Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has amended the decree on the competition to elect a new ECtHR judge from Ukraine, which gives a chance to correct some shortcomings of the previous competition.

The corresponding decree of 26 October was published on the president's website, reports "European Pravda."

The decree approves the new personal composition of the competition commission.

It includes Professor Vasyl Repetskyi (head of the chair of international law of the faculty of international relations of the Lviv National Ivan Franko University, PhD in law); Yaroslav Romaniuk (retired judge of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, chairman of the Supreme Court of Ukraine in 2013 - 2017); Natalia Hendel (coach of the Human Rights Program of the Ukrainian School of Management, PhD in law); Olga Shpakovich (professor of the comparative and European law department of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of International Relations of the Lviv National University).

Human rights activists called the drawback of the previous commission that there were no human rights practitioners or practicing lawyers with extensive experience of working with the ECtHR.

Among other things, the changes suggest that the competition commission will have to form a rating of contestants - based on the results of the interview and the test of proficiency in the official languages of the Council of Europe.

Based on this rating and respecting the requirement for gender balance, the competition commission will decide on the inclusion of contestants in the list of candidates for a judge of the ECtHR.

Also, the decree now provides for consultations on the list of candidates with the Council of Europe.

"If during the preliminary consideration of the list of candidates by the Council of Europe it is found that one or more candidates do not or do not fully meet the criteria defined in part one of Article 21 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the competition commission may decide to remove such candidates from the list and to include the next highest scoring contestants in the list, respecting the gender balance requirement," the text reads.

On September 22, the Committee for the Selection of Judges of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) rejected Ukraine's list of three candidates for the judges of the European Court of Human Rights. On September 27, the PACE rejected the Ukrainian candidates by a majority vote. Now Kiev must hold a new competition to select candidates for the position of ECHR judge for the third time.