Vanja Skoric

Vanja Skoric (@vanjasko) is Program Director for the European Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ECNL) overseeing global and EU engagement programmes with 19 years of experience in legal analysis and research. She mostly works on the UN and EU /Council of Europe-level support and advocacy, as well as in EU member states, Western Balkan region, MENA, East Africa and Eurasia countries. She also leads the work on securitisation and counter-terrorism / anti-money laundering measures that impact civil society, as well as ECNL’s engagement in digital and artificial intelligence (AI) issues affecting civic freedoms.

Her favourite engagements include changing the opaque standard related to countering financing of terrorism in nonprofit sector and advocacy for enhanced protection of the right to freedom of assembly through inciting adoption of the General Comment no. 37 by the UN Human Rights Committee. Lately, she enjoys blending law and tech through the work on AI and finding synergies between civil society and technical voices.

Vanja has been a civil society activist since 1999. Previously, she was a Legal Advisor at Croatian organisation GONG and a member of the Croatian Council on Open Government Partnership Initiative. She is also one of the founders and served as a board member of the Solidarna Community Foundation in Croatia. Vanja holds a LLM degree in Public International Law from the University of Amsterdam and a Law Degree from the University of Zagreb.