Vesna Škare Ožbolt

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Vesna Škare-Ožbolt (born June 20, 1961 in Osijek) is a Croatian politician.

Before the first democratic elections in 1990, Škare-Ožbolt used to work in Croatian judiciary. In the 1990s she joined the Croatian Democratic Union and became one of the advisors to President Franjo Tuđman.

In the late 1990s she handled the sensitive negotiations leading to a peaceful return of Serb-occupied areas of Eastern Slavonia to Croatian sovereignty.

After defeat of the HDZ party in the 2000 parliamentary elections, Škare-Ožbolt, widely perceived as a moderate, left that party and followed Mate Granić to newly formed Democratic Centre. Three years later, her popularity helped her win a seat in Sabor, which turned out to be the only one for DC.

After Granić resigned she took the leadership of DC and joined the government of Ivo Sanader as minister of justice. She was the only non-HDZ minister in Sanader's cabinet and, as such, she received the most thankless of all cabinet posts, because Croatian judiciary is generally perceived as the most corrupt and most inefficient branch of Croatian government.

She launched highly publicised drive for reform, most notably by trying to digitalise notoriously inaccessible land registries. She also nurtured good relationship with media and was often perceived as one of the more popular members of Sanader's cabinet.

During her tenure, she created enemies, one of them being Granić, who left the party following corruption allegations. Within HDZ, many saw her post and influence unproportional to the poor standing of her party.

During the last months of her tenure, Škare-Ožbolt was involved in highly publicised extradition proceedings against former Serb warlord Dragan Vasiljković, a process that revealed large degree of incompetence within her ministry. This, and the alleged leakage of Croatian government's legal strategy in Gotovina trial to press, led Sanader to have Škare-Ožbolt dismissed and replaced with HDZ cadre Ana Lovrin on February 10th 2006.