As a practising barrister and Queen’s Counsel, Nicolas Bratza was elected as the United Kingdom member of the European Commission of Human Rights in 1993. In 1998 he was appointed a High Court judge and elected as the first United Kingdom judge of the permanent European Court of Human Rights. In the same year he was elected as one of the Section Presidents of the Court and in 2007 was elected as one of the Court’s two Vice-Presidents. In 2011 he was elected as President of the Court, a post he held until his retirement from the Court and from the High Court in October 2012. He is a member of the International Commission of Jurists and currently chairs an International Advisory Panel overseeing the investigation into the violent events in Kyiv and Odessa, Ukraine at the end of 2013 and the early part of 2014.