Once a refugee, today an employee of the Senate of Berlin. Bosnia-born Adna Hasanagic is one of 100 judges and state prosecutors who recently joined this institution.

The Hasanagic family fled from the war and left their hometown Banja Luka in 1993. Adna was only a 2-year-old girl then. Today, she is a 28 and has been living in Berlin for the past nine years. She is a successful example of integration into society, according to the German media.

“We want the structure of population to reflect in the ranks of judges. Finally, 40 per cent of people living in Berlin is not of German origin. Germany is their legal state. That's why it is right we focus on the people of foreign origin for our courts, because that is how the identifying with Germany increases,” said Senator for Justice of Berlin Dirk Behrendt.

Adna and her family were among 350,000 refugees who came to Germany from the former Yugoslavia during the 1991-95 period. While her older sister works as a doctor in Frankfurt, Adna decided to study law. As a little girl, she watched a story on The Hague Tribunal and it impressed her. She strongly believed the judges fought for justice. And the first sentence she heard at university was that “the law does not automatically mean justice,” carried the Berliner Zeitung, which said for Adna that she was a bright person.

Adna knows, the daily said, she will have to fight the prejudices, because she is young, she is a woman and has a foreign name.