MPs meet members of an initiative that has collected 1.2 million signtaures, including 65,000 from Croatia, demanding safe and accsssible abortion rights for all women in the EU. Members of the My ...

This week’s shutdown of Serbia-run post offices in north of Kosovo is only one of many such operations within the last three years. Since the summer of 2021, the north has constantly topped the ...

Elsewhere, legislative chaos as Slovak government rams through laws and president wields veto; yet another scandal in Hungary exposes government’s hollow ‘child-friendly’ narrative; and Poland invited ...

Though rakija exports are up, registered production is still dwarfed by small-scale, front-yard distillation for personal consumption. The threat of regulation, however, lurks on the horizon. Predrag, ...

Authorities pledge to check claims made in a TV documentary, alleging corruption and undue influence in the justice system. The judge’s gavel of the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) lies on the ...

Pollution and sand extraction are destroying the Vardar River in North Macedonia, say the boatmen who sail its waters every year. As an organiser of the annual Gemidzii or ‘Boatmen’ regatta on North ...

Efforts to provide teachers and books in the Roma language culminated last year with the opening of a library of Roma-language books in Prizren – and interest in it has grown ever since. Arzu Cukici ...

BIRN’s analysis of the situation in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia shows how mainstream politicians and other prominent public figures have used ...

An extreme nationalist organisation from Turkey set up a Bosnian branch whose leader helped President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime target opponents from the so-called Gulenist movement for ...

More and more women are joining Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, but while they can now take on the same roles as men, the challenges they face are very different. Since Russia’s ...

Police investigations reveal that organised crime groups often use ordinary people and passenger transport agencies to smuggle their illegal profits from EU countries and elsewhere back into Albania.

From the BIRN archives: After the death of nationalist leader Milosevic in 2006 while he was on trial for war crimes, Gordana Igric explained how he was not the only man responsible for the malign ...