Svetlana Geleva has been working on the Council of Europe issues for more than 25 years. However, she first came in contact with the Organisation indirectly much earlier, in 1989, when her friend, who she married a year later, visited the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg.
Ambassador Geleva was a member of the CDDH for almost 20 years, during which time Protocols 14, 14 bis, 15 and 16 to the ECHR were drafted. She was a member of the Committee of Experts on Discrimination on grounds of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity which drafted the CM/Rec(2010)5 on measures to combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity and took part in the finalization of the CM/Rec(2021)1 on the development and strengthening of effective, pluralist and independent national human rights institutions. Nationally, she took part in the work of the Inter-ministerial commission for the implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgments. At different stages of her diplomatic career in the Ministry, she liaised with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance and the Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and was part of the national delegation to a number of Committee of Ministers ministerial sessions. She was also in charge of coordinating the overall cooperation with the Council of Europe.
Ambassador Geleva became a permanent representative of North Macedonia in May 2021. Since September 2022, she has been chairing the Rapporteur Group for Democracy, which, inter alia, worked on the drafting of the Reykjavik Principles for Democracy.
Ambassador Geleva was born in Montenegro, has two children and is still married to the guy who visited the Youth Center in 1989.
The project “75 women in 75 years of Council of Europe history” is organised by the Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe with the Council of Europe and the Permanent Representations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
