Category: Outputs

Kosovo War Crimes Court E-Book

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has published an e-book about the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, aiming to increase understanding about the newly-established court that will try ex-guerrillas for crimes during and after the war.

BIRN’s e-book, entitled ‘Kosovo Specialist Chambers: From Investigations to Indictments, published on October 31, 2017, includes expert analysis, interviews and archive reports that trace the history of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers from the initial Council of Europe investigation into wartime and post-war crimes by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters to the establishment of the new court to try them in The Hague.

Film ‘Your House was My Home’

Documentary ‘Your House was My Home’, which tells how Serbs and Croats from Kula in Croatia and Hrtkovci in Serbia swapped houses and moved to each other’s villages after the outbreak of war in 1991, had its television premiere on Al Jazeera Balkans in September 2017.

The half-hour documentary follows the stories of two of the villages’ residents – Goran Trlaic, who left Kula for Hrtkovci, and Stjepan Roland, who left Hrtkovci for Kula. Before the 1990s conflict, Kula was predominantly populated by Serbs, while the majority of the people in Hrtkovci in Serbia.

Since the end of World War II, they had lived peacefully together – until the first multi-party elections in 1990, when nationalists came to power and minorities were not welcome in either republic anymore.

A series of threats and violent incidents started a chain reaction as increasing numbers of inhabitants of Kula and Hrtkovci exchanged properties so they could escape to safety.

This was described by officials as ‘humane relocation’, but it was actually a forced population exchange in the midst of a war.

The personal recollections in ‘Your House Was My Home’ show how this forced population exchange had a devastating long-term effect on the lives and relationships of ordinary people from both villages, said Baljak.

See more information about the film here.

Media Ownership Monitor – Serbia

Research by BIRN and the German branch of Reporters without Borders, presented in June 2017, highlights the extent to which the Serbian media space has become dominated by a handful of broadcasters and media companies.

The biggest threats to media pluralism in Serbia are the concentration of audience and political influence over the media.

BIRN and Reporters without Borders also launched the website, which contains the database with information about media ownership and audience shares.

According to the research, 62.35 per cent of the audience in Serbia is shared between four broadcasters that own seven channels.

Control and Freedom of Media – Journalists’ Testimonies

Serbian media outlets’ economic weakness means journalists are vulnerable to pressure on their reporting, suggests research conducted as part of a project involving BIRN, the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia and the Slavko Curuvija Foundation.

Serbian media’s economic unsustainability and dependence on the authorities for advertising, combined with a poor professional culture and a lack of protection and financial security for journalists, allows politicians to exert control over media organisations, according to the research.

According to the findings of the research, conducted by the Slavko Curuvija Foundation as part of a project with BIRN and the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia, pressure usually comes from the authorities and political parties, then from editors, and then advertisers.

Of all the journalists polled, 69 per cent said they encountered at least one form of pressure from the authorities. Over half of them – 56 per cent – encountered pressure from political party representatives.

Editorial pressure was experienced by 47 per cent; 41 per cent faced pressure from management, a third from the advertisers and 30 per cent from the media owners.

Follow this link to find out more.

BIRN Albania Publishes Online Court and Crime Reporting Manual

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania has published an online court and crime reporting manual which aims to strengthen the capacities of local journalists to report on complex cases from local courts and law enforcement institutions.

The manual was written by Flutura Kusari, an international expert on media law, Albanian media expert Elira Canga and Dorian Matlija from the Res Publica legal centre in Tirana. The drafting and publication of the manual, entitled ‘Reporting of Court and Criminal Cases in the Media’, was supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the USAID-funded ‘Justice for All’ project.

Published in the Albanian language, the manual is an online resource for reporters, journalism students, researchers and people who have an interest in how the media reports on criminal cases and court cases which are of legitimate public interest.

The manual was drafted to give journalists and media practitioners, but also to the wider public, an understanding of the institutions and the hierarchy of the judicial system in Albania and the path that civil, criminal and administrative cases follow.

The manual also aims to serve as a resource for journalists who report from the courts and on criminal cases on daily basis, in order to better understand their rights and responsibilities, the regulations and self-regulation of the media, the right to information and access to public court documents as envisioned in the local legal framework, as well as best international practices.

Published with the goal of being periodically updated, the manual also provides ample tip sheets for journalists who report from courts and on crime cases, as well as advice on how to protect sources and whistleblowers.

Municipalities Uncovered: New BIRN Macedonia Database Published

Ahead of the October 15 local elections, BIRN Macedonia published ‘Municipalities Uncovered’, a database on the promises and accomplishments of mayors in the 80 Macedonian municipalities plus the capital, Skopje, during their current mandate.

http://opstini.prizma.mk

The results show that mayors delivered less than half the capital projects they planned during their four years in office.

The BIRN database, published on September 20, gives Macedonians a more accurate understanding of what projects were promised and realised between the last local elections in 2013 and the upcoming vote on October 15.

Many of the current mayors are competing for a new term.

The database aims to remind the politicians about their past promises and help voters identify those that they did not deliver.

The database also analyses the municipal budgets for capital investments as well as their overall budgets from 2013 to 2016.

It shows that over the four-year period, the mayors pledged to spend a total of 762 million euros on such projects but actually invested less than half of that – 336 million euros. This was 46.7 per cent of the initially planned budget for capital investments.

The database presents data on how much the municipalities spent on capital investments per capita ranging from 1,170 euros per capita over this period in Novaci, 673.4 euros in Makedonska Kamenica, to the three rural, mainly ethnic Albanian municipalities, Aracinovo and Saraj, which spent the least money on infrastructure.

Aracinovo holds the worst record, having spent only 24.7 euros per capita.

The local election campaign in Macedonia started on September 25.

A tough political battle is expected, pitting the now governing Social Democrats, SDSM, against the right-wing VMRO DPMNE party, which held power nationally for 11 years and was ousted in May.

“Missing you…”

“Missing You…” is a documentary that depicts the suffering and reality facing people who lost family members during times of peace and war.

Apart from the search for the missing, the film describes how identification through DNA analysis is conducted and lists the governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in seeking missing persons.

The fate of those who went missing during war and peace is the same. The documentary shows how to alleviate the suffering of people who are searching for their family members, both at the regional and international level.

The documentary is available on Detektor.ba and BIRN YouTube Channel.

The Silent Scream

“Silent Scream” is a documentary that depicts the trauma that sexual abuse victims still feel twenty years after the end of the Bosnian war.

Featuring the testimonies of women and men who survived sexual abuse during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as neighbouring countries, the documentary aims to encourage all victims to report the crimes they experienced and speak up about what they went through.

Experts, NGO representatives and judicial institutions appear in the “Silent Scream.” They describe the problems victims have to deal with and explain what witnesses have to go through when trying to prove that incidents of sexual wartime violence occurred.

The documentary is available on Detektor.ba and BIRN YouTube Channel.