Category: Programmes

Summary:

At the core of the project is the struggle for spheres of influence on the Eurasian continent, which has been going on between Russia, China and the EU for around a decade. Among other things, the project aims to identify Russian, Chinese and EU economic activities in these two broad regions, expose their consequences and downsides and inform the general public about its findings.

Political, economic and cultural ties with Russia, “inherited” from the Cold War, are still operative to varying degrees in these countries. However, the binding and integrating power of an economically weak, revisionist Russia, which relies above all on military strength, is clearly declining – and even driving away some former partners (Georgia).

The EU meanwhile is struggling to maintain its attractiveness because the demands that Brussels places on recipients of its financial support are high and often involve lengthy reform and adjustment processes that often cause frustration and disappointment among partners (Western Balkans, Georgia).

The main beneficiary of this frustration is China. By offering to finance large investments in long-awaited infrastructure projects, quickly and easily, it has found a willing audience in all the project countries. Although capital from China entails considerable risks and disadvantages for the recipient countries, the potential ecological, social and political consequences of cooperation with China in the recipient countries is barely publicly discussed.

Donor:

German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Main objectives:

 Objective 1: Strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in the project countries, as they are the main pillars of a critical public discourse on the effects of economic cooperation with China, Russia and the EU.

Objective 2: Increase skills and strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in the project countries to continuously inform a broad public with high-quality reporting about the background and consequences of international economic cooperation.

Objective 3: Increase the capacities of participating journalists to join cross-border projects and engage in data journalism.

Objective 4: Advance the reporting and publishing of complex investigative stories achieved through interesting and understandable preparation and a strategic public relations campaigns with a wide audience.

Objective 5: Increase the capacities of the participating journalists to become parts of international networks whose members support each other in researching and analysing global economic relationships.

Main Activities:

• Hold several meetings and trainings throughout the project duration (in Tbilisi, Belgrade, Tashkent, Podgorica, and Sarajevo).
• Organise and conduct online capacity-building workshops and sessions.
• Work on a database and an interactive map to present the spread of FDIs in the project countries.
• Produce country-based and cross-border long reads and investigative reports.
• Develop curricula for self-study.

Target Groups:

• The direct target group includes 25 journalists from the seven project countries who deal with questions of international economic cooperation either as freelancers or as permanent employees.
• The indirect target group consists of two subgroups:
• group of experts from diverse Non-Governmental Organizations (around 150 people involved in the project through trainings, researches and publications)
• general audience in the participating countries.

Main implementer:

n-ost

Partners:

BIRN Hub

Anhor.uz, Uzbekistan

JAM News, Georgia

Summary:

Corruption remains one of the main obstacles to strengthening the rule of law across the Western Balkans, undermining democratic governance, public trust, and fair access to public services. Politicised decision-making, weak oversight, and limited accountability mechanisms continue to create space for abuse of power, particularly where public resources and appointments intersect with narrow political or private interests.

In Montenegro, corruption continues to affect public confidence in institutions and the credibility of reforms. Progress on transparency and accountability remains uneven, and civil society and independent media have repeatedly flagged gaps between formal commitments and practice. For example, reporting has highlighted how the state still lacks key transparency tools in areas like public procurement and access to data that would enable meaningful scrutiny and oversight. Reporting has also underlined the importance of ensuring that anti-corruption bodies have the independence and resources needed to function effectively.

In Kosovo, corruption and clientelism remain persistent challenges, particularly in areas such as public contracting and institutional governance, where accountability mechanisms are often perceived as weak or inconsistently applied. Balkan Insight’s country governance profiling similarly points to ongoing issues linked to corruption risks and the need for stronger transparency and oversight in public decision-making.

Across both contexts, education, healthcare, and the environment remain sectors vulnerable to politicisation, conflicts of interest, and misuse of public funds. Addressing these risks requires stronger cooperation between citizens, civil society, and local media, so that community concerns translate into credible evidence, public scrutiny, and pressure for institutional follow-up.

This initiative in a broader sense aims to contribute to free speech, open debate and free sharing of information, reducing corruption, all forms of organised crime including drug and human trafficking, influence from hostile entities and countries, creating a more favourable democratic and business environment.

Donor:

United States Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Main Objectives:

1. Empower local media, civil society and citizens to be able to identify corruption in their communities, report it to responsible authorities and hold institutions accountable.
2. Strengthen civil society’s and media’s capacities to report and counter corruption at national and local level to influence changes, with a special emphasis on the environment, education and healthcare
3. Improve policies and/or laws through constructive engagement between civil society, government(s) and/or the private sector

Main Activities:

1.1: Conduct needs assessments of local CSOs and media;

1.2: Implement tailor-made trainings and mentoring sessions;

1.3: Develop and implement a digital tool for citizens’ reporting corruption.

2.1: Provide sub-grants to local CSOs and media in Montenegro and Kosovo.

2.2: Develop and publish anti-corruption stories based on inputs from citizens;

2.3: Develop and publish anti-corruption policy papers based on the needs of local communities;

2.4: Promote anti-corruption campaigns through mainstream media, social media, partner websites and BIRN platforms.

2.5: Provide sub-grants to independent journalists in Montenegro and Kosovo for anti-corruption content production.

2.6: Support national and cross-border investigative journalism on corruption across the Western Balkans.

3.1: Organise workshops between media and local CSOs to strengthen cooperation and joint action.

3.2: Organise anti-corruption forums gathering CSOs, media, institutions, the private sector and international stakeholders.

3.3: Implement community events linked to concrete anti-corruption activities and local advocacy efforts.

Target Groups:

Civil society organisations, media outlets, journalists, independent journalists, local and central institutions, justice-sector actors, private-sector representatives and citizens of Montenegro, Kosovo and the wider Western Balkans.

Main implementer:

BIRN HUB

Partners:

Civic Alliance, Eos Tech Trust

Summary:

Although more than 20 years have passed since military conflicts in the Balkans ended, former Yugoslav countries have been slow to implement transitional justice mechanisms regarding human rights violations. In the past, stakeholders in the field of transitional justice in the Balkans were mainly focused on criminal justice, which had its foothold in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ITCY, and its successor, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. On completion of the work of the tribunals, domestic courts were to take over the prosecution of war crimes suspects.

However, the number of such trials is declining, and new indictments remain focused on low-ranking perpetrators. Although the few existing trials are noteworthy, and BIRN is closely monitoring and reporting on them, it is important to focus on other segments of transitional justice and link it with criminal justice efforts. In this context, when regional cooperation among local judicial institutions remains key to advancing accountability and ending impunity, BIRN aims to increase the awareness of the key stakeholders and the public about these processes.

Aside from ongoing trials, court archives are a repository of testimonies and evidence presented at earlier trials, which should be used to create fact-based narratives about wartime past. Archives from the ICTY and local courts in all former Yugoslav republics make this conflict one of the best documented in history. Unfortunately, however, most of the archives are not easily accessible; a considerable amount of essential material does not see the light of day.

BIRN has already implemented two projects supported by the Matra Regional Rule of Law Program. The first, “Accountability and regional cooperation in prosecuting war crimes in former Yugoslavia”, focused on criminal justice efforts and regional cooperation among local prosecutors’ offices. The second, “Shaping and promoting war crime trial narratives in the Western Balkans”, aimed to promote and strengthen criminal justice and guarantees of non-recurrence through regular, in-depth, high standard reporting on war crime trials, but also to promote and disseminate the archives of the international and local courts.

This project is a follow-up to these previous actions, expanding the work on court archives and memorialisation processes but also providing interested individuals with the opportunity to research archives from different and often complementary perspectives. This way, overall reconciliation processes are being reinforced by broadening the scope of independent professionals interested in becoming active in securing guarantees of non-recurrence.

Donor:

Matra Regional Rule of Law, The Netherlands

Main objectives:

Overall objective – Strengthen transitional justice mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo through enhanced usage of courts’ archives and professional reporting on war crimes.

Specific objective 1 – Reinforce the role of local artists, journalists, researchers and historians in becoming drivers of change in the overall reconciliation processes in the Balkan region.

Specific objective 2 – Improve intercultural dialogue and guarantees of non-recurrence through enhanced usage of court archives for the creation of multimedia fact-based content combating disinformation and denial caused by mainstream nationalistic narratives.

 Main Activities:

1. Produce and publish online 1,500 daily reports and analyses of war crime trials’ monitoring and transitional justice processes at all levels of the judiciary. The most important ones will be translated into BCMS and Albanian.
2. More than 3,000 republications in local, regional and international media outlets.
3. Publish at least five data-driven multimedia investigations into war crime cases.
4. Artists, journalists and historians to produce at least 10 small projects using international and local court archives.
5. Upload up to 20 multimedia pieces (essays, articles, photographs, video materials and archaeological research papers) to the Mass Graves Database.
6. Update Mass Grave Database with small-size mass graves locations
7. Hold one regional conference with up to 100 participants.
8. Hold one archive workshop for youth, mentor 10 young people to produce 20 oral history videos and hold five exchange programmes.
9. Develop tool for journalists, researchers, historians to more easily search court archives.

Target Groups:

Journalists, media, victims of war, researchers, historians, artists, academia

Main implementer:

BIRN Hub

Partners:

BIRN BiH

Project associates:

n/a

Summary: 

At the core of the project is the struggle for spheres of influence on the Eurasian continent, which has been going on between Russia, China and the EU for around a decade. Among other things, the project aims to identify Russian, Chinese and EU economic activities in these two broad regions, expose their consequences and downsides and inform the general public about its findings.

Political, economic and cultural ties with Russia, “inherited” from the Cold War, are still operative to varying degrees in these countries. However, the binding and integrating power of an economically weak, revisionist Russia, which relies above all on military strength, is clearly declining – or even driving away some former partners (Georgia).

The EU is meanwhile struggling to maintain its attractiveness because the demands that Brussels places on recipients of its financial support are high, and often involve lengthy reform and adjustment processes that often cause frustration and disappointment among partners (Western Balkans, Georgia).

China is the main beneficiary of this frustration. By offering to finance large investments in long-awaited infrastructure projects quickly and easily, it has found a willing audience in all the project countries. Although capital from China entails considerable risks and disadvantages for the recipient countries, the potential ecological, social and political consequences of cooperation with China in the recipient countries is barely publicly discussed.

Donor:

German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Main objectives:

Objective 1: Strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in project countries, as they are the main pillars of a critical public discourse on the effects of economic cooperation with China, Russia and the EU.

Objective 2: Increase skills and strengthen the capacities of independent and public media in project countries to continuously inform a broad public with high-quality reporting about the background and consequences of international economic cooperation.

Objective 3: Increase the capacities of the participating journalists to join cross-border projects and engage in data journalism.

Objective 4: Advance the reporting and publication of complex and data-heavy stories achieved through interesting and understandable preparation and strategic public relations campaigns with a wide audience.

Objective 5: Increase the capacities of participating journalists to become parts of international networks whose members support each other in researching and analysing global economic relationships.

Main Activities:

• Several offline meetings and trainings throughout the project’s duration (in Tbilisi, Belgrade, Tashkent, Podgorica, Sarajevo).
• Capacity-building measures/workshops online.
• Work on the database and an interactive map to present the spread of FDIs in the project countries.
• Production of country-based and cross-border long reads and investigative reports.
• Development of curricula for self-study.

 Target Groups:

• The direct target group includes 25 journalists from the seven project countries who deal with questions of international economic cooperation either as freelancers or as permanent employees.
• The indirect target group consists of two subgroups:
• group of experts and multipliers from NGOs and science(around 150 people involved in the project through further training measures, research and publications)
• general audience in the participating countries.

Main implementer:

n-ost

Partners:

BIRN Hub

Anhor.uz, Uzbekistan

JAM News, Georgia

Summary:

The Greater Internet Freedom (GIF) program is a four-year, global program that works to preserve an open, interoperable, reliable and secure Internet – and by extension, protect individuals, civil society organizations, media outlets and vulnerable groups who rely on it to realize fundamental freedoms. Through its dual objective of enhancing digital security for civil society and media and increasing citizen engagement in Internet government, GIF supports a diverse range of elements that impact Internet freedom.

The core of GIF’s approach centres on putting regional and local organizations at the forefront of this work. By enabling local and regional partners to lead this work, GIF helps local actors to build stronger trusted networks with peer organizations in their regions and around the world – and gain technical expertise from expert international organizations and share lessons learned.

Donor:

USAID

Main objectives:

 Increased Citizen Engagement in Internet Governance.

 Main Activities:

1. Working with local advocacy partners, to promote and advance policies to protect an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet
2. Identify and build relationship with key stakeholders to safeguard internet freedom, IF, at regional and national levels
3. Expand and mainstream IF issues regionally, by training and mentoring human rights CSOs to integrate internet freedom advocacy into their advocacy programs.
4. Coordinating with local advocacy partners to analyze and respond to policies that risk closing civic space
5. Raise awareness among regulators, policy makers, service providers / private sector, and government actors on challenges and opportunities to uphold internet freedoms
6. Pursue locally and regionally relevant innovative approaches to spreading digital rights awareness, including working with universities to expand curricula; documentation of violations by both private and public sectors, etc.
7. Sharing best practice responses to the above approaches
8. Play a leading role in regional and international Internet governance forums

Target Groups:

• General public
• CSOs
• Journalists
• Human rights defenders

Regional partner for Western Balkans:

BIRN Hub

Implemented by:

Internews

Local Partners [2020-2024]:

BIRN Albania (Albania), Center Science and Innovation for Development (Albania), Youth Centre KVART (BiH), CA Why not (BiH), Levizja FOL (Kosovo), Kosovar Centre for Security Studies (Kosovo), Open Data Kosovo (Kosovo), Independent Journalism Center (Moldova), Helsinki Committee for Human Rights (N. Macedonia), IMPETUS (N. Macedonia), Metamorphosis (N. Macedonia), Da se zna (Serbia), Belgrade Centre for Human Rights (Serbia), Belgrade International Law Circle (Serbia). SHARE Foundation (Serbia).

Summary:

Media play an important role in the fragile balance of a post-conflict situation in a region characterized by linguistic and ethnic diversity: media can break down issues of regional, national and international significance into local contexts and idioms. They represent the most effective tool for holding local institutions to account. They also enjoy a potentially high level of trust in their local target group. However, when it comes to environmental and climate reporting in the media in the Balkans, systematic and competent reporting is not being done as yet.

 Journalists need more background knowledge on complex environmental and climate issues, especially related to EU regulations, which are relevant for the Balkans. Journalists need additional skills in research, data analysis and fact-checking as well as financial resources. Finally, as a result of a lack of resources, journalists lack opportunities for networking and cross-border cooperation with colleagues investigating similar topics in other countries. Connections to regional and pan-European networks would bring new perspectives and more sustainability for the journalists interested in these topics.

In response to these needs, the project is intended to carry out capacity on three levels:

• Participating journalists and media are aware of the importance of climate issues, in particular the cross-border nature of a problem that needs to be addressed collectively in the region. Through two workshops and a final event, their skills to investigate these topics will be strengthened and their networking possibilities improved. Finally, resources will be provided for the production of their stories during the project.
• Participating journalists and media will network with colleagues from other countries so that they can access a wealth of experience and know-how in the field of climate reporting.
• Participating journalists and media may better understand the special responsibility they have in raising public awareness on climate change. 

Donor:

Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Main objectives: 

• To achieve more quality reporting on climate change and environmental issues through tailored workshops, production of stories, peer-to-peer learning and cross-border cooperation. Participating journalists and media will gain knowledge and resources to investigate different environmental issues.
• To integrate participants into different journalistic networks. Through their integration into the n-ost and BIRN network, participants will be better networked throughout Europe and enabled to produce transnational, collaborative work.
• To raise public awareness on climate change and the environment.

Main Activities:

• Project start, central strategy development
• Call for participation and selection of participants
• Kick-off meeting with all participants
• Selection of topics and trainers, planning workshops
• First workshop
• Follow-up workshop and development of stories
• Second workshop
• Follow-up second workshop and finalization of stories
• Publication of stories and videos about the stories
• Final event

Target Groups:

• 18 climate/environmental journalists
• 18 local/regional media
• Visitors to the final event
• Audience of publications/stories published within the project
• Viewers of the videos related to the publications/stories

Main implementer:

n-ost, Germany