Alma Zadić

Alma Zadić (born 24 May 1984) is a Bosnian-born Austrian lawyer and politician of the Green Party. She has been serving as Minister of Justice since 7 January 2020 in the governments of Chancellors Sebastian Kurz, Alexander Schallenberg and Karl Nehammer.

Early life, education, and early career
Born in Tuzla, Zadić fled to Austria with her parents in 1994 during the Bosnian War and the family settled in Vienna. She has been described as a Muslim, but denies any religious affiliation herself.

She studied law at the University of Vienna and at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Piacenza before getting a Fulbright scholarship for a postgraduate law degree at Columbia University in New York. While being a student, she worked as a junior legal researcher at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Vienna and as an intern at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She was also a competitive volleyball player and fitness coach.

Before entering politics, Zadić worked for six years as a senior associate at the Vienna office of London-headquartered multinational law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, specialising in human rights issues.

Political career
In 2017 she joined the Pilz list, from 2018 the Jetzt list and was elected to the National Council in the 2017 parliamentary elections. In 2019 she briefly became a non-party member of the National Council before being elected as a member of the Green Party in that year's election.

On 7 January 2020, Zadić, along with three other Greens, was sworn in by Austria's president Alexander Van der Bellen to serve in the Sebastian Kurz coalition government as Minister of Justice pursuant to the coalition agreement of Kurz's ÖVP with the Greens, led by Werner Kogler, who serves as Vice Chancellor.

Zadić remained in the same role when Alexander Schallenberg set up a new government following Kurz's resignation in October 2021.

Defamation case
On social media, Zadić shared a photograph in which a member of a Burschenschaft was seen giving a Nazi salute, with the comment "No tolerance for neo-Nazis, fascists and racists". In November 2019, she was found guilty of defamation and fined 700 euros by a criminal court in Vienna.