Nataša Kandić

Nataša Kandić
Nataša Kandić in Belgrade, 2010
Born	1946 Kragujevac, Serbia, Yugoslavia
Nationality	Serbian
Occupation	Human rights activist
Known for	Documentation of Serbian war crimes
Awards	Civil Courage Prize (2000) Homo Homini Award (2003)

Nataša Kandić (Serbian Cyrillic: Наташа Кандић) (born 1946, Kragujevac, Serbia, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian human rights activist and the founder and ex-executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC), an organisation campaigning for human rights and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia, focusing on the Serbian role in conflict. It was formed in 1992. The HLC's research was integral to the war crimes prosecutions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), particularly the "smoking gun" video linking Serbian military forces to the Srebrenica massacres. She has won numerous international awards for her human rights work (Amnesty International's Objective Observer Award, among others). She is a figure of controversy in Serbia where she is the subject of a defamation lawsuit by Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić.

Kandić is a sociologist by training. In 1992, she founded and became executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, a human rights organisation which has been praised for its systematic and impartial investigations of human rights abuses. Since the start of the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s, she has documented and protested against war crimes committed between 1991 and 1999, including torture, rape, and murder. According to Businessweek, her work drew "the hatred of fellow Serbs and military leaders throughout the region -- and won the admiration of human-rights defenders worldwide".

Throughout the war in Kosovo, she traveled back and forth across Serbia, providing information to the outside world about human rights violations being committed by police and paramilitary groups. She was one of the few Serbian rights activists to continue investigating the Kosovo crisis after the murder of Slavko Curuvija and to collaborate with ethnic Albanian activists. She and her staff were anonymously threatened for their work, and their office was spray-painted with a swastika and the message "NATO's spies". In December 1999, HLC lawyer Teki Bokshi was arrested in Kosovo by Serbian police, drawing protest from the HLC and a United Nations envoy.