The first UK judge of the newly structured European Court of Human Rights, Sir Nicholas Bratza, 63, has since January last year been its vice-president. He went into Bar after studying law at Oxford and was appointed a High Court judge in 1998. That same year he was elected to the European Court and soon after, and again in 2001 and 2004, as one of its five section presidents. He sits on various bodies as a human rights specialist: he is a member of the advisory council and former vice-chairman of the British Institute of Human Rights, a member of the advisory board of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and a member of the editorial board of the European Human Rights Law Review. His father was Milan Bratza, the well-known Serbian concert violinist who settled in London after the First World War, and his mother came from the Russell family, which has produced law lords in three generations. He says that the enlarged membership of the Council of Europe strengthens the new democracies, providing a “bulwark against countries receding into the Dark Ages”. Likely to be president.

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