Vesna Pešić

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Vesna Pešić (Serbian Cyrillic: Весна Пешић) (born May 6, 1940 in Grocka, Serbia, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian politician.

Pešić engaged in the struggle for democracy, peace, and human rights in the early 1970s as the member of the Intellectuals' Movement for the Defense and Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms, popularly known as the “Belgrade opposition”. In 1982, she was arrested and imprisoned for organizing the protests against the arrest of a group of the University of Belgrade students.

Pešić was a founder member of the Yugoslav Helsinki Committee (1985), the Association for the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (1989), the Yugoslav European Movement (1991) ant the Centre for Antiwar Action (1991). From 1992 till 1999 she was the president of the Civic Alliance of Serbia, and from 1993 until 1997 she was one of the leaders of the Coalition Zajedno (Together), with Vuk Drašković's SPO and Zoran Đinđić's Democratic Party.

Her many honors include the Award for Democracy of the U.S. National Foundation for Democracy (1993), the W. Averell Harriman Award of the U.S. National Institute for Democracy (1997), and the Andrei Sakharov Award from the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the Sakharov Foundation for Freedom (1997). She also served as national Ambassador to Mexico from 2001 to 2005, firstly for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and then for its successor, Serbia and Montenegro.

After the merger of the Civic Alliance of Serbia into the Liberal Democratic Party in 2007, she became the president of the Political Council of the Liberal Democratic Party. Since 2007, she has also been a Member of Parliament.

Vesna Pešić is a senior scientific associate of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory.