Milan Antonijević, a lawyer and human rights activist, was elected Commissioner for the Protection of Equality by the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia on 3 December 2025.
He was born in 1975 in Belgrade, where he completed the Third Belgrade Grammar School and the Faculty of Law of the University of Belgrade, Department of International Law. He completed the Human Rights School of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights in 1999. He was awarded the Chevening Scholarship of the Government of the United Kingdom in 2009 and completed the programme in Conflict Prevention and the Use of Democracy to Achieve Peace at the University of Bradford. He enrolled in doctoral studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade, Department of Anthropology and Ethnology.
He became Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM) in 2005, and in 2010 became its Director. He is the founder of the Human Rights House in Belgrade (2011). Throughout his career, he has worked as a consultant for the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, and other international organisations, as well as for the Poverty Reduction Team of the Government of the Republic of Serbia. Between 2014 and 2018 he was an independent member of the Council for Monitoring the Implementation of the Action Plan for the Implementation of the Anti-Discrimination Strategy. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Slavko Ćuruvija Foundation. He served as Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Chevening Society of Serbia from 2024 to 2025.
From 2018 to 2021 he served as Executive Director of the Open Society Foundation Serbia. From 2021 to 2022 he worked as a consultant to the Government of Montenegro in the EU accession negotiations. From 2022 to 2023 he worked as an advisor to the Director at the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED), responsible for improving relations with local governments and foreign and domestic companies. He is a member of the Council for Monitoring the Implementation of the UN Human Rights Mechanism Recommendations, as well as of the National Convention on the EU of the Republic of Serbia, where he has been active since 2015 as coordinator for Chapters 23 and 24 in Serbia’s EU accession negotiations.
He speaks English and French and has working knowledge of Hungarian.
