Egils Levits
Egils Levits was president of Latvia from 2019 to 2023, the judge who had sat on the European Court of Human Rights from 1995 to 2004 and on the Court of Justice of the European Union from 2004 to 2019, the longest of any Latvian in a European institution. He had written, as a young lawyer in exile in 1990, the declaration of the restoration of independence of 4 May 1990 that the Supreme Council adopted, on the doctrine of state continuity that the republic of 1918 had never legally ceased to exist and was resuming rather than beginning, which is the principle that governs Latvia's citizenship and its relations with Russia to this day. The parliament elected him in May 2019 on the first ballot with sixty-one votes. The four years were the pandemic, the Belarusian migrants pushed at the border in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Latvia answered with the largest aid per head of any country. There was the demolition of the Soviet victory monument in Riga in August 2022 that he had asked for, and the law of 2022 that made Latvian the only language of the schools. There were the citizenship revocations of Latvians who had supported the war, the defence budget to three per cent, and the conscription restored in 2023. He was born in Riga in 1955 to a Jewish father, an engineer, and a Latvian mother, and the family was allowed to emigrate to West Germany in 1972 under the Soviet Jewish emigration. He grew up in Münster, studied law and political science at Hamburg, and was a lawyer and a scholar of the Baltic question in the Federal Republic until 1990, when the independence movement called him home. He was Latvia's ambassador to Germany in 1992-93 and its justice minister and deputy prime minister in 1993-94 before the courts. The presidency was the constitutional lawyer's. There was the preamble to the constitution of 2014 that he had drafted and that names the Latvian nation's culture and language as the state's foundation, and the national and values policy he pressed, and the referral of laws back to the parliament that he used sparingly. The parliament did not re-elect him in 2023, choosing the foreign minister on the third ballot. He withdrew before the vote. He has returned to scholarship and the boards. He has said that the state's continuity is the answer to every Russian argument, which the arguments have kept testing.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: Latvian
- Roles: president, judge, politician
