Born in Zagreb, Professor Nina Vajić is a Croatian academic and lawyer. Before obtaining her LLM and JSD in Public International Law in Zagreb, she attended the diploma program at the Institute, where she was supervised by Professor Lucius Caflisch. From 1971 to 1998, Nina Vajić was part of the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb, teaching International Public Law (general course), Human Rights, Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, Law of International Organisations, United Nations Law and  European Law, both at graduate and postgraduate levels, as well as at the Diplomatic Academy in Zagreb. 

Vajić left Zagreb for Strasbourg when elected Judge in respect of Croatia at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from 1998 to 2012.  She  also sat as Section Vice-President and Section President. 

After leaving the Court, she served as an expert in the HELP (Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals) programme in Serbia, which supported the integration of the European Convention on Human Rights standards, as interpreted by the ECHR, into domestic law from 2013 to 2014, . 

From 2013-2019, Vajić was member and subsequently Chair of the Council of Europe Advisory Panel of Experts on Candidates for Election as Judge to the ECHR .

Well known for her judicial career at the ECHR, Vajić was also active in INTERPOL from 2014-2017, as Chair of the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files. During her mandate as Chair of the Commission, she took part in the work of “the INTERPOL Working Group on the processing of Information” (2015-2016), which discussed INTERPOL’s supervisory mechanisms. It prepared the new Statute of the  Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files which was adopted in November 2016 by the 85th INTERPOL General Assembly in Bali. The Statute entered into force on 11 March 2017.