Prof. Slobodanka-Boba Nedovic, Ph.D.
1955 - 2004

With sincere regrets and deepest sorrow, the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy announces to the public, our associates and friends, that Ms. Slobodanka-Boba Nedovic, Ph.D., one of the founders and the President of CeSID, and Professor with the Faculty of Law of the Belgrade University, passed away on January 24th 2004 in Belgrade.

With a group of students from the Faculty of Law, following several months long protests in 1996-97 against rejection of the elections results by the Slobodan Milosevic regime, Boba Nedovic founded CeSID as the first non-governmental organisation with a mission to improve the electoral process through impartial elections monitoring in Serbia, including the monitoring of the media and the voting procedure, and the parallel vote tabulation.

Following the founding of CeSID, leading experts and researchers in the fields of sociology, media and statistics, joined our activities, and the programmes have been extended to comprehensive researches, dealing both with the electoral will of citizens and the improvement of democratic values and processes in the society in general.

According to the unanimous opinion of relevant organisations in the region and worldwide, CeSID has accomplished a pioneer task in the process of democratisation of Serbia, which is still in progress. This process immensely and exceptionally benefited from the work of Boba Nedovic, who was guided by the idea of crucial establishment of democracy in the country, which during the 90-ies, was dismissed and excluded from the process that overwhelmed the region and the countries of former Eastern Europe.

Boba Nedovic was born in 1955 in Belgrade where, after completing the high school, she graduated from the Faculty of Law and subsequently obtained M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. She started the lecturing career at this faculty in 1978 as a teacher of Sociology. Boba Nedovic was the author of significant number of studies in the field of Political Sociology and Family Sociology, and also lectured as a visiting professor at the Columbia University in New York.

Boba Nedovic was one of the founders and members of the United Yugoslav Democratic Initiatives (UJDI) in 1998, in times preceding the introduction of a multi-party system in former Yugoslavia. As a prominent pro-democracy activist, Boba Nedovic was persecuted by Slobodan Milosevic's regime, during the implementation of the Law on University in 1998, as well as before and during the crucial elections held in the year 2000.