent publications include International Court Authority (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Karen Alter and Larry Helfer, “Between Universalism and Regional Law and Politics: A Comparative History of the American, European and African Human Rights Systems”, International Journal of Constitutional Law (2018), co-authored with Alexandra Huneeus, and “Backlash Against International Courts: Explaining the Forms and Patterns of Resistance to International Courts”, International Journal of Law in Context (2018), co-authored with Pola Cebulak and Micha Wiebusch.

Phillip Ayoub – Associate Professor in the Department of Diplomacy & World Affairs at Occidental College. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 2013, after obtaining a B.A. from the University of Washington and M.A. degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell University. He also spent a year as Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, and four years as an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at Drexel University.
His research bridges insights from international relations and comparative politics, engaging with literature on transnational politics, sexuality and gender, norm diffusion, and the study of social movements. He is particularly interested in how the transnational mobilization of marginalized peoples and international channels of visibility influence socio-legal change across states. His book, titled When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility, was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2016. It uses a mixed-method approach, combining large-n quantitative analysis with in-depth qualitative analysis of key cases, in order to explore the domestic conditions under which international norms governing LGBT rights are most likely to spread.

Peeter Roosma – Judge at the Supreme Court of Estonia. He completed his studies at Tartu
University and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Since 2016 he serves as a
Judge at the Supreme Court of Estonia, at which he is a member of the Criminal Law Chamber and
Constitutional Review Chamber. Since 2017, he is a member of the Judges’ Disciplinary Chamber.
Furthermore, he serves as an ad hoc judge of the European Court of Human Rights. His term was
renewed in 2018. He also evaluates articles published in the law reviews Juridica and Juridica
International.

Rimvydas Norkus – President of the Lithuanian Supreme Court. He completed his studies at the University of Vilnius which concluded with a doctorate in 2005. From 1999 until 2009, he worked in various positions in the Lithuanian judiciary (Court of Appeal, Highest Administrative Court of Lithuania).
From 2009 to 2010 he worked as a lawyer linguist at the European Parliament. From 2010 until 2012 he worked as a director for Legal research department at the Supreme Court of Lithuania. In 2012 Rimvydas Norkus was appointed a judge of the Court of Appeal of Lithuania where he heard civil cases under appeal.
In 2013 the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) appointed him a judge of the Supreme Court of Lithuania.
Since 2014 he is the President of the Lithuanian Supreme Court. In 2016 Rimvydas Norkus was elected a Chairman of the Judicial Council.

Sirpa Rautio – She is the Chair and Finnish member of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights Management Board, with over 25 years of experience in human rights (e.g. the World Bank Nordic Trust Fund, the Council of Europe, the OSCE/ODIHR, the UN and the EU).
She has been the director of the Finnish Human Rights Centre since 2012. The Centre, together with the Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman Office is Finland’s A-rated National Human Rights Institution. She has extensive experience working in post-conflict settings and countries in transition, including former Yugoslavia. She is a lawyer by profession.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Vashkevich, Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of Belarus is a Professor of Public Law at European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania and Visiting Professor at the Regional Master's Program in Human Rights and Democratization in the Caucasus. He teaches Comparative Constitutional Law, Human Rights Law, EU Institutional Law, and Law of International Organizations.
He holds an LLM from  the Belarusian State University Law Faculty, doctoral degree in Constitutional Law from Kharkiv Law Academy and a number of research fellowships, including  Senior  Fulbright Scholarship  at American University, Washington D.C., Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, Free University in Brussels, Belgium and University of Toronto, Canada. He has more than 120 scientific publications, including a Commentary to the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (2016). Since 2006  Professor Vashkevich  is a  member of  the OSCE/ODIHR Panel of Experts on Freedom of Peaceful  Assembly’and  co-authored ‡the joint  OSCE/ODIHR –Venice Commission  Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly (the 3rd  edition is forthcoming in 2019), translated into several languages, including Russian, Arabic, Armenian, French. As an expert of the Council of Europe, Professor Vashkevich organized trainings, seminars and lectured for the highest judicial institutions and members of the parliaments in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine. He also was a key national expert of the UNDP project «Promotion of a wider application of international human rights standards in the administration of justice in Belarus» in 2008-2010 and Raoul Wallenberg Institute «Establishment of a National Human Rights Institution in Belarus» in 2012.

Maris Kuurberg (magister iuris) is the Estonian Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights since 2008. She is working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is also a member of the Bureau of the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee for Human Rights, as well as a member of the same steering committee, a member of the Committee of Experts on the System of the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Drafting Group on freedom of expression and links to other human rights.Since 1999 she is a member of the Estonian Bar Association and since 2003 she is an Attorney at Law. From 1999 to 2004 she worked in Law Office HETA and from 2004 to 2007 in Law Office Ots&Co. During 2006-2007 she also worked in the Estonian translation division in the European Court of Justice. She has published numerous articles, including on the European Convention system, in the Estonian law review Juridica.