Category: News and Events

In a tough competition involving 222 entries, seven prizewinners were selected.

Stancu won the Special Prize for Coverage of Domestic Violence for an article published in Marie Claire Romania, about a young woman whose mother was a victim of domestic violence.  

Odobescu won third place in the Portrait Category with his article The Return of Marius, a feature report about the reintegration of a former prison convict.

Earlier this year, Stancu was awarded another journalistic grant. She is one of the recipients of the 2013-2014 Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism.

Through this she will receive intensive training from leading mental health and journalism experts and a stipend to report on a mental health topic of her choice.

http://www.cartercenter.org/news/pr/mhj-fellows-2013-2014.html   

She and the Romanian photographer Cosmin Bumbut will work on a multimedia project about the post-traumatic stress disorder in children exposed to family violence. For one year the team will examine the culture of education by violence in the Romanian families and society.

Ten journalists from across the region have spent the past few months investigating stories within the overall annual theme ‘Integrity’, tackling issues of corruption, media, politics and the legacy of war.

The Zagreb event represents the culmination of the journalists’ participation in the programme, when they will have the chance to present their work to the selection committee members who will vote for the top three stories.

The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on December 13, which will be attended by the Fellowship programme’s partners, selection committee members and Croatian media.

The winner will be awarded a cash prize of 4,000 euro, with the second and third place runners up receiving 3,000 euro and 1,000 euro respectively.

The final event in Zagreb will also feature meetings with important figures in Croatian media and politics, as well as a cultural programme.

This year’s Fellowship programme began in May in Vienna, where the fellows took part in career development training and fellowship orientation programmes. Each fellow was awarded a 2,000 euro bursary and a further 2,000 euro travel allowance.

As well as travelling to neighbouring Balkan states, thefellows also visited other EU member states including Greece, Czech Republic, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany and Belgium.

The fellowship programme aims to develop and support Balkan journalists reporting on complex reform issues. It was established by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

“The prosecution of war crimes before national courts was part of negotiations with Croatia, and it is now with Montenegro, and it will be for Serbia as well,” Mirel, the director for the western Balkans in the European Commission Directorate General for Enlargement, told the BIRN conference in Belgrade on Thursday.

“But we should note that transitional justice is more than just war crimes trials and it goes beyond courtrooms. Here I would stress the issue of missing persons. How can reconciliation take place if thousands are missing?” he asked.

Mirel told the conference, which focused on transitional justice in the context of Belgrade’s EU ambitions, that Serbia still needed to do more to address the legacy of the 1990s wars.

“One of the problems is that trials in The Hague didn’t lead to a wider debate in the society. And some political leaders participated in the glorification of [Hague] indictees as heroes,” Mirel said.

Transitional justice will not be a specific part of the talks about the rule of law and human rights reforms that Serbia has to make to win membership from Brussels, but some elements like war crimes prosecution will be discussed in negotiations about chapters 23 and 24 in the EU body of legislation, which deal with the rule of law and human rights.

“A number of areas which deal with transitional justice will be touched upon directly through these chapters,” Serbian deputy justice minister Cedomir Backovic told the conference.

Serbian chief war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic pointed out the importance of working with other ex-Yugoslav states to bring suspects to justice.

“Without regional cooperation, our work in prosecuting war criminals would be impossible. But it is important to say that we don’t have the support of [Serbian] institutions and media, unlike our colleagues who prosecute organised crime,” Vukcevic said.

“I am referring to the problems we have with units for witness protection and the police who investigate war crimes,” he added.

The witness protection unit, part of the Serbian police, has been criticised for allegedly intimidating witnesses instead of shielding them.

Speaking about common problems that the region is facing when it comes to prosecuting war criminals, Ivan Jovanovic from the OSCE Mission to Serbia outlined three main problems.

“First is the time that passed from the conflict, second is access to public documents and third is witness protection,” Jovanovic said.

In the part of the conference dedicated to the role of civil society in the upcoming EU negotiations, Jelko Kacin, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Serbia, stressed the importance of civil society being part of the negotiations.

“The European Union is asking Serbia to enroll civil society as part of the negotiations with the EU, especially when it comes to the chapters 23 and 24, which will be opened first and closed last,” Kacin said.

Jelena Djokic Jovic from Zagreb-based civil rights organisation Documenta he conference also heard how a Croatian campaign group called Platform 112 managed to convince the government to include some transitional justice issues in Croatia’s EU membership negotiations.

“Here I am mainly referring to a new network of courts – four specialised courts which are now prosecuting war crimes,” Jovic said.