Darija Željko was born in 1994 in Karlovac, where she finished primary school Dragojla Jarnević Karlovac and high school Gimnazija Karlovac. During her studies at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb in 2015, she was awarded the Rector’s Prize for the paper “Sisters of Fornication: Statutory Regulation of Women Prostitution in Croatian Territory in the Period between 1852 and 1934, with Special Reference to the City of Karlovac and European Context” under the mentorship of associate professor Dunja Milotić, as well as Award of the Faculty’s Council for success in studies in 2014 and the scholarship for excellence of the University of Zagreb in 2015. She received the Pravnik Association award for the best student paper in December 2016. As part of the Erasmus+ exchange in 2017, she spent one semester at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna and was an intern at the European Parliament and the Embassy of the Kingdom of Belgium in Zagreb. She completed her postgraduate studies in Human Rights at the Central European University in Budapest with special honours in 2019 with a final thesis on “Gender Stereotyping in Cases of Sexual Violence: An Analysis of Regional Human Rights Courts and Croatia”. She worked as a trainee at the Municipal State Attorney’s Office in Zagreb, and since January 2021 she has been employed as an assistant within the Project for the Development of Careers of Young Researchers (DOK-01-2020) of the Croatian Science Foundation at the Department of Criminal Procedure at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb. She enrolled in the postgraduate university doctoral studies in legal sciences in June 2022 under the mentorship of full professor with tenure Zlata Đurđević. She participated in the project “Knowledge, Advisory and Capacity Building Information Tool for Criminal Procedural Rights in Judicial Cooperation” (CrossJustice) funded by the Justice Program (2014-2020) and she currently participates in the project “Systematic Approach to Models of Consensual Justice in Croatian Criminal Procedure”NegJusCro funded by the Croatian Foundation for Science and FACILEX of the European Union (JUST-2022-JCOO). She was an academic mentor to students of the Faculty of Law in the XV, XVI and XVII Regional Moot Court Competition in Human Rights. Since October 2022, she has been an academic mentor in the Group for Protection and Assistance to Victims of Criminal Offenses of the Law Clinic of the Faculty of Law in Zagreb. She passed the bar exam with special honours in July 2022. She is a member of the Croatian Association for Criminal Sciences and Practice, and since March 2023, the administrative secretary of the Croatian Association for European Criminal Law.