Sejla is a human rights lawyer with a particular interest in freedom of expression and media freedom. She has experience working in legal practice, as well as working with non-governmental and international organizations. Before joining BIRN, she has worked with International Press Institute (IPI) and the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media (RFoM), where she focused on research, advocacy and monitoring of media freedom violations, particularly in Southeast Europe and Turkey.
Currently, she is a research fellow with the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at Central European University. In 2021, in collaboration with CMDS, she established a research group and launched an Anti-SLAPP research project, “Silenced by Lawsuits”, which focuses on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) aimed at silencing public watchdogs.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Law from the American University in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she graduated with Highest Honors as Student of the Generation. She holds a Master’s in Human Rights Law from Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, where she graduated with Distinction, receiving CEU’s Outstanding Academic Achievement Award as the student with the highest GPA in the LLM Human Rights program. In her Master’s thesis, she focused on impunity for killings of journalists in Europe through analysis of state responses in the Daphne Caruana Galizia and Jan Kuciak murder cases.
Apart from being native in Bosnian, Sejla is fluent in English, has a strong working knowledge of German and some knowledge of Spanish, French and Russian.