News and updates from BCSDN and the region
The right to free assembly is an indispensable element of democracy and a healthy civil society. Recent years have seen a new era of mass protests, but also a significant increase in practical restrictions on the right in Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership countries. This year’s ECNL monitoring reports build on previous efforts to monitor
Read more →The Western Balkans has attracted new attention in recent months. Though, as ever, not for the best of reasons. People have taken years of accumulated anger, frustration, and rage out onto the streets. In the last 20 years, the Western Balkans has seen little progress. Political leadership from the 1990s may have changed colours, but
Read more →Free assembly is vital to democracy. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that authoritarian governments in Europe are restricting this right in illegitimate ways. In democratic societies, free assembly is one of the instruments by which people can bring about social change. There are some justified ways to put impositions on public
Read more →Open Government Partnership (OGP) was founded on the idea that public policy reform is better when government officials engage with civil society actors. Because of this, OGP cannot succeed without the ability of people to freely organize, participate, and communicate about policy. This is referred to as “civic space.” Yet, based on an analysis of
Read more →In light of the limited social movement literature, this paper aims to hypothesise the reasons why individuals in the Global South disengage from activism, making activism unsustainable over a lifetime. The paper analyses the reasons put forward by scholars to explain initial activist participation, inferring from this that four lenses are vital to utilise in
Read more →A new analysis, published by Civic Initiatives, describes the space for the functioning of civil society in Serbia in the last 5 years in systemic…
Read more →The global state of freedom of expression and information is at its lowest point for ten years, according to Article19 Expression Agenda 17/18. The price for speaking out and protecting the right to freedom of expression around the world is high. With 78 journalists and 312 human rights defenders murdered in 2017, many more incarcerated,
Read more →Thirty-two European and international human rights and digital rights organizations sent an open letter to ministers ahead of the Justice and Home Affairs Council that was held on the 6-7 December 2018. The signatories expressed their concern about the European Commission’s proposed ‘Regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online’. In its current form,
Read more →Governments and investors everywhere should take notice today as a group of major brands call for protecting human rights defenders and civic freedoms, which are under attack across the world. The statement is the first of its kind, with supporters including Unilever, adidas, Primark, ABN AMRO, Anglo American, Leber Jeweler, Domini and the Investors Alliance
Read more →Civil society space is increasingly a key issue for humanitarian organisations. Independent research carried out for ICVA in the summer of 2018 sought to identify civil society needs in this area and help define the potential role of ICVA in helping and supporting its membership to navigate, protect and expand civil society space. Civil society
Read more →The existing Draft Law on Social Entrepreneurship is deficient and its adoption would lead to exclusion of the majority of the existing social enterprises from a future legal regulation, according to a statement by Civic Initiatives. The wording of the Law, which was addressed in a public hearing until 23 November, exclusively limits the notion
Read more →On 17 November 2018, Yiğit Aksakoğlu, a human rights defender who serves as the Turkey Country Director for the Bernard van Leer Foundation, was arrested on the allegation of “attempting to overthrow the government or to avoid, partially or entirely, its performance”. In the early morning of 16 November 2018, police carried out simultaneous raids
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