Jun 1, 2009 -- The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hear a case on June 3 brought by Jakob Finci, a Jewish citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who is denied the right to stand for election to the three-member presidency and the House of Peoples in the Bosnian Parliament, solely because of his ethnicity and religion. Finci is represented by Sheri P. Rosenberg, director of the Human Rights and Genocide Clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and Clive Baldwin of Minority Rights Group International. The case, Sejdic and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, is one of the first to challenge at the European level the discriminatory laws found in Bosnia's constitution that prohibit individuals from minority groups from running for the highest offices. The Grand Chamber traditionally agrees to accept only a small number of cases referred to it by the court's ordinary chambers and then does so because the case is considered to have significant precedential value. The case was first brought before the Strasbourg Court in 2006. The ordinary Chamber joined Finci's case with the case of Dervo Sejdic in 2008. The Court's ordinary chamber relinquished jurisdiction on 10 February, 2009. The Grand Chamber’s decision to accept the case—the first to be heard under Protocol 12, which provides for a robust right to non-discrimination--gives Europe’s highest judicial body the opportunity to make clear that racial discrimination no longer has a place in the political arrangements of any of the continent’s countries. Judgment is expected later this year. Rosenberg is also director of Cardozo’s Program in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies. She received her JD from Cardozo in 1994, and holds an LLM, which she received in 2003, from Columbia University. In 2000, the US Department of State selected Rosenberg to be one of two U.S. lawyers to work in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Human Rights Chamber, a quasi-international court established under the Dayton Peace Agreement. Ari Brochin, a first-year student at Cardozo, and Matthew Diament, who graduates this June, worked on the case while working in the clinic and will be in Strasbourg with Rosenberg for the court proceedings. Rosenberg has been working on the case with clinic students since 2005.