News and updates from BCSDN and the region
On the occasion of its 125th session, to be held in Geneva from 4 to 29 March 2019, the Human Rights Committee will hold a half day of general discussion in preparation for a General Comment on Article 21 (Right of Peaceful Assembly) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The purpose of
Read more →The compendium provides a compilation of extracts taken from opinions adopted by the Expert Council with respect to various issues of compliance by proposed and adopted legislation with European and international standards relating to NGOs. The extracts are systematised by reference to the different themes addressed in the opinions so as to give an overall
Read more →As security – rather than protecting rights and freedoms – becomes the top priority of governments worldwide, laws have increasingly been used to obstruct the work of media professionals in the 35 countries that are in or affiliated with the European Union. Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project, which monitors violations against media professionals
Read more →This report presents new data on employment and wages in private, nonprofit establishments in the United States from 2007 through 2016. Information of the sort can be of enormous importance to sector leaders, government policy-makers, and citizens at large. What these data show, among other things, is that nonprofit organizations are a far more sizable
Read more →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,
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