Sonja Biserko

Sonja Biserko (; born 14 February 1948) is a Serbian activist for human rights. She is the founder and president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia.

On 8 May 2013, she was appointed as a member of the United Nations human rights investigation into North Korea, with Michael Kirby and Marzuki Darusman. On 18 February 2014, they published a report which received worldwide attention.

Biography Sonja Biserko was born in Belgrade, FPR Yugoslavia (today Serbia) to a Serb father and a Croat mother. She holds a degree from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Economics. She served as a diplomat for the former Yugoslavia in London and at the United Nations in Geneva for over 20 years until 1991 when she resigned her diplomatic position in protest over the policies of Slobodan Milošević amid rising nationalism throughout Yugoslavia. challenging nationalist dogma, documenting war crimes and acting as advocate for the victimised and disenfranchised.

In her 2009 speech accepting the City of Weimar's Human Rights Prize, she affirmed her belief that Serbia's recent past and the traumas associated with it can only be transcended by knowing and understanding that past. HCHRS's work sought to cast light on the suppression or falsification of the past. Orchestrated amnesia and reinterpretation of both the historical and recent past had resulted in failure to confront the truth and abandon the legacy of expansionist nationalist aspirations. Change could only be achieved in Serbia and the region as a whole if the truth was told.

She argued that the persistence of nationalist aspirations had fostered a climate hostile to all non-nationalistic values, including human rights, and pointed to the need for strategic change, calling for the establishment of a ‘moral minimum’ in society and in politics as the basis of Serbian statehood, opening the way for the consolidation of democracy and regional co-operation. This "moral minimum" would involve sincere co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and recognition of the work of the Tribunal as a moral reference point. Among some 140 other publications she has written about the Srebrenica genocide, the fall of Vukovar, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and war crimes and accounts of the trials of Slobodan Milošević and Vojislav Šešelj. Her works have documented the role of Serb institutions including the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in encouraging Serbian extremism and have contributed to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.