On 2-3 November 2017, the Council of Europe organized a study visit to Strasbourg for a group of 31 judge candidates undergoing pre-service training program that is a part of judicial selection process steered by the Academy of Justice of Azerbaijan.

The programme of the study visit allowed the participants to obtain practical insight on the application of the European Convention on Human Rights and functioning of the European Court and other Council of Europe bodies.

During the visit, the candidates had the opportunity to meet with the Judge of the European Court of Human Rights in respect of Azerbaijan, as well as the lawyers of the Court, who introduced them to the case-law through interactive sessions on the selected Articles of the European Convention. Judge candidates learned more about specificities of the internal procedures, admissibility criteria and case filtering system, the principles of “legal certainty” and “subsidiarity”, the evolution of the case law and execution of judgments of the Strasbourg Court as supervised by the Committee of Ministers.

By completing the training programme in the beginning of 2018, the judge candidates will face another round of the examinations and successful nominees will be recruited to vacant judicial posts.   

The activity was organised in the framework of the Project on “Application of the European Convention on Human Rights and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in Azerbaijan” that is part of the Partnership for Good Governance for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Republic of Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus and is funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe.