Mirjan Damaška

Mirjan Damaška (born October 8, 1931

Biography

Damaška was born in Brežice in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, present-day Slovenia in a Croatian family. His hobbies were painting, music and languages. Later, he learned to speak six languages. Prior to the World War II, his family moved to Zagreb, where Damaška finished elementary school and a gymnasium, after which he entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb in 1950. As a student he showed interest in science, and in his fourth year he gained a scholarship at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands. He graduated at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb in 1955. Next year, he gained a master's degree in comparative criminal justice at the International Faculty of Comparative Law in Luxembourg.

Between 1956 and 1957 he worked as a law clerk in trial and appellate courts. After that he choose a university career. He was named an assistant at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb in criminal proceedings. He gained his PhD at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana after successfully defending his dissertation, the Defendant's Testimony as Evidence in a Modern Criminal Proceedings in 1960. He was among the youngest doctors of law in the FNR Yugoslavia. He also wrote other significant works: the Defendant's Testimony as Evidence in a Modern Criminal Proceedings (1962), the Dictionary of Criminal Law and Proceedings (co-author, 1966), the Comparative Law (1988), the Evidence Law Adrift (1997). He published various works in foreign magazines, mainly in the sphere of criminal law and proceedings, civil proceedings, legal history, comparative law and theory of law.

Damaška was an advisor to several Croatian governments in relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He was named a special advisor to the prime minister Ivo Sanader in 2010, and a Croatian agent before the International Court of Justice, where he led a team of Croatian and British lawyers in the case Croatia vs. Serbia.