News and updates from BCSDN and the region
Civil society from across the world are calling on all UN Member States to demonstrate their support to environmental human rights defenders. At its current 40th session, the Human Rights Council is discussing a draft resolution on environmental human rights defenders. This is a timely and important initiative as UN agencies, human rights organisations and the media have
Read more →At the CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE) Policy Conference 2019 held in Beirut, CSOs tackled emerging issues surrounding development cooperation and affirmed their commitment to advocate for and contribute towards achieving development effectiveness. The discussions culminated in the adoption of an outcome document, the Beirut Declaration: Upholding Accountability, Building Solidarity for Effective, People-Centred Development. A
Read more →In today’s fast changing environments, it is beneficial for organizations to conduct an exercise to self-evaluate their accountability practices on a regular basis, and to adapt in real-time. In light of a Dynamic Accountability approach, CSOs can only become more transparent and effective when they are ready to turn themselves inside out, including regular spaces
Read more →The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) has announced a call for proposals to increase use of the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association (UNSR) in civic space awareness raising and advocacy campaigns at the national and sub-national levels. Grant amounts are not fixed,
Read more →The EU enlargement process in the Western Balkans has fallen short of reproducing the transformative impact it had in Central and Eastern Europe. Solveig Richter and Natasha Wunsch point to state capture as the core obstacle to deep democratisation in the region and argue that EU conditionality not only fails to overcome detrimental governance patterns, but unintentionally contributes to
Read more →Women and girls represent half of the world’s 7.6 billion of population and, therefore, also half of its potential. Gender equality, besides being a fundamental human right, is essential to achieve peaceful societies, with full human potential and sustainable development. Moreover, it has been shown that empowering women spurs productivity and economic growth. This 3-day
Read more →Warsaw Euro-Atlantic Summer Academy (WEASA) 2019: Humans, Machines, Politics, Truth is a summer school for mid-career professionals from the Eastern Partnership, the Western Balkans, and Poland that focuses primarily on the intersection of technology and society. WEASA is addressed to participants coming from a cross-section of society and specifically from public administration, academia, think-tanks, media and
Read more →MacArthur launched a new round of its 100&Change competition for a single $100 million grant to help solve one of the world’s most critical social challenges. 100&Change remains open to organizations and collaborations working in any field, anywhere in the world. Proposals must identify a problem and offer a solution that promises significant and durable change; they will be
Read more →The European Fund for the Balkans (EFB) announces the call for applications for the new initiative – EFB Fellowship at the Austrian Parliament. The fellowship is designed for the public servants working in the administrations of the National Parliaments in Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia, who are proficient in German language
Read more →National and pan-European NGO platforms for development and relief, representing the current and upcoming EU Council Presidencies: FOND (Romania), Fingo (Finland), CROSOL (Croatia), and CONCORD (pan-European) joined forces to increase public support for a European Union which puts the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, development cooperation, human rights, and civil society space at the centre
Read more →Over 90 percent of Europeans surveyed in recent research by German think tank d|part and the Open Society European Policy Institute believe that the rule of law, pluralism, and the protection of individual rights are essential for a good society. As part of a collaborative project called Voices on Values, researchers asked more than 6,000
Read more →Governments across the world are increasingly attacking CSOs by creating laws that subject them and their staff to surveillance, nightmarish bureaucratic hurdles and the ever-present threat of imprisonment. Amnesty International’s new report: Laws Designed to Silence: The Global Crackdown on Civil Society Organisations reveals the startling number of countries that are using bullying techniques and
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