Since hundreds of Balkan extremists went abroad to fight for Islamic State and other militant groups, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia have come under increased international pressure to clamp down on the financing of terrorism.
Balkans states might be prepared on paper, but in practice they are struggling to confront the growing threat from cyber-attacks. Bosnia doesn’t have a state-level strategy.
In trying to control the pandemic narrative, governments in the region have turned to draconian tools, muzzling media, arresting critics and bombarding social media giants with requests to take down posts and shut down accounts.
Mirsada Tursunovic, who was raped by a soldier at a detention camp during the Bosnian war, explains how it took 17 years to overcome her fear of being socially ostracised and give evidence against her attacker.
Since the fall of the Islamic State ‘caliphate’, piecemeal efforts by Balkan states to repatriate their nationals from refugee camps in Syria means more than 100 children are still living in squalid, unsafe conditions.
Laws and counter-terrorism strategies in the Balkans demonstrate a failure on the part of governments to take seriously the threat from far-right extremism, according to a BIRN analysis.
Bosnia lags behind the rest of the Western Balkans in terms of its strategy on countering terrorism, particularly how to handle fighters returning from foreign wars.
Three years after the assassination of Kosovo Serb opposition party leader Oliver Ivanovic, the still-unsolved murder case is plagued by claims of political interference, obstruction of investigators, concealment of evidence and judicial incompetence.
The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt acutely by Turkey’s LGBT community, in terms of employment, income, hate speech, violence and discrimination.
Research into verdicts handed down by the Hague war crime tribunal and domestic courts in the former Yugoslavia shows previously unresearched links between wartime sexual violence and trafficking - as well as highlighting that many perpetrators have gone unpunished.
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