SERBIA: MILAN ANTONIJEVIC

 

MILAN ANTONIJEVIC

Milan Antonijević is one of the prominent fighters for human rights in the last two decades in Serbia. Antonijević was born on 24 September 1975 in Belgrade (Republic of Serbia). He graduated from the Third Belgrade Gymnasium and the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law.

Studies began in 1994, at the time of the most severe crisis in the disintegration of the Yugoslavia. The whirlwind of war i Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia, severe civilian suffering and the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milosević motivate him to focus his professional career on the protection of human rights. On third year of study, Milan opts for specializationon in the Department of International Law. Parallel with studies, 1999 he graduated from the Human Rights School of the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, where as of 2019 he works as a lecturer.

Since 2001, Antonijević has worked as an associate on The Lawyers’ Committee For Human Rights (YUCOM). He graduated at Faculty of Law in November 2005 and since then he worked as executive director of YUCOM. In 2010 Milan became director of the committee. During his time at YUCOM, as a member of a team of lawyers and jurists, he represented people whose human rights were endangered before the Serbian and international courts.

Antonijević was a 2006 trainer in Amman, training representatives of Iraqi civil society on constitutional reform advocacy. He worked on a number of laws in the field of education and social protection, which were adopted in 2009 and 2010, as well as in drafting amendments to the Criminal Code of the Republic of Serbia, whose provisions were adopted in 2012. Antonijević received a Chevening Scholarship from the Government of the United Kingdom in 2009 and completed a major in Conflict Prevention and Using Democracy for Peace at University of Bradford.

Milan Antonijević is the founder of the Human Rights House in Belgrade in 2011. During his career, he worked as a consultant to the United Nations, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and other international organizations. He also contributed to the writing of reports on human rights of domestic and international organizations, and the UN Universal Periodic Review. Milan Antonijević was also a Serbian candidate for membership of the United Nations Committee against Torture. He participated in the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) set up by the Ombudsman of Serbia in 2011 and made visits, wrote reports and made recommendations.

Between 2014 and 2018, Antonijević was an independent member of the Council for Monitoring the Implementation of the Action Plan for the Implementation of the Strategy of Prevention and Protection against Discrimination from 2014 to 2018.

On 1 December 2018, he was named Executive Director of the Open Society Foundation Serbia. In interview to vice.com he cautiously warned the public about the ban on the promotion of war crimes: "...the spark set something on fire in '91, and we really don't want a spark again in 2018."

Antonijević is a member of the Serbian Council for Monitoring the Implementation of the Recommendations of the UN Human Rights Mechanism and of the National Convent on the European Union in Serbia, where he has been active since 2015 in Chapters 23 as Coordinator, and 24 in Serbia's EU membership negotiations.