Tag: Albania

BIRN Albania’s roundtable on the financial industry held on February 1^st  in Tirana was part of a programme called “Exposing Corruption in Albania”, which is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, NED.

The project aims to expose corruption in the financial industry by bridging the gap between civil society and investigative journalists, in order to uncover abuses of power, abuse of client trust and abuse of regulations.

About 20 representatives of non-governmental organisations and journalists discussed the topics to be investigated, which ranged from transparency of the financial sector, investment funds’ disclosures with clients and the ability of regulatory institutions to monitor their activities.

Participants at the roundtable also listed questionable loan practices from banks and debt collection services as topics of concern.

The topics highlighted by the NGOs will be listed in BIRN Albania’s upcoming call for investigative stories in the field of financial industry. 

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania launched a call for investigative stories on local government on November 27th.

The call is part of the project “Strengthening the Local Partnership between Media and Civil Society”, while the grants are supported by Leviz Albania and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Three journalists will be awarded grants to cover their expenses while conducting investigations and writing their stories on local government.

The journalists will have some three months to dig deeper and research their ideas, and will also have the opportunity to work with experienced editors as mentors to guide them through the process of writing in accordance with BIRN standards.
The call only applies to journalists from Albania and closes on December 18th.

Click for more information about the application procedure, with details in Albanian.

The roundtable held on November 18 in Tirana was part of a programme called ‘Exposing Corruption in Albania’, which is financed by the Open Society Foundation in Albania (OSFA).

The project aims to expose corruption cases in local government by bridging the gap between civil society and investigative journalists, in order to uncover abuses of power.

About 25 representatives of non-governmental organisations and journalists discussed the topics to be investigated, which ranged from tax collection to the delivery and procurement of services by local government units.

The participants at the roundtable also listed corrupt practices in the procurement of waste collection and recycling services, concessionary agreements and their impact on the public, logging contracts and conflict of interests in employee recruitment schemes as topics of concern.

The topics highlighted by the NGOs will be listed in BIRN Albania’s upcoming call for investigative stories in the field of local government.

The Central European Initiative and the South East Europe Media Organisation, in special partnership with the Media Program South East Europe of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, on Wednesday announced that BIRN Albania journalist Lindita Cela is the winner of the CEI SEEMO Award for Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism 2016 in the category of “Professional Journalists”.

For over more than 15 years as a reporter she has been covering complex stories with a major impact in Albanian society, showing impressive courage and determination. 

“Cela was awarded for her overall professional achievements and hard-hitting investigations exposing corruption scandals in the highest levels of power as well as revelations on Albania’s organised crime networks, stretching from the Accursed Mountains to the streets of Brussels,” the Central European Initiative said.

This year’s CEI-SEEMO prize in the category of “Young Professional Journalists” went to Artsiom Harbatsevich, from Minsk, Belarus. He has worked at Intex-press and Nasha Niva and was awarded for his investigative reporting that had significant impact on and repercussions for his country.

A Special Mention was assigned to Iurie Sănduță, director of RISE Moldova and member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP.

Çela and Harbatsevich will receive the awards offered by the CEI  -4,000 and 1,000 euros respectively at the South East Europe Media Forum in Belgrade, Serbia, on 21-22 November 2016.

The workshop in Durres from November 4-6 focused on multimedia techniques which can be used by journalists in telling stories about people making change in their communities as well as the transparency of local governance.

The training was part of BIRN Albania’s project, Strengthening the Local Partnership between Media and Civil Society.

The project, funded by Leviz Albania and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, aims to strengthen the mechanisms available to the public to influence local government institutions and increase transparency by increasing cooperation between journalists, civil society groups and grassroots organisations.

During the first day of the workshop, BIRN Albania editor Besar Likmeta presented the key findings of the report Local Government Under the Lens of Freedom of Information, in which the journalists present at the workshop had participated as monitors.

New opportunities to contribute video-based stories to BIRN Albania’s publication Reporter.al were also discussed with local reporters.

On the second day of the workshop, documentary film-maker Elton Baxhaku held three training sessions on video reportage, the techniques of shooting and editing a mini video documentary.

On the third day of the workshop, well-known Albanian photojournalist Armando Babani held a workshop on the importance of photography to illustrate feature stories.    

The goal of the three-day workshop was to raise BIRN contributors’ capacities to produce multimedia-rich stories which increase their audience reach.

This report was published as part of BIRN Albania’s project, Strengthening the Local Partnership between Media and Civil Society.

The project, funded by Leviz Albania and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, aims to strengthen the pressure mechanisms of the public on local government institutions and increase transparency, by strengthening cooperation between journalists, civil society groups and grassroots organizations.

The report contains the results on the transparency of the 61 local government units in Albania, based on 50 indicators. According to the monitoring data this indicators were realised by local municipalities on the level of 43 per cent, with the majority of the municipalities failing to realize half of the monitored indicators.

The findings of the report show that local municipalities in Albania are more transparent when it comes to the category/indicator of “freedom of information” “municipal councils,” while the category where they are less transparent on a national level are: “financial transparency,” “legislation” and “public consultation.”

Apart from the big picture created on the measurement of these indicators on a national scale, the detailed results for every municipality reveal an even more chaotic situation, where the application of the law on freedom of information, which forces municipalities to make public or available certain amount of information and documents in hardcopy and online, it’s not determined by the size of the municipality, geographic location or budget.

The monitoring of municipalities for this report was carried out in June 2016 from a network of local journalists across Albania

Click here for copy of the report in Albanian

The workshop in the village of Drymades in southern Albania, supported by the Open Society Foundation in Albania and the Swedish Development Agency, SIDA, was aimed at refining the skills of investigative journalists with whom BIRN Albania has been working over the past two years.

The training programme introduced journalists to advanced techniques for harnessing the power of Google in their search for information and tracking offshore companies, as well as to open source investigative techniques in social media, how to deal with massive leaks of data, investigating extremist groups and the use of Albania’s Freedom of Information Law.
The training programme was headed by BIRN investigative editor Lawrence Marzouk, who in recent years has coordinated regional teams of journalists to produce hard-hitting investigations published by BIRN’s Balkan Insight website and republished by international media outlets like The Guardian in Britain.
Stevan Dojcinovic, the editor-in-chief of the Serbia-based Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, KRIK, was also a trainer at the workshop.
Dojcinovic is an investigative journalist based in Belgrade, and from 2005 to 2012 was the editor-in-chief of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Serbia, CIN. He has also worked for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP.
Another key trainer was the editor-in-chief of the daily Zeri in Kosovo, Arbana Xhara, the winner of the 2015 US Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award for Europe, who went into detail about her investigations into jihadist networks in Kosovo and how she handles threats from corrupt officials and religious extremists.
The roster of trainers was completed by BIRN Albania editor-in-chief Besar Likmeta, 2009 winner of the CEI-SEEMO Award for Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism, and Ardita Shehaj, from the office of Albania’s Freedom of Information Commissioner.