With great regret, we received the news that Jelisaveta Vasilić, a member of the Council for the Fight against Corruption, has passed away. The council, in which Ms. Vasilic has been a member since 2004 and has a prominent place in it, has been recognized as one of the few bodies that sincerely and dedicatedly fights corruption and one of the last to still resist pressure. With her work and professionalism, Ms. Vasilic gave an example of how it is possible to fight corruption, as one of the biggest problems of today’s Serbian society and fight for the rule of law so that the Republic of Serbia is truly “Res Publika”, public good, not private property of the people in power. Due to her professional and fact-based anti-corruption statements at the highest levels of government in Serbia, she was often the target of verbal attacks, both by government officials whose corruption she pointed to and by government-controlled tabloid media.

With her work and personal example of steadfastness in the fight against corruption, and above all her sincere commitment to the values she believed in, Jelisaveta Vasilić is one of the laureates of the Contribution of the Year to Europe award given to her by the European Movement in Serbia for 2020.
Jelisaveta Vasilić was born in 1940. She graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade in 1964. She worked as a judge for more than 35 years, of which six years as a judge of the Higher Commercial Court in Belgrade, from 1994 to 2000. She has been a lawyer and arbitrator in foreign trade arbitration at the Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce since 1998. She has been a permanent expert consultant to the Privatization Agency since 2002. She was the founder and member of the Management Board of the Association of Judges of Serbia until 2000. Author of more than 100 professional papers in the field of commercial law and co-author of several legal projects.
Jelisaveta Vasilić will always remain in the memory of our organization and we will remember her with pride as a person who created the foundations of modern European Serbia that we want.
Thank for everything she did.