Greece
Born in Thessaloniki, Marialena Tsirli attended the Greek-French Ursulines School in Athens, studied law at the Athens Law School and gained her Masters and PhD from the Robert Schuman University in Strasbourg. Once a Doctor of Law and ready to say goodbye forever to Strasbourg, she took part in a recruitment campaign organised by the Council of Europe for young Greek lawyers and never left.
She first badged in as a Council of Europe’s staff member on a rainy 1st March 1994 and three decades later, she still feels the same excitement and happiness every time she enters the building (unless it is very early in the morning). In 1998, she and her colleagues of the Secretariat of the old European Commission of Human Rights were taken on board by the new permanent European Court of Human Rights where she has worked relentlessly ever since.
While she was rising through the ranks, as Head of Division, Deputy Section Registrar, Section Registrar and then Deputy Registrar, her free time was dwindling but she still managed to find time to travel, go to the movies and enjoy all other forms of art. She has also enjoyed publishing articles, editing books and lecturing to schools and Universities, preaching the Convention and the Court’s case-law.
She was elected Registrar in the middle of the pandemic, which proved to be the first of a series of unique challenges she would face steering the Registry. She is the first-ever woman Registrar in the organisation’s history and hopes that she will not be the last.
In 2020, Marialena Tsirli was the first-ever woman to be elected to the post of Registrar by the Judges of the European Court of Human Rights. She tells us about her best memory and how proud she is to work alongside the Judges and her colleagues on an everyday basis to promote and protect human rights.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
