INTERCULTURAL

LEADERS

Naida Softic

Summer Schools

Naida is a lawyer, consultant, researcher and human rights activist from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She specializes in post-conflict development, including social risk management and constitution- building in transitional societies. As a member of Helsinki Committee for Human Rights for 5 years, she worked on establishing human rights education programs from young people aimed at reconciliation among ethnic groups and building capacities of young people to think critically of the conflict and eventually emerge as active citizens, community leaders and reformist policymakers. Her work with young people from divided communities also included establishing public legal education program aim at building public understanding, confidence in and respect towards justice institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina through advocacy for sustainable, youth targeted, public legal education strategies and programs involving judiciary. She worked on providing free legal aid to members of disadvantaged groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina and worked on advocacy and strategic litigation aimed at improving anti discrimination legislation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With Internews, she worked on strengthening independent media in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on media law, literacy and policy. She participated in establishing several nongovernmental organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including European Law Students Association in Sarajevo. During her years at the University of Sarajevo, she was also junior associate with the Department of Criminal Studies at the Law Faculty, working on international criminal law. She authored and coauthored several papers on constitutional interpretation; comparative analysis of media, memory and justice and analysis of freedom of commercial expression and corporate data protection. She has been working in the private sector for the past couple of years, focusing on risk management and data protection.