Zlata Đurđević is a Full Professor of Criminal Procedural Law, Human Rights Law, European and International Criminal Law and Psychiatric Law at the School of Law, University of Zagreb. She obtained her LLM in Criminal Law and PhD from the University of Zagreb and holds an MPhil Degree in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. She is a Deputy of the Secretary General and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Organization of Penal Law (AIDP) and president of the Croatian Association of Criminal Sciences and Praxis. She has written over 50 publications and presented at over 70 national and international conferences. Moreover, Maria Curie EU NEWFELPRO grant enabled her to be for two years a Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Law School.

Her NEWFELPRO project is called Towards an European Criminal Procedure: Integration at the Expense of Human Rights (EuroCrimPro). The general objective of the research is to test the integration of European criminal procedures through human rights criteria. The convergence of national criminal procedure in EU has intensified after the Lisbon Treaty, due to the EU's supranational legislative powers in the field of criminal procedure. The EU is intensively using this power, adopting until beginning of 2014 eight directives related to criminal proceedings and proposing the establishment of the European Public Prosecutors Office. The project entails the assessment of the hypothesis that European criminal justice systems' integration creates an insufficiency in the protection of HR within the criminal justice system. This project engages normative, empirical and comparative based approach focusing on the U.S. federal criminal procedure. The specific objective shall be to establish a comparison of American and European integration of the criminal justice system from the point of view of human rights.

By this moment, she had several public presentations that are linked to her NEWFELPRO project:

• Investigative powers and admissibility of evidence, ECLAN Symposium on the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, Colégio da Trindade - University of Coimbra, Portugal, 29-30 March 2017.
• Procedural rights of legal defendants charged with environmental crimes in the EU and the US - AID P World Conference „The Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law“ – Bucharest, 18-20 May 2016.
• Foundations and structure of the Right to Appeal in Continental Europe - a keynote presentation at the international conference „Criminal Appeals in Europe – University of Luxembourg, 30 June 2016.
• What about the organisation  of transnational defence ? - ECLAN International Conference „The Needed Balances of EU Criminal Law: Past, Present and Future“ – Brussels, 26.4.2016.
• Defence Rights Directives: Filling a Human Rights Gap in the European Union Legal Order - conference „Defence Rights in the EU Member States Cooperation in Criminal Matters“, Faculty of Law University of Zagreb and the Croatian Association of European Criminal Law – 17.2.2016.
• Cooperation with the ICC: International justice in the jaws of politics, International Conference "Administration of Justice – Past Experiences and Challenges of the Future", Cavtat, Croatia, May, 29 2015
• Right of access to a Lawyer: from Salduz to EU Directive, International Conference "European Criminal Procedural Law in Service of Protection of European Union Financial Interests: State of Play and Challenges”, Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 15, 2015
• International cooperation with the ICC: status quo or improvements? Ancillary meeting "International cooperation in criminal matters in the XXIth century: towards a new approach?", Thirteenth United Nations Congress of Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, Doha, Qatar, April 14, 2015

Also, she wrote several papers:

• The Crisis of the Rule of Law in the European Union in the 2010s, Editorial, Croatian Annual of Criminal Law and Practice, 1/2017, 5-12.
• Legal and Political Limitations of the ICC Enformcement System: Blurring the Distinctive Features of the Criminal Court, Ackerman, Ambos, Sikirić (eds.), Visions of Justice, Essays in Honor of Professor Mirjan Damaška, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2016
• The Directive on the Right of Access to a Lawyer in Criminal Proceedings: Filling a Human Rights Gap in the European Union Legal Order, published in the peer reviewed conference proceedings book “European Criminal Procedure Law in Service of Protection of European Union Financial Interests: State of Play, and Challenges“, Zagreb University Press, 9-23 February 2016
• The legal nature, legal framework and purpose of bail in criminal proceedings: can it survive the decision of the Constitutional court of the RC, No. U-III-1451/2015, to terminate the pre-trial detention of the mayor of the City of Zagreb and to return the bail posted by his defence counsel? (Pravna priroda, pravni okvir i svrha jamstva u kaznenom postupku: mogu li preživjeti odluku Ustavnog suda RH U-III-1451/2015 o ukidanju istražnog zatvora za gradonačelnika Grada Zagreba i vraćanju jamčevine njegova branitelja?) Croatian Annual of Criminal Law and Practice, 1/2015, 9-47
• Constitutional rights, the European Arrest Warrant and EU Criminal Law, chapter in the Croatian Report, forthcoming in Albi, A. (ed) The Role of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance, T.M.C. Asser Press 2017 (co-author)

She created curriculum, introduced a new course at the Faculty of Law University of Zagreb entitled European and International Cooperation in Criminal Matters at the University of Zagreb.