Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent De Gaetano has been elected vice president of the Fourth Section of the European Court of Human Rights.

The court has five sections and, as a rule, an application filed against a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights is dealt with in the section to which the judge elected in respect of that state has been assigned. This means that all applications against Malta that overcome the filtering hurdle will now be handled by Section IV.

When Dr De Gaetano was appointed to the European Court of Human Rights in September of 2010 he had been assigned to Section IV and he started sitting on Section V in February last year. At the end of last month, he was reassigned back to a recomposed Section IV. The other judges in this section come from Austria, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia.