Mislav Kolakušić (born 15 September 1969) is a Croatian lawyer and politician who has been a

Member of the European Parliament A member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been Election, elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and S ...

for Croatia from 2 July 2019 to 16 July 2024, having been elected to the position at the 2019 election as an

Independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in Pennsylvania, United States * Independentes (English: Independents), a Portuguese artist ...

. Previously, he served as a

judge A judge is a person who wiktionary:preside, presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a judicial panel. In an adversarial system, the judge hears all the witnesses and any other Evidence (law), evidence presented by the barris ...

at the Zagreb Commercial Court.

Early life and education

Kolakušić was born in

Zagreb Zagreb ( ) is the capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Croatia#List of cities and towns, largest city of Croatia. It is in the Northern Croatia, north of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the ...

Croatia Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country in Central Europe, Central and Southeast Europe, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herze ...

, where he finished elementary and high school. Kolakušić graduated law from the

University of Zagreb The University of Zagreb (, ) is a public university, public research university in Zagreb, Croatia. It is the largest Croatian university and one of the oldest continuously operating universities in Europe. The University of Zagreb and the Unive ...

in 1997. He passed the

bar exam A bar examination is an examination administered by the bar association of a jurisdiction that a lawyer must pass in order to be admitted to the bar of that jurisdiction. Australia Administering bar exams is the responsibility of the bar associat ...

in 2000.

Professional career

Kolakušić worked as a court trainee at the Commercial Court in Zagreb and at the Municipal and County Courts in Zagreb from 1998 to 2000. From 2001 to 2005, Kolakušić worked on the working-financial department of the Administrative Court of the Republic of Croatia, and from 2005 to 2011 as a senior counsel at the same court. Since 2011, he has been a

at the Zagreb Commercial Court. Kolakušić also served as the spokesperson of the High Administrative Court of the Republic of Croatia from 2009 to 2011, as well as the Labor Relations Interlocutor of the same court from 2005 to 2011. He was the president of the Croatian Association of Judicial Advisers and Trainees from 2006 to 2011. In 2017, he was a candidate for a judge at the

Constitutional Court of Croatia The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia () is an institution that acts as the interpreter and guardian of the Croatian Constitution and which monitors the conformity of laws with the Constitution as well as protection of human rights ...

, but was not elected.

Political career

9th European Parliament

At the European Parliament election in Croatia in May 2019, Kolakušić was elected to the

European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it ...

, as an

. Kolakušić is a member of the Parliament Committee on Budgets and the

Committee on Legal Affairs The Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) is a committee of the European Parliament. Responsibilities The main responsibilities of the committee are the interpretation and application of international and European law and the compliance of European U ...

, and a substitute of the

Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly or other form of organization. A committee may not itself be considered to be a form of assembly or a decision-making body. Usually, an assembly o ...

. From 2019 to 2022, Kolakušić voted with the winning side in 14.8% of votes, the lowest of all MEPs. In January 2022, Kolakušić addressed French President

Emmanuel Macron Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron (; born 21 December 1977) is a French politician who has served as President of France and Co-Prince of Andorra since 2017. He was Ministry of Economy and Finance (France), Minister of Economics, Industr ...

during a legislative session, arguing that vaccination must remain a choice, and compared vaccine mandates with

capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence (law), sentence ordering that an offender b ...

, claiming that tens of thousands had died from it citing data from the

European Medicines Agency The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is an agency of the European Union (EU) in charge of the evaluation and supervision of pharmaceutical products. Prior to 2004, it was known as the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products ...

. The European Medicines Agency said in a response that the cited data was a public, self-reported database of suspected side effects which did not report deaths and would require further scientific investigation to find any causal link between the reports and the

COVID-19 vaccine A COVID19 vaccine is a vaccine intended to provide acquired immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 ( COVID19). Knowledge about the structure and fun ...

. In March 2022, Kolakušić gave a speech at the European Parliament targeting Canadian Prime Minister

Justin Trudeau Justin Pierre James Trudeau (born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician who served as the 23rd prime minister of Canada from 2015 to 2025. He led the Liberal Party from 2013 until his resignation in 2025 and was the member of Parliament ...

's response to protests against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, saying that Canada once stood for civil rights but now resembled more like a "dictatorship of the worst kind". In October 2022, following a Pfizer executive's testimony before the EU special committee on the COVID-19 pandemic regarding lack of vaccine testing for preventing disease transmission, Kolakušić made several strong statements to ''Euro Weekly News,'' speaking out against the EU's purchase of enough vials of the Pfizer vaccine to inoculate every member of the EU 10 times over (4.5 billion vials / 450 million citizens). He further criticized the lack of disclosure of vaccine ingredients, saying..."no one in the world, except maybe 2 or 3 people, knows what it contains," calling it "the biggest corruption scandal in the history of mankind." In the same month during a session of the European Parliament, Kolakušić remarked that criminal proceedings should be initiated by the EU against Pfizer for the promotion of billions of dollars of fraudulent medicine.

Presidential candidacy

A day after the 2019 European Parliament election, on 29 May, Kolakušić announced that he will run at the 2019 Croatian presidential election. On 29 November, he submitted some 15,000 signatures to the State Electoral Commission.

References

External links

*
MEP Mislav Kolakušić

Antikorupcija
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kolakusic, Mislav 1969 births Living people Candidates for President of Croatia Croatian judges Lawyers from Zagreb Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb alumni Croatian anti-vaccination activists Politicians from Zagreb MEPs for Croatia 2019–2024