The candidate’s life’s work shows an outstanding commitment to fostering mutual understanding and closer integration among Member States and facilitating cooperation in the European Union.
He was a postgraduate student of the International Faculty of Comparative Law in 1961/62 inStrasbourg, where he made his first pan-European contacts. In the seventies, he worked as a consultant for the OECD to improve public services. In the eighties, he worked on projects for the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation and Social Sciences, based inVienna, mainly in environmental protection and the democratization of political systems. During the landmark period inSloveniabetween 1988 and 1991, he was involved in the transformation of the constitutional system and the transition to a constitutional democracy with a multiparty parliamentary system, making many proposals and contributions.
In 1990, he was elected as a member of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia and was its president from 1997 to 1998. He then worked as Minister of Education (2000), Minister of Justice (2004-2008), a member of the European Council in the group of Ministers of the Interior and Justice (2004-2008), and President of the European Council of Ministers of Justice of the EU (01.01.2008 – 30.6.2008).
In the nineties, he worked at conferences of European Constitutional courts, and then after 2000, among other things, at international research projects of the Institute for Legal Philosophy at the University of Munich; within the framework of the Council of Europe at the Robert Schumann University; at the European Consortium of State and Church; and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Lovro Šturm has concretely expressed the values of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, especially as editor and lead author of the Commentary to the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia, which was published in two volumes in 2002 and 2010 and encompasses more than 3000 pages, based on a number of judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
On a personal level, he has acted responsibly and with great self-discipline, in spite of serious physical impairment he suffered as a child during the Second World War. With his persistent efforts for the legal protection of the environment, the rule of law, constitutional democracy and a free society he has contributed to the long term strengthening of European spirit.
