Balkan News

Albania has again been criticized for poor conditions of its only prison for psychiatric patients by a Council of Europe committee.

The owner of Kosovo’s Medicus clinic and his head anaesthetist were convicted of human trafficking and organised crime after a court found they carried out illegal transplant operations to sell kidneys to patients.

The Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro and devotees of Romanov dynasty have marked the anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II and Russia's imperial family.

Nineteen years ago, as NATO bombed Yugoslavia, Serbian forces lined up ethnic Albanian prisoners at Kosovo’s Dubrava jail and killed scores of them with guns and grenades - but no one has ever been prosecuted.

As many Slavs mark the Day of Sts Cyril and Methodius, founders of the Glagolitic alphabet, BIRN travels to the Macedonian town of Ohrid, where their disciples, Clement and Naum, created and spread the Cyrillic alphabet.

Macedonian viewers on Wednesday tuned into the first live televised debate between a Prime Minister and an opposition leader in 16 years to hear them thrash out the big issues of the day.

Kosovo citizens still need visas for EU states due to their country’s poor track record on the rule of law – but can the judiciary’s attempts to fix the problem work?

The message of the Sofia summit was that the Western Balkan states can join the EU, but only once it is stronger and more stable – and no one can predict when this will happen.

A Bosnian canton and the state government are heatedly arguing over the recent case of a blocked convoy of migrants – with each side accusing the other of criminal actions.

A series of acquittals in high-profile corruption cases puts the credibility of Romanian anti-graft prosecutors at risk as they battle political moves to restrict their power, analysts warn. 

European Commission and European Central Bank reports on Wednesday dashed Bulgaria’s hopes of joining the 'waiting area' for the single currency before the end of its Presidency.

A coalition campaigning for the establishment of the RECOM fact-finding commission on the 1990s wars said that it plans for the cross-regional body to start work in 2022.

The European Court of Human Rights is to decide whether there is a legal basis for a lawsuit against Montenegro in a case related to the wartime deportation of 83 Bosniak refugees, who were later killed.

An information centre giving access to the war crimes case archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia opened in Sarajevo’s iconic city hall.

A Skopje court on Wednesday sentenced former PM Nikola Gruevski to two years in jail for involvement in the illicit secret purchase of a luxury Mercedes – in a first-instance verdict that he may appeal.

Croatian police said they have caught an 18-year-old male who sprayed symbols of the World War II fascist Ustasa movement on an anti-fascist monument in the city of Rijeka.

The landmark trial in Belgrade court for the massacre of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the village of Kravica was postponed because a defendant reportedly slit his wrists several days before the hearing.

A play about refugees by the radical Croatian theatre director Oliver Frljic has united both communists and Christian activists in protest in the Czech Republic – which does not surprise him, Frljic told BIRN. 

The Moscow Patriarch's visit to Moldova is widely seen as a move to help the country's pro-Russian Socialists ahead of key elections due this autumn.

In closing statements at the high-profile trial in Kosovo, the defence insisted that the kidney transplants at the Medicus clinic had no connection to people-trafficking as the indictment claims.