Lawyer Vytautas Mizaras has been appointed a judge of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court, succeeding Dainius Žalimas who had stayed on for over a year after his term expired in March last year.
In a secret ballot on Tuesday, Mizaras was appointed by the parliament with 75 votes in favour, 44 against, and 14 abstentions.
Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, the speaker of the Seimas, said Lithuania has only a handful of lawyers of such a high level of competence as Mizaras.
"His areas of scientific interest cover constitutional and international law, protection of human rights, as well as separate areas of private law, especially intellectual property law, and information technology, personal privacy and EU law," she said while presenting the candidate.
Mizaras, 46, told the parliament that the viability and relevance of the constitution are as important as its stability.
He is a professor at the Department of Private Law of Vilnius University's Faculty of Law, chairman of the council at the Human Rights Monitoring Institute, and a lawyer with the law firm Ellex Valiunas.
The Constitutional Court consists of nine justices, each appointed by the parliament for a single nine-year term of office. The court is reconstituted every three years.
On January 14, the Seimas appointed two new Constitutional Court judges, but rejected Andrius Kabisaitis, the head of the Lithuanian parliament's Legal Department who had been nominated for the post by Čmilyė-Nielsen.
Therefore, Dainius Žalimas stayed on in the Constitutional Court even though his term of office had expired back in March 2020.
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