News and updates from BCSDN and the region
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
Read more →The Expert Council on NGO Law of the Conference of INGOs has just published a review on international standards relating to reporting and disclosure requirements for NGOs. The review is prepared against the background of the perceived trend of Member States imposing onerous reporting and disclosure requirements on NGOs. It is hoped that this publication
Read more →Capping a three-year process, the United Nations Statistics Division has released the final edited version of the United Nations Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work —a groundbreaking statistical guidance manual for nations to use to generate solid data on the world’s third, or social economy, sector—the TSE Sector. This Handbook offers
Read more →On 24 October 2016, the CIVICUS Monitor went live. Two years on, there are ratings for 196 countries, over 1,500 individual updates on civic space have been published and 365,652 views by 73,944 people have been attracted! BCSDN has been part of the Monitor since its beginning, providing updates on civic space in the Western Balkan
Read more →TUSEV has launched the website of Monitoring and Enhancing the Enabling Environment for Civil Society Project. The project, which is funded by European Union and carried out by TUSEV under Civil Society Law Reform Program Area, aims to contribute to the enhancement of an enabling legal and fiscal environment for CSOs in Turkey and to
Read more →The 9th of December 2018 marks 20 years since global leaders adopted the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. This was a major victory for the human rights movement as the international community finally gave due recognition to those brave individuals who devote their lives to fighting for all of our rights. Unfortunately, twenty years after
Read more →Ahead of the G20 summit in November 2018 in Buenos Aires, the Global NPO Coalition sent a letter to the G20 and its members, asking them to take global leadership on reducing bank de-risking, ensuring that all entities, including NPOs, have equal access to financial services. Through a communique at the November summit, the G-20
Read more →The government violated the Law on Amendments to NGOs in all segments of financial support to NGOs and disassembled this process, said Ana Novakovic, CRNVO Executive Director. As Novakovic said, the Law obliges ministries that will finance projects of NGOs, by 1 June of the current year, to propose priority areas for financing in the
Read more →The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recently published Guidelines on effectively implementing the right to participate in public affairs. Various dimensions of that right are covered, with a focus on participation in electoral processes, in non-electoral contexts and at the international level, and
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